Warning: unlink(/home/eqstudios/public_html/components/libraries/cmslib/cache/cache_53f802d64d80e94a5ee71171fe229f28) [function.unlink]: Permission denied in /home/eqstudios/public_html/components/libraries/cmslib/libraries/cache.php on line 142
John's Blog
Book 'Songwriters on Songwriting' by Paul Zollo
Posted by: John
I have had this book for several years now, but recently, inspired by a recent burst of creativity at the behest of daughter Alice and several talented clients, I have revisited its pages. The premise is pretty straight-forward. Zollo interviews some of the most prominent songwriters of the past 50 years - Paul Simon, Brian Wilson, Randy Newman, Carole King, Sammy Cahn, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and many more (these just happen to be my favourites!) and asks them about their particular views on the subject of songwriting.
This can cover the mechanics of musical and lyrical structure, discipline (coping with the 'that's good enough for rock' attitude), spiritual empathy (am I really the conduit for a greater intelligence, or did I have too many glasses of red last night?), motivation and inspiration, words first or music? ('The phone call' - Sammy Cahn), and many other random but related angles.
As someone who has always enjoyed and flourished in the company of others, I personally find writing reveals a curious anomaly in my own psychological make-up - that is I love the totally self-absorbing process that is songwriting. where I can retreat into my imagination and find an inspiration that eventually appears in she shape of a completed song. The best of fun!
I'd be curious if any of my blog readers have any songwriting insights they would like to share. I'll be happy to post them up as they come in.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
written by Rasheed on May 19, 2009
Good to read your post John. This interests me both as an author, coach and as a singer-songwriter.
As a singer-songwriter I must remember that inspiration arrives when it arrives. My job is simply to be silent so I can hear and capture the song when it arrives.
As an author it's kind of similar. Ironically I always intended to write a book for singers/ performers. I also have two books to write over the next few months, but know that again I simply need to be mindful and allow the space for the book to manifest through me.
As a coach ironically yesterday I was working with a business owner who is also a songwriter. He felt that his music had been neglected a bit and that he should be doing 'this' and 'that'. Too often our ideas about our careers, success and music is the only barrier to enabling them to manifest in their own time in their own way.
For me personally it was only when I gave up the 'need' to be a successful singer-songwriter that I became any good at it.
Rasheed, coach & speaker and author, The Gift of Inner Success
www.rasaru.com
written by john clare on May 21, 2009
Let me take my cue from your page, John. There is a book about Tchaikovsky which mentions that he used to complain to his nurse when he went to bed about the noise of the music. The silly old bat thought he was complaining about the noise from the band down in the ballroom when it was really all the tunes that went round in his head. Where do they come from?
I get at least three or four tunes a day which ramble around my brain. Some of them I write down on the back of an envelope which I then lose, some seem to come back over and over, and occasionally I put words to them, most I dont bother with. I find that I am unconsciously playing music in my head almost all the time, but 70% of it is not learned music, but just passes through the air and into my brain, as if I am playing a musical instrument in an autonomic way, like breathing.
One of my favourite passtimes is to sit down at a keyboard and ramble on. Quite honestly I could extemporise almost indefinitely. This means that writing songs, and creating electronic music is more a matter of throwing out most of the material, and creating a structure that will handle just a small part of it. (Going back to another book I read several decades ago; Schoenberg, when asked what was the most important part of his creative process, said, "using the eraser".)
One song I wrote last summer, while driving down the Harrow Road to your studio ended up being cropped and cropped until there was very little to it.
There is that funny thing that encourages you to love songs that come easy. I like Biscuits (the song written on the Harrow Road) mainly because I wrote it in five minutes. Then just spent a further ten minutes removing unnecessary complications.
Then there are those songs which wake me up at 3.00 a.m., which I sometimes scribble down. Sometimes I dont bother, because I know if they are the sort that wake you up, you are going to remember them, and as McCartney used to say "If you cant remember the song the next day it was no bloody good anyway".
I also used to get a buzz going to a studio in Hatch End (sorry john) with Little Julian, and a few kids, and having no idea what we were going to do, and then coming up with a number while everyone was setting up and messing around with sounds. As a matter of fact I've just entered one of those in that song competition you alerted me to; it's called "It Gets Yer". That was another one where I chopped a lot out, and then found that I could sing the verse over the chorus, which gave me a way to sing the whole song through again after the 8 bar break, with both ch & v going together.
The most difficult part of writing music for me is to produce something which accords with the public pulse. I've now given up, and just write my own thing anyway.
But isn't it nice getting up in the morning, switching on the radio, and then, while you're mucking about with breakfast, you join in one of the songs they are playing, and suddenly realise it's one of yours. Unfortunately it has only ever happened once to me, but that was magic.
