Martin Newell on songwriting

Just thought I'd post this excellent bit by one of my great heros Martin Newell (and if you haven't got The Greatest Living Englishman in your CD collection yet, what the HELL is the matter with you? Seriously, one of the great albums of the last century) discussing one of the things he knows a bit about.

Martin on songwriting...
A good way of starting a song is with a title, especially one that's been misheard. "I had too much to dream last night" (Electric Prunes)How could you not be onto a winner with such a title? "Eight Days A Week" Fantastic.You need a chorus. It's got to be your best idea. But then make it into the verse and try to write something even stronger. Try to make your songs about 3 minutes long. Nearly every piece of music that anyone ever remembers, including classical favourites are usually about three minutes long..the salient bits of Bach and Vivaldi for instance.When you have a tried and trusted chord sequence, deliberately go and throw an unmatching chord in there, instead of one of the regulation ones and see if anything good happens.When I was 17 a kindly A and R man called Fritz Fryer told me that if a song is any good, it will usually work with just one voice and one instrument.Does your song stand this test?It is much harder to write a fast cheerful song which makes people want to dance, than it is to write a slow and soulful slowie. This is a fact.When the great Kimberley Rew for instance, wrote Walking On Sunshine for Katrina and the Waves, he was holding pure gold in his hands from the minute he found the first chorus.There's something to be said for well-plumbed misery too, however, or Len Cohen would still merely be a great Canadian poet.You have to be a songwriter because you want to write songs...even if they never discover you.Sonmeone, either Vaughan Williams or Vivian Ellis once said, "Only write the tunes that won't go away."Do make sketches of songs...but don't go making demos of everything. If a tune's really good, it refuses to leave your head and will even crop up years later on another instrument.Great songs often possess holes somewhere in our collective consciousness (If I may be so esoteric)which they wait to be placed in even before they are written. Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" is a prime example of this. When he found the tune, he went around hunmming it to people and asking who'd written it. This is because it already existed in the future somewhere. Both he and the public already knew it. It was just waiting for him to execute the formality of writing it. This converges with a Socratic principle of learning which borders on the occult...that is to say, we already know everything, but we need to relearn it.A really great song, like some really great babies just come out in one pop..a painless delivery...some, however require a long labour and caesarian.Conversely, my title song The Greatest Living Englishman took about 12 years.I wrote the verse part in 1980 on the piano and left it lying around the workshop because I couldn't find anything to go with it. The chorus came to me in 1992. After that I simply constructed a bridge to weld them together and hey presto, another great non-hit was born.When you begin to write a song, ask yourself about its general atmosphere. What season are you in, for instance. Is it summer? Is it autumn? This is an established element of Haiku poetry (not my favourite thing but I admire some of its principles) A good haiku nearly always has some allusion to or sense of its season.If I were to write the title "An Autumn Flower." it would be okay. "An Autumn Tower" would be less pretty and more of a challenge and might tax my imagination more, too.Sometimes though, a common catchphrase will do the job.. Queen's "We Are The Champions." Still sung by drunk boneheads at football matches and business convention parties all over the world.I guess the only rules are that there are very few rules. Just don't confuse a hit record with a great song, though.

The Mirror

Last night, in the mirror, I saw the devil.
I tried to stare him down, but my eyes fell,
Avoiding the level gaze of that prince of evil
Where he left off and I began I could not tell.

- William David Perkins

I started this post with a poem by my Dad, which seems to relate to some of my feelings recently. It's been a long time since I've done any writing really, certainly since my last blog. I think a lot of it's because for me writing is a way to see into myself, a mirror if you will, and lately I haven't wanted to look in that mirror too much. Many of my deeper feelings have been so dark that I haven't wanted to fess up to them, even to me. Maybe especially to me. Staring into the glass...man, I don't know...I don't know if I want to see what I've become.

A lot of this is of course colored by my ongoing work helping to take care of my folks, and the continuing frustration and despair as I watch those good souls struggling to keep their lives together against the various slings and arrows shot them by time and entropy. Some of it is related to Cyn and I, and our struggles with life and finance and our difficult lifestyle choices...and some of it is just me fighting my many personal demons. Hey, I'm a bucket of fun, eh? But some days are harder than others, and it seems like I've just had a few months of 'em all together.

All bathos aside, it seems like I'm turning another corner. I've been writing again, and actually spending time in the studio (I literally had to dust off the console!), and playing music for fun a lot more. That last has been really important, and I have to thank my friends who've been playing with me for getting me back into it again. Playing music just to play is something I haven't been doing in a long time.

So am I really ready to look in the mirror again? Hell, I don't know. Will I see Satan there staring back at me? Most probably, along with other faces I'm probably gonna be uncomfortable with. But at least there's signs of life in my reflection...and perhaps another and better world on the other side of the glass.