Author: IJ

Ringo’s Stars

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I had the privilege of seeing Ringo Starr and his All Star Band this past Tuesday at the Hard Rock Theatre in Coquitlam BC. Some of you may have already seen one version or another of this tour over the past 20 years or so since Ringo has been doing this.

The idea behind the All Star Band is that Ringo invites other artists/musicians/songwriters to join him and it literally becomes a kind of songwriter/performer-in-the-round event, with each taking turns to do a song they’re famous for and the rest of the group being “the band”.  Ringo himself didn’t have a lot of solo hits compared to his band mates John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, so what he has done instead is brilliant.

The All Star incarnation that I saw the other night consisted of Steve Lukather from Toto on vocals, lead and rhythm guitar, Gregg Rolie from Santana and Journey on vocals, organ, keyboards, Todd Rundgren who was a successful solo artist along with being in other bands, on vocals, lead and rhythm guitar,  and Richard Page  from the 80’s band Mr. Mister on vocals and bass guitar.  Warren Ham provided vocals, saxophone, percussion and keyboards, and Gregg Bissonette was on drums, percussion, and added some backing vocals.

Aside from Ringo’s hits like Yellow Submarine, Photograph and It Don’t Come Easy, there were great songs like Africa, I Saw The Light, Bang The Drum All Day, Rosanna, Evil Ways, Black Magic Woman, Broken Wings and Kyrie, among others.

It was such a great throwback to the 70’s!  What it reminded me of was just how much I was influenced by songs, not only artists.  I’ve mentioned many times the artists that have impacted my own songwriting like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.  But the fact is that individual songs can do that too.  What I appreciated most about my teenage years was the fact that you could hear all kinds of music on the same radio station, not just one genre. You were just as likely to hear, for instance, a gospel song from “Hair” as you were rock or country or pop ballads.  So it seems to me the emphasis in those days was on the songs first, artists second.

In the late 70’s (and according to one article I read, because of Peter Frampton’s enormously successful album ‘Frampton Comes Alive’) the focus of record labels started to shift from singles to albums.  At the same time radio began narrowing its playlists to one or two genres and because of this paradigm shift, a lot of songs that would have deserved the radio exposure, didn’t get any.  No longer could you buy singles, you had to buy whole albums.  Today because of YouTube and mp3 players, we’ve come back to that notion of single songs which is really how it should be.  As I’ve always believed, the song is the thing.

And listening to all of those songs played the other night because of Ringo’s clever notion of an All Starr Band, I realized the impact of single songs on my own songwriting.  For instance, Todd Rundgren’s song I Saw The Light had that mixture of major 7th and minor 7th chords that I loved to use, and so I did, ad nauseum!  He also wrote simple but powerful melodies, exemplified in his song Love Is The Answer, which I recall the England Dan and John Ford Coley version of more than Rundgren’s.

So from now on I’m going to focus on remembering the SONGS that influenced me, not just the artists.  Which songs influenced your songwriting?  Post yours below!

IJ

 

Writer’s Block – No Such Thing?

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writersblockI came across an article the other day where the author insisted that writer’s block really didn’t exist. My guess is that he was trying to draw attention to his blog by coming up with something that might be, in the songwriter’s world, considered “controversial”. Like a sucker, I was drawn in and I protested his claims, and therefore I guess I did exactly what he wanted. I engaged.

There’s more advice on songwriting on the web these days than there ever has been. If nothing else, MY only piece of advice to you is to consider who is writing this stuff before using it. Or believing it.

Writer’s block exists. I know, because I have it. In a bad way.

I have been writing songs since I was 12 years old. I’m not saying I wrote every day, or that I have a thousand songs to my credit. But I was consistently inspired and if not coming up with something new, always working on something unfinished. A couple of years ago, I finished my last song, and that was a laborious task because I had been working on it for some time. My excuse might be that I have had a lot of personal things to overcome, one being the death of my father last December after a long battle with Alzheimers. It wasn’t fun and it shook me to the core. I kept telling myself that eventually this would give me fodder for more songs, but so far it really hasn’t.

I was, however, inspired recently when I read an excerpt from an interview with Sting, who had a very long dry period until he went back to the town he grew up in, and found that writing in someone else’s voice was his cure. He wrote from the perspective of the people who lived in his home town, past and present. I think that’s a good idea. Not just the idea of going back to your home town, but trying to write in someone else’s voice. I’ve rarely, if ever, done that. So I’m going to try.

I have written several articles on finding inspiration but when I wrote them I was having no trouble myself. I had a muse or two back then, but they have long gone. For awhile I told myself that maybe I just wasn’t going to write any more, and I haven’t pushed it. But since reading that little snippet by Sting, I have found the odd line or phrase or verse coming out. My intention is to continue to explore that.

I’ll let you know how I’m progressing.

No such thing as writer’s block? Yeah, sure.

IJ

Good Things Come In Threes

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There’s an expression that people often speak of when bad things happen;  bad things come in threes.  Whether that’s true or not, I suppose people tend to look for and count “bad things” when they happen in order to prove it to themselves.

I am also finding more and more evidence that when it comes to songs, good things also come in threes.  Let me explain.

I wrote in another article years ago called Self-Indulgence about repetition; how some songwriters repeat things too often, and others not enough.  At the time I didn’t come to any particular conclusion other than the fact that I often would repeat things three times and that seemed to be enough.  The elements that I referred to were things like melodic phrases, or lyrics that repeated, often in a chorus, but also in other parts of the song.

Lately I’ve been paying attention to how many times certain things are repeated in popular songs, especially melodic phrases since most of us tend to be drawn to the music first.  When I was playing a song with a young guitar student last week, Coldplay’s “Paradise”, it occurred to me that this song had that very type of repetition:

Dreamed of para- para- paradise
Para- para- paradise
Para- para- paradise
Every time she closed her eyes

The “para-para-paradise” is repeated three times in this chorus before it changes in the last line.

I recently posted in my I Like Songs blog about a song that was a recent Academy Award nominee, “Happy” by Pharrell Williams.  I think it’s a great song and should have won, but what do I know?  🙂

Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you know what happiness is to you
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do

Ah, but Irene, you’ll say, the line is repeated FOUR times.  Yes, but.  The melody isn’t quite the same in each repetition, is it?  You have to listen to the song to see what I mean if you don’t know it.

Repetition is an interesting phenomenon.  You’ll notice it with very young children, the desire to have something repeated, especially something that makes them laugh.  Human beings are wired to want to experience something that gives us pleasure over and over again.  And there’s a psychological reason for that!  It’s called “Mere-Exposure Effect”.

Wikipedia describes the effect this way: “The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds.”  The emphasis is mine.

Pop music is notoriously repetitive…the choruses in pop are meant to be memorable and originally titles (or the “hook”, if you will) were specifically placed in the chorus so you would remember the name of the song in order to either request it on the radio, or buy the record.  Yes, manipulative, right?  But people wanted to hear those songs again and again, and the mere-exposure affect partly explains why.  We like what we know.

But how much is too much?

Today I saw an article about another remix of the Academy award-winning song “Let It Go” and the article began with “You’re probably sick of ‘Let It Go’ remixes, but…”.  We’ve all had the nausea-inducing effect of hearing a song or something in a song, once too often.  Even Taylor Swift chooses the songs she’s going to include on her next album by weeding out the ones she gets tired of first.

The Perfect Three Effect, which I am now going to call it just because I can, refers to how many times in a row something can safely be repeated without tiring the listener.  This includes lyrical and/or musical phrases.  If you look at your own songs, can you find any that include this phenomenon?  Sometimes these things come out of us without much thinking, and that’s the way it should be when you’re first sitting down to write.  But when you go back to re-write a song, that’s when you have to scrutinize it for elements that have to be fixed.  Watching out for how many times you repeat something, is an important part of that process.

IJ

In The Thicke of Things

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I was pretty curious when I first heard about the continuing lawsuits that have been flying back and forth between Robin Thicke and his label and the children of Marvin Gaye.  The suits (I don’t really know how many!) are because of Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines”.

I think what really might have sparked this whole fuss was when Thicke gave an interview in GQ Magazine where he said:

“Pharrell and I were in the studio and I told him that one of my favorite songs of all time was Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give it Up.’ I was like, ‘Damn, we should make something like that, something with that groove.’ Then he started playing a little something and we literally wrote the song in about a half hour and recorded it.”

When the Gaye family started to make noises about the similarities between the two songs, Thicke actually threw the initial punch by suing the Gaye family FIRST, claiming that there were no similarities.  I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of anyone doing that before.  It was supposedly to “protect” the song, which was was No.1 on Billboard for 12 weeks in 2013, and a huge hit for Thicke and his producers Pharrell Williams and Clifford Harris Jr. It was also up for, but didn’t win, a Grammy for best song.

Since then, the accusations have been flying back and forth, with the Gaye family also accusing Thicke of copying Marvin Gaye’s song “After The Dance” for his song “Love After War”.  But instead of talking lawsuits for a moment, let’s have a listen.

If you haven’t already heard it, here is Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines”:

And now, here is Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up”:

The usual elements that are brought up in song copyright suits are melody and lyrics, which is why those are the parts that you submit when you are creating a documented copyright for a song.  You can’t copyright a chord progression or a title, although occasionally they have come up as part of a suit.  In this case, the issue is the feel and/or beat, which is created by the percussion, drums and bass.  The chord progressions in each song (and the key, for that matter) are different.  The lyrics and melody (where there is one) are different.

So has there been an infringement?

For what it’s worth, here’s what I think.  They are an awful lot alike because of that groove. Whether, technically speaking, a similar groove will be enough to claim copyright infringement, I will leave that up to the courts.  I’ve read arguments on both sides, one claiming that Pharrell, who I admire a lot, likes to pay “homage” to those who influenced him and what harm is there in that?  But that groove is really, really similar.

I could almost write the whole thing off if I thought to myself that Thicke had subliminally come up with that groove because the song was ‘way back in his memory somewhere.  But his interview says it all.  He liked the groove in that song and they (for the lack of a better word) copied it.  It was, in that respect, intentional.

What do you think?  Where do the lines get crossed?

IJ

And The Nominees Are…

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I’m always curious about the songs that end up in movies.  Are they already in existence and just end up being a perfect fit for the movie, or are they written specifically for the movie?

My guess would be either or.  I’m sure a director might be drawn to a song before a movie is completed in some cases…and in others I would imagine there are some politics involved, where they have to use a particular artist, band or songwriter for their movie.

Let’s understand first that “Best Song” is different from “Best Score”.  The score is the music that is underneath the dialogue or helps to drive the emotion or drama of a movie in various scenes.

The very first Oscar for best song was awarded in 1934.  “The Continental” written by Con Conrad with lyrics by Herb Magidson was sung by Ginger Rogers in the movie “The Gay Divorcee”.  Wow, that movie title would have a whole new context these days 🙂

Here is a video clip from the movie:

Of course, the movie was a musical.  But these days, musicals aren’t as common in film form unless they are filmed versions of Broadway musicals or Disney films.

The best song nominations are very often at the end of a movie, during the credits.  Which makes me wonder if a lot of people actually stay long enough to hear them.  Maybe the intention is to keep people in their seats during the credits, or to prevent you from turning the movie off, in the case of a DVD or streamed movie.   I wonder if that actually works?  There are certainly people who like to watch the credits, or who take that time to soak the movie in, but a lot of people don’t bother.

This years nominations are all quite different.  “Let It Go”, from the Disney movie “Frozen” is your typical Disney pop ballad, sung by Idina Menzel and written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and her husband Robert Lopez, who have written songs for Disney before in the movies Finding Nemo and Winnie The Pooh.  In this case, of course, Disney commissioned the song specifically for the movie.  I was curious about it because I wrote a song with that very name about 20 years ago.  I guess without the context of the movie, it’s hard to judge the song on its own merit, but it is not a stand out for me.  I can see, however, that it might appeal to the little girls that the movie is mainly targeting.

Another nominated song is “Ordinary Love” by U2 from the movie “Long Walk To Freedom”.  This is Nelson Mandela’s story, and although I didn’t see the movie, I do know his story well.  When I listened to the song, I more or less expected to relate to the lyrics because of that, but I have to say I was confused by them to some degree.  I do like some of the imagery in lines like “The sea throws rock together, but time leaves us polished stones”, but the chorus lines “we can’t fall any further if we can’t feel ordinary love” probably has some sort of mystical meaning to the writers, that go right over my head.   I just don’t think the song is a stand out.

The movie “Juno” which came out in 2007 had a couple of songs in it by the Moldy Peaches.  I know there are Moldy Peaches fans out there because a couple of my guitar students requested one of the songs that was used in the movie “Anyone Else But You”.  The group described themselves at the time as “anti-folk”, “lo-fi” and “garage-rock”.  For me, they were “sophomoric”, but that’s just a matter of personal preference, I guess :-).  This year, “The Moon Song” from the movie “Her”, strikes me exactly the same way.  ‘Nuff said.

My favourite song on this year’s list of nominees, is the song “Happy” from “Despicable Me 2” by Pharrell Williams.  Reflecting its title, of course, it’s a very upbeat and catchy song.  It is, by no means, lyrically deep.  But then again, I was drawn to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”, so I don’t have to hear deep lyrics to find happiness.

Online there is huge support for “Let It Go” and although that isn’t necessarily a reflection of what the Academy is going to choose, I think it’s a strong possibility that it will win.   There are, honestly, some years that I find the field of nominees lacking.  But then again, I suppose in some years there isn’t a whole lot to choose from.

I’ll be watching…

IJ