This website is meant for songwriters of all sorts. I’ve been writing songwriting articles since 1996 and pretty much all of them are still available! To see a list of all of the articles, you can go right here. Otherwise I welcome you to peruse the site whichever way you want.
Happy writing 🙂
IJ
I remember the first song I plagiarized. It was “Leaving On A Jet Plane” by John Denver. I was probably only about 12 years old at the time because I had likely heard the song on the radio sometime in 1969 when it was first released. I didn’t know the word “plagiarism” then, let alone understand the concept of it.
I was in the middle of writing a song called “Home” (sorry, I took that title before you, Edward Sharpe and Phillip Phillips!). Instinctively I came up with a little instrumental bridge, but then I decided to hum over top of it. Part of the melody I was humming was the first two lines of the chorus of Leaving On A Jet Plane. I remember the subtle feeling that the melody wasn’t mine, but it didn’t bother me too much at the time!
Every songwriter has occasionally come to the point in the writing of a song, or after finishing it, when they’ve wondered if it isn’t something they’ve heard before. I remember a few times later on in my songwriting life, realizing that I had unknowingly plagiarized something and being utterly disappointed in myself. Damn! And I really liked that one too!
It might help to know that even the songwriting giants make the mistake of accidentally plagiarizing from time to time. One famous case was the Rolling Stones’ song “Anybody Seen My Baby?”, in which the chorus melody was pretty much exactly the same as k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving”. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards claimed they had never heard the song, and that might be true. But practically speaking, they would have only had to be somewhere where that song was playing to subliminally pick it up. You’ve all experienced how a melody can appear in your head, even when you don’t recognize the song or where it came from. Was it playing in the coffee shop when you were ordering your latte?
The result was that Jagger and Richards included k.d. land and her songwriting partner Ben Mink as co-writers on their song. That way, any royalties earned would be split between all of them. A nice, simple solution. But it’s not always so nice.
The case of Marvin Gaye’s family vs. Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke lead all the way to court. I wrote about this in an earlier blog. When Thicke and Williams were writing “Blurred Lines”, they were deliberately trying to come up with something that sounded the same as Gaye’s 1977 song “Got To Give It Up”. Well, it sounded SO much the same that they lost the subsequent lawsuit filed by Gaye’s family. Be careful what you wish for.
Bob Dylan was once called out by Joni Mitchell for being a plagiarist because of Bob’s habit of “borrowing” from earlier folk songwriters and poets to craft his own songs. There’s a good article all about that here. He had no shame, however. That’s Bob for ya. Actually, folk music songwriters young and old did a lot of plagiarizing, except the word used was “pastiche”. In the dictionary, pastiche is defined in one way as: “a piece of writing, music, etc., that is made up of selections from different works”. That’s the way Bob thought of it I guess.
Many of you remember the art of “sampling”, where a small section of a well-known recording was actually used in a newer recording. In the beginning, the original artists were not paid any royalties for that little snippet, but eventually the laws changed and they were compensated. Sampling didn’t continue on very much after that, needless to say!
The truth is that when first we start writing songs we tend to repeat pretty much everything we’ve ever heard before. Our lyrics can sound cheesy and boring, our melodies uninspired, all because we’re simply regurgitating our past playlists and nothing is new. How aware we are of that depends on the person. Many realize when their songs sound dull and boring, but they often don’t know why. Plagiarism, then, is as natural as speaking your first words when you were an infant. You repeat what you hear, and what’s the harm in that? It only gets sticky when the money starts rolling in.
My little song “Home” never made it any further than an old cassette tape, complete with the rip off section of Leaving On A Jet Plane. I’ll file that under “pastiche” :-).
IJ
The hardest part about writing a song is finishing it. Wouldn’t it be nice if they all just 
flowed out of us in one, sweet sitting with no editing necessary? More likely is the fact that we’ll have to work at it to get it done. When you find yourself struggling to finish a song, consider these five points:
Continue reading “Five Reasons Why You Can’t Finish That Song”
I have written about this before, but thought I would do so again after reading another songwriting blog that suggested what the five “most successful” songwriting topics are. They were listed as “love, country, religion, nature, sports”. I want to take each of those topics and discuss them a little further. These are my opinions, of course, you might want to argue with me in the comments section below :-).
First of all, I’m assuming that the writer is talking about “success” in some sort of commercial way, or least in terms of popularity on YouTube or other digital means. Success can be a pretty relative thing, but I’ll go by that assumption.
I can certainly agree with “love” being a successful topic. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I guessed that probably 75% of the songs you hear on the radio are about some aspect of love; new love, lost love, jealous love, old love…the list goes on and on. You can’t go wrong using love as your songwriting topic.
The second, country, was actually described as “about the country”, basically describing songs about patriotism. I don’t think you’ll find too many songs on YouTube or on the Billboard Top 100 on a REGULAR basis, that are patriotic. So I would broaden that topic to “places”. Places can be anything from a city (there have been lots of famous and successful songs over the years about cities!), to a spot where you used to meet someone (okay, that’s bordering on a love song, I know), to a neighbourhood you grew up in, to your room or even a job place. Patriotism might feel good to you, but it can often become cheesy, so be careful with that topic on its own.
The next topic was described as religion and religion is a subject that is rather audience specific. For instance, there are Christian songwriting websites and messageboards out there, so I am certainly aware that there are songwriters who write solely in that genre, and it is indeed a genre. Within the Christian community there are radio stations with hit songs and big name artists. I do remember a time when gospel songs were occasionally on the playlists of mainstream radio, but that doesn’t happen any more. Country radio often has its share of songs with religious overtones, so a person might have some success with a country audience. So I’m on the fence as to whether this topic can be potentially successful outside of its specific audience.
Nature is the next topic. Oddly enough, the first song that comes to mind is an old one written by Eddie Rabbit and performed by Elvis Presley. I don’t know why, but “Kentucky Rain” just popped into my head! It’s really not about rain, though, or Kentucky. It’s an excellent title, but it is…guess what? A love song! Nature in and of itself seems a rather benign topic. Another one that comes to mind (sorry, these are all old!) is “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver. It takes place in the Rocky Mountains, but it is really a coming-of-age song. So I think that nature is probably used more as a metaphor for something else, rather than a topic in and of itself.
Here are the most recent (as of 8/20/14) Billboard top 5 hot pop songs and their topics:
And the hot rock top 5 songs:
The hot country top 5 songs:
Okay, so let’s compare with the original list of five topics. Out of the three genres with fifteen songs in total, I’ll see which topics are included:
So what do we learn from this? First my statistics were off a little. I said that 75% of the songs out there are love songs. Nine out of fifteen songs makes it closer to 60%. But you’re pretty safe writing a love song. Religion, country, nature and sports, not so much. And, there are a lot of other topics to write about…even Pompeii! So push the envelope, be imaginative, write about what you know (or make it up!) and don’t restrict yourself. Your idea might be better than any other song idea on the charts!
IJ
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