Songwriting

Another song popped into my head. It wasn't fantastic or anything. But I thought, what the hell, write it down. One day, you're going to be old, and you're going to be glad to be even writing stuff of that standard. Don't be fussy. Build up a stockpile so that you won't regret it when you grow old.

I don’t really know whether or not to write this. I think I may have grown as a songwriter over the last 2-3 years, or maybe I have not. It’s not a coincidence that many people write their best songs before they’re 30. Songwriting is a process, whereby the best ideas, and also the ones that come most naturally to you, are the ones which get written first. So even if you do get better at it as time goes on, your best ideas are already out there, and you simply have to do something different.

Anyway, I’ll put a header on some of my points.

1. Songwriting is a black art.
When people say they write songs, the reaction is naturally scepticism. Why? Because the number of good songwriters out there is comparatively few. It is difficult. Like Bjork says on “Human Behaviour”: There is no map and a compass won’t do. Music theory teaches you relatively little, or at least it’s only half of the story. Music theory is like grammar. Just because you have mastered grammar, it doesn’t make you a great story teller.

2. Music theory.
Of course, having a music education helps. I have been educated in music almost all my life, and I cannot imagine what it is like to listen to music with an uneducated ear, so I take for granted that you will be able to identify notes when hearing them, you will identify chords.

3. Have an opinion.
The second task of a songwriter is to develop taste. Have an opinion about music. Every song, you like it or you don’t like it. Why does this speak to you? What is it saying? Why do some songs remain in the memory, and why do others fade? Why is this something you want to listen to over and over again, and why is that something that irritates you?

This is very important, almost the first skill you have to learn as a songwriter, because you will be using this skill to assess your own work.

I have learnt as much about music from music critics, as I have from my music teachers. I have read reviews about albums, and often wondered, why some albums get bad reviews and others get good ones. Sometimes, music critics are wrong. More often than that, though, they are right. And 20 years later, the critical opinion about a given piece of music should be secure.

4. Emotional vocabulary
Every chord is a colour. (Actually, some people think that every note is a colour too.) But chords are more important than which key of the scale you are playing. Irving Berlin only knew how to write music in the key of F. It doesn’t really matter.

Every chord, relative to the tonic, conveys an emotion. Understand the emotional impact of chords. Simplistically, major chords are happy and minor chords are sad. But not always. From I to IV is like going to a higher plane, and from I to V is going to a lower one. But not always. Inversions (ie changing which note of the chord is used in the bass) change the way the chords sound, and change the emotional shade.

More interesting than the I, IV and V are the relatives of these chords. Sometimes you will have the minor versions, the major versions, the extended chord, your 7s, 9s, 11s, even 13s. Augmented. Diminished. Suspended. Know your chords. This is important.

5. Chord progression
Chord progressions and melody in music are similar to plot and narrative in a story. Like a good maths proof (it is not a coincidence that I learnt how to write a song around the same time I was learning how to write a maths proof) a chord progression is a sequence of ideas which lead, logically to each other. Whether the chord progression makes sense or not, is analogous to whether it is grammatical.

6. Melody
A melody will typically contain certain notes that make up the chord. There will be transitional notes that don’t have much to do with that chord, and they are called passing notes. The melody needs to both be consistent with what’s going on in the chord progression, and at the same time it should be artistically appealing. That’s why writing a song is not easy – it’s like solving a simultaneous equation. You don’t want to have a melody which follows the chord progression like a slave. There’s no tension, and it’s boring. But you don’t want to have a melody that is not related to the chord progression either.

Somebody asked “what is melody” in a music forum. It is a very good question. Our most conventional notion of melody is that it is the part of music which is in the foreground, it is typically linear, with only 1 note at a time (like if 1 person is singing). It is a sequence of notes.

Any of these notions can be violated. The melody can be in the bassline. Counterpoint is what we call it when there are 2 melodies playing against each other at the same time. Harmony is what we call it when 2 or more non-clashing notes are played together. 2 or more voices can make up the same melody, they just sing different parts of it.

7. Form
Almost the first thing people will teach you when you have formal instruction on composition is the form of the music. ABA, AABA, ABABCA, etc. This is important, of course, but it’s like saying that when you write a story, your words must fall on a straight line going from left to right. Although this convention is important, it has very little to do with whether you are writing a good song or not.

There is only 1 thing to learn from the idea of form: big pieces of music are made of smaller pieces of music. How you arrange the smaller pieces is the architecture design.

What’s more important, from my perspective, is how those smaller chunks flow into each other. How everything combines together to form the narrative arc. Always pay attention to the bigger picture, and how the smaller pieces make up the bigger puzzle. Sometimes you can have 2 really spectacular pieces of music, and they sound awful when you put them side by side because the flow is gone. Sometimes you can tolerate having a boring part, because it gives you a break from the exciting part.

8. Hidden melodies
Moving away from our conventional idea of melodies to the bigger picture, we need to understand what is a melody, in a more generic sense. Melodies are narratives. They tell a story. They lead the listener through a series of logically connected moods, and represent an arc through the music for the listener to follow.

If you study the human brain, you will understand that stories are our method of organising information and making sense of them. One favourite technique we have of memorising long lists, is to make up a story where all the items appear in sequence, in the story. The reason why this works is because we are so well adapted to thinking about stories.

Similarly, it is difficult for me to memorise a lot of numbers (musical notes are basically numbers. Sounds inhuman, but deal with it.) But when they are arranged in a catchy melody – miracle of miracles, it’s so easy.

So when you extend the definition of melody, into something like a catchy hook, or a motif, or a drum figure, the definition becomes something like: foreground.

This should explain why hip hop and rap works, even though there are so few chords and melodies. It’s all hidden melodies – the brain still has something to latch onto. Maybe it’s the combination of wordplay, or the rhythm of the words, or catchy slogans.

But the cardinal rule is this: the brain still has to have something to latch onto. Something to think about. Take away chords and melody, maybe you have to make the rhythm interesting. Or maybe you have to make the architecture interesting, like how minimalist music takes away a lot of your points of reference, and instead you pay attention to how the mood shifts and changes very subtly. But music cannot be vacuous.

9. Borrowing ideas
I’m not good enough to come up with my own ideas. Maybe nobody is. I’ve always borrowed from others. It’s like building a nest, all your material is stolen from somewhere else. But the creation, the nest, is yours and yours alone. Unless you steal somebody else’s nest wholesale (or a significant chunk thereof).

So when you are starting to write, just steal. Take a piece here, another piece there, put it together in a way that’s never been done before. Take somebody else’s melody, and harmonise it with different chords. Take somebody else’s chords an put a new melody on it.

Combine genres in a way that has not been done before. Chinese with Indian. Dub with classical. Avant Garde with Gregorian. Whatever.

10. Experience
I started “writing” music when I was 8. I wrote the first song I was happy with when I was 21. Yes, it takes that long. If you start off as an adult, your learning curve will be shorter. But you have to wait a long time and put up with stuff that doesn’t work. Then you learn your lesson from point number 3: assess it like a music critic.

If you can’t finish songs, KIV them. A few songs were stuff I KIV’ed from when I was a teenager, and now I have the experience to complete them, to solve problems I wasn’t able to solve back then.

You might learn some tricks. Like repeating a phrase because it sounds better the second time. Or ending a song abruptly. Or throwing in an unexpected chord.

After a while, the seam that you are mining will be empty. Then branch out, try a different form of music and see what happens. There are a lot of songwriters, they were very good when they were young, and then they lost it. Or rather most of their songs were written and as a consequence they ended up repeating themselves. There wasn't much that was new. Brian Wilson - his last great album was merely to finish a project he abandoned when he was young. Paul McCartney - was never as great a songwriter as when John Lennon was around. Lou Reed - wrote most of his great stuff before he was 30, with the Velvet Underground.

Is songwriting a young man's art? Or is it that people always run out of ideas no matter what? Only a few years ago, when I wrote something good, I'm like, "damn, I never knew I had it in me." Now it's like, "wait, didn't I just write this before? aren't I just piecing together some other stuff that I've done before, and done better?" After your best ideas are out in the open, it just gets more and more difficult.