Lyrics Are Important As Cold Ice Cream

Posted on by IJ

It's the picture of Italian ice-cream in a sho...

I was in the car on the way home today when I heard a singer/songwriter on the radio sing these lyrics:

I like ice cream when it’s cold
I like old time radio
It’s funny but it’s true
These things I do

The last two lines I’m not exactly sure of the wording, I was trying to remember them because they got me to thinking about writing lyrics and how we need to pay attention to detail.

I’ve been working on music all summer, but not lyrics. I spent the late spring and early summer working on theme music and tracks for one TV series, and all of August on music for another series. I consider myself lucky to have the opportunity to have my music on television, even if in a small way, and even if it doesn’t amount to much of anything money-wise. The biggest bonus for me was that it got me into writing again. Well, I shouldn’t come to any conclusions, I’ve only started on one song, but hey, for somebody who has had nothing but a dry well to draw water from the last three or four years, it’s something!

And that’s why the above lines struck me today. You should read them again before I go on and see if you can spot the inconsistencies.
Continue reading “Lyrics Are Important As Cold Ice Cream”

New I Like Songs Post

Posted on by IJ

There’s a new evaluation of the song “A Team” by Ed Sheeran up at the I Like Songs blog.  If you’ve never heard of Ed Sheeran, there’s a video of him performing the song as well.

Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran (Photo credit: Man Alive!)

Here’s an excerpt:

“This is a series of five lines that rhyme;  not perfect rhymes on all occasions, but each two syllables long whether they are one word or two.  And on each of those he uses the same two notes, higher than any other note in the song.  Now my rule of thumb has always been to only repeat something three times or it starts to feel like too much, but in this case that rule appears to go out the window.  It just works.”

Check it out!

IJ

Enhanced by Zemanta

I Like Songs

Posted on by IJ

Well, I do. I like all kinds of songs, old ones, new ones that I discover through my students…all kinds of ’em. Which is why I started a blog just about the songs I like. You can find it here.

Songwriters Circle
Songwriters Circle (Photo credit: AndyRobertsPhotos)

As a songwriter, I quite often find myself listening to a song with a “critical ear”, which isn’t always a good thing! If the song really appeals to me, however, I notice that this critical ear shuts off. Why is that? It’s because the mind has shut off and the emotions have taken over. I don’t care if there is anything wrong with the song from a critical viewpoint, I just love the song.

When you think about all of the songs you’ve fallen in love with over the years (and yes, it’s like falling in love), you notice that any time you hear them again it almost brings back that initial “rush”, just like seeing an old flame. If you stopped for just a second and listened to it as a songwriter and not just a regular listener, you’d probably notice some flaws in it. There are flaws in just about every song, but when you’re crazy about the song, you push all of that aside, just as you look past the flaws of a person you’re in love with.

So I decided that I’d take a look and listen to all of the songs that I’ve really loved (and the ones I’m learning to love) not so much from a critical viewpoint, although there is some of that, but from a music lover’s perspective. I actually started to write those articles for this blog but realized that I didn’t just want to critique, I wanted to listen and enjoy! And that’s how ILikeSongs was born.

I don’t want to spend all of my time listening to songs with a critical ear any more.  I, like the rest of you, fell in love with a whole bunch of songs before I even knew what songwriting was.    So if you’re interested, join me on my other blog, won’t you? 🙂

Enhanced by Zemanta

From The Mailbag April ’12

Posted on by IJ

I recently received this email from Joel Patterson (link to his website below), who describes himself as “the enfant terrible of the recording website Gearslutz”.  I’ll let you read his email and my response is below:

Hi Irene,

Great site! Glad you’re so willing to help out the neophytes out here.

I’ve got a question, it goes like this: every so often I will hear a familiar phrase in a “new” song, I guess the latest was in the Enrico Iglesias “I Like How It Feels.” This may be an ancient song… I’m not too exposed to the current scene… anyway, he weaves the phrase “ticket to ride” into his lyric.

Or, whoever wrote the song did, is Enrico a talented guy? A front man for a larger organization? Isn’t he descended from Julio Iglesias, some kind of star of a previous era? So many questions, so much I don’t know…

“Ticket to ride” is obviously a quotation from the Beatles‘ tune “Ticket to ride.” I am on the fence between thinking this is a heavy-handed, blatantly obvious, cheesy play, and thinking it’s cool and hip.

If I were to work the phrase “rolling in the deep” into a new, original song, in a way that worked within the song and had a completely different melody from the Adele hit, I’m just wondering how that would strike you, overall? Cheesy? Hip? What’s your take?

Thanks!

Joel Patterson
www.joelpatterson.us

“Hi Joel,

“This is a great question!  First of all, I think timing is everything.  If you encompassed “rolling in the deep” into a song in the very near future, I would consider it tacky because it would APPEAR to be the use of a phrase in order to draw attention to your own song.  You have no idea how many people hit my website using that phrase just because I did a bit of a critique on Adele’s song!  So people out there looking for that song lyric, or a discussion or critique of it, would also potentially find any other song containing that lyrical phrase if it was posted on the web.

Continue reading “From The Mailbag April ’12”