Songs that just arrive – if you’re right there waiting
I’ve gotten fascinated by the process of songwriting, something I don’t understand. I think I can safely say I will never write a song. But there are people who do it from childhood on, over and over. Sometimes they never succeed, sometimes they’re one-hit wonders, and sometimes they seem to have the golden touch.
Sometimes they just know when something will be a hit. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they work a long time on the song, but often – more often than one might think – they describe the song as having arrived quickly, sometimes intact.
The prolific songwriting Bee Gees have spoken about this in interviews. They sometimes seem to be saying songs exist out there in some Platonic form and come to them in a mysterious way. It’s not just the Bee Gees, either; it seems to be a common perception among songwriters, and who am I to tell them otherwise?
Here’s a great story about a song like that, courtesy of song-receiver Richard Marx. I’m not keen on this particular song, but gazillions of people are:
He was waiting – for the song. And it arrived!
By the way, he looks really good in that video for 57.
Here’s the song itself:
And who was his fiance, and did she become his wife? I did some sleuthing around, and it seems very likely to have been actress/singer/dancer Cynthia Rhodes, whom Marx married around the time that song was released. Here are some interesting facts about her history:
Her most notable role was as dance instructor Penny Johnson in the hit 1987 motion picture Dirty Dancing with Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze…
Rhodes also appeared as a dancer in a number of music videos, including “Rosanna” by the band Toto, “The Woman in You” by the Bee Gees, and “Don’t Mean Nothing” by Richard Marx. She was a dancer for the glam rock band The Tubes when they toured in the early 1980s. Rhodes later joined the pop group Animotion, replacing their lead singer Astrid Plane, for the recording of their third album of original material. In 2002, Rhodes co-wrote the smooth jazz track “Perfect Day” with then-husband Richard Marx for December, trumpeter Chris Botti’s holiday album.
Rhodes and Marx were married for 25 years and had three children, but are now divorced. Funny thing, I was just watching that “Rosanna” video the other day. But although I’ve become familiar with a lot of the music of the Bee Gees, I didn’t previously know that Bee Gees song mentioned as having starred Rhodes in the video.
So of course I had to find it. It’s not one of my favorites, either, but the 1983 video is incredibly 80s in every way, and the brothers do a lot of funny bits in the first half (Barry’s hair toss at around 1:06 is especially amusing). The video’s a bit blurry, but it’s certainly viewable. Rhodes is – well, you’ll see her first in red, then in blue, and then in white. This came out the same year as “Flashdance,” in which Rhodes had a major role, and the second half of the video has a Flashdance vibe:
And just to round the whole thing off here’s Lucas Marx, one of Rhodes’ and Marx’s three sons, all of whom are musicians. He looks a fair amount like Dad and even has a similar high and light voice, but his voice has that modern twist that I can’t stand that makes it sound artificial to me. Is it a diction thing? Some technology they use with the voices to distort them, like autotune? It has that “slide-y” and metallic effect:
A lot of these songwriters are no Chaucer. I remember reading an article about Maurice Starr, who managed the band New Kids on the Block. The reporter followed him and the band around. It related a story on how during one flight between two cities, Starr knocked off three songs. Nothing profound but then very few people look for meaning within the song.
Here are some abstruse words from Milli Vanilli.
….
You can blame it on the rain
Cos the rain don’t mind
And the rain don’t care
…..
The video for the above mentioned ‘Don’t Mean Nothin’ which was his debut single and featured Cynthia Rhodes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8E_dkESwzg
Not a bad song in a 1987 way. Marx has written a ton of songs and has remained active mainly as a songwriter after his hit making days ended.
I knew exactly what kind of “modern twist” you were talking about before I hit the play button. I can’t stand listening to the pop stations because all the male artists sound like this.
shadow:
But do you know why they sound that way? Is it just a stylistic decision, or do they need electronic aids to achieve that awful sound?
Andy:
I rather like that lyric.
Lyricists often use the pathetic fallacy to link their feelings to the rain, as though the rain had feelings, too. But the lyricist there is flipping it around and saying no, the rain doesn’t care about your feelings.
Practically every recording artist nowadays will use auto tune so that maybe it but that Lucas Marx sounds to me like the vocal is too much out in front. It’s a decent enough song kind of moody doesn’t sound like too much human instrumentation (unless you call computer programming instrumentation).
Chaucer, you say… A Whiter Shade of Pale took some work to get down on paper. Wikipedia says that one of the lyricists heard the phrase “You’ve turned a whiter shade of pale” during a party and it went from there.
All well and good, but there’s more Based Red Pill in the Decameron. And it’s been a Plague Year.
I don’t have a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with me here, but IIRC the episode where young Stephen composes the “Are you not weary of ardent ways?” poem is interesting. I don’t think much of the poem itself, but again IIRC the episode does a good job of showing how inspiration arrives and is then worked through.
1. Cynthia Rhodes is beautiful. I’m going to marry her!
2. I wrote a song: Coyotes of Austin. I gave to 2 country artists, but they won’t do the music. Big hit!
https://www.song-lyrics-generator.org.uk/
Sorted. We can close this thread and go home now.
Zaphod:
I think “A Paler Shade of White” would be better.
Blues traveler put it best..
The hook brings you back [28,520,340 views!]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM
There is almost a formula to hit songs today, which really starts with an old song or a bit of that, and adds new so its fresh yet familiar… (One of my best friends was a owner of a high end recording studio in nyc… and i got to talk to lots of people… still friends with the drummer from pharrel and the nerd project, and many others… )..
the lyrics of the hook say a lot about it… a song about writing hit songs..
and how they play the audience like an instrument…
On August 20, 1999, Bobby Sheehan was found dead in his New Orleans, Louisiana home, where he had been recording music with some friends the night before. Sheehan’s death was ruled an accidental drug overdose, with cocaine, Valium, and heroin found in his system.
I write (or have written). It seems that the music and lyrics have to come together for me. A few lines in my head, noodling on the guitar or piano, it takes shape gradually. OTOH, there’s Al Stewart, who seems to write the lyrics and music separately and assemble them later. It’s a mystery. And, yes, it seems that the song is given to one. Perhaps the Muse is sitting behind us, unseen, whispering suggestions. She probably looks just like my wife, but in Greek goddess robes.
some write great lyrics… some dont..
Jackson brown, billy joel, great on lyrics..
funny about Joel though, often he keeps his voice fixed and modulates the music using audio illusions… so it sounds like he is moving his voice around but he inst… Also many people love his music without realizing what songs are about… if you find a woman who loves “shes just like a woman to me”… ask her if she would like to live with such a person!!! Joel really knew how to write to be popular which came easy to him, and then he moved to classical music… other than his regular concert at Madison Square G…
if you wonder what i mean by music illusions you can do a bit of research on Shepard tone, which is a forever rising pitch… there are lots of them… its interesting if you know what to pick out… then there is the ‘effects’ which are popular with the audience which would be considered not so good music other than it entertains… you can actually take classes to learn these licks…
funny how some made it with just a few chords and others with incredible ability..
like allman in statesboro blues
The Allman Brothers Band – Statesboro Blues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNUbrhapPp4&feature=emb_logo
and many people dont know that a lot of music was created behind the scenes by just a few people… like jeff lynne (ELO, etc)… people here mention the Beatles… but jeff lynne had a hand in that too..
his song database is HUGE… spanning beatles, orbison, tom petty, traveling wilburys…
the article on him in rolling stone… my life in 15 songs makes a great playlist
[I decided to pack it in in 1986. About six months later, George Harrison got in touch with me to ask me to work on his new album. ]
Electric Light Orchestra, “All Over the World” (1980)
[“All Over the World” was a song written for the Olivia Newton-John movie Xanadu. I wrote half the songs in the film, though I’ve never seen the thing. I don’t suppose anybody else has either.]
George Harrison, “When We Was Fab” (1987)
Roy Orbison, “You Got It” (1988)
[I wrote “You Got It” with Roy and Tom Petty. For years before this, he’d just been going through the motions of recording and not working with people who were empathetic with him or who had put enough care and love into the music. I reminded him of who he was and how great he was, and that’s why I got a great performance out of him. ]
Brian Wilson, “Let It Shine” (1988)
[I had just finished George Harrison’s album when Warner Bros. asked me to produce Brian Wilson. I was like, “You can’t produce Brian Wilson. He’s the best producer in the world.”]
Tom Petty, “Free Fallin'” (1989)
[I met Tom in England and then I saw him again at some streetlight in Los Angeles. He said, “Jeff, pull over.” I did and he said, “I just listened to George’s album. What about coming over and writing some tunes together?” I said, “I’d love to.” Probably the second song we wrote was “Free Fallin’.”]
The Traveling Wilburys, “Nobody’s Child” (1990)
[When you hang out with George Harrison, you can do whatever you like. On the strength of that, that’s how the Traveling Wilburys came to me. One night while we were recording he said, “We should form a group.” I said, “Who should we have in it?” He said, “Bob Dylan.” I’m going, “Bloody hell.” I never expected that answer. And then I said, “Can we have Roy Orbison?” He said, “Great, I love Roy.” And we both loved Tom. Everyone we asked joined immediately, so that was a great thing. ]
The Beatles, “Free as a Bird” (1995)
[George asked me to do this, and it was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my life. There was this elation and dread at the same time. I was given a mono one-track cassette tape of John singing the song in 1977. I came to the first session with George and we were late, which was a bad start. Ringo and Paul were already there. All four of us sat down at a table, the first time they’d all been together for about 20 years.]
Jeff Lynne’s ELO, “When I Was a Boy” (2015)
Jeff Lynne’s ELO, “Love and Rain” (2015)
you want to know about writing AND producing hit songs… then you study Jeff Lynne
1970s (705 songs)
1980s (304 songs)
2000s (248 songs)
2010s (416 songs)
Mr Blue Sky
Dont bring me down
Telephone Line
Rock n Roll is king
Learning to fly
While my guitar gently weeps (Beatles)
Prince, Tom Petty & others – “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWc4wMyL1oI
Do ya
Turn to stone
Hold on tight
All over the world
STrange Magic
sweet talking woman
twilight
its a living thing
need her love
standing in the rain
and if that wasnt enough.. he liked to hide things in his music.. 😉
oh… and who can forget the lyricist Bernie Taupin?
oh… you know his partner better… Elton John…
here is his list of songs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_with_lyrics_by_Bernie_Taupin
i could go on for hours going all the way back to the 20s…
I’ve heard interviews with Elton John that in the early days Taupin would bring Elton the lyrics and he would sit at the piano and write the music and never change the lyrics. That is a true songwriting partnership.
@Neo:
Now that you say it, yes!
The title has always sounded slightly unearthly since ever I first knew it. Whether that due in part to the nature of the song itself which I heard before knowing title or due to the reversedness you’ve just pointed out cannot quite say.
Roger Glover Animated Love is All Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR6pYICqZT0
Once more with Irony.
I love Neo’s tidbit about Streisand wanting to change Marx’s lyrics ’cause she doesn’t wait around for anyone.
No, a whiter shade of pale is perfect. It’s about someone partying too hard who develops a facial pallor. But they’re very out-of-it. What’s a facial pallor taken to the max.?
We skipped the light Fandango
Turned cartwheels cross the floor
I was feeling kind of seasick
But the crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
The waiter brought a tray
And so it was that later
As the Miller told his tale
That her face, at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale
The collaboration on the first “Traveling Wilburys” was an astounding bit of magic. Those five guys — Dylan, Harrison, Petty, Lynne, Orbison — wrote and recorded that record in ten days!
True, they were some of the best in the biz, but that didn’t necessarily make it easy. Ego collisions in super-groups are legendary. But the Wilburys kept their egos in check and had fun.
My favorite song on the album, “Tweeter and the Monkey Man,” is a hilarious Springsteen send-up that Dylan, master that he is, wrote with his left hand.
____________________________________________
Tweeter and the Monkey Man were hard up for cash
They stayed up all night selling cocaine and hash
To an undercover cop who had a sister named Jan
For reasons unexplained she loved the Monkey Man
Tweeter was a boy scout before she went to Vietnam
And found out the hard way nobody gives a damn
They knew that they found freedom just across the Jersey Line
So they hopped into a stolen car took Highway 99…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PabG3nJRu3k
After digging around for Roger Glover, YouTube Algo has gone maximum bullish on The Seekers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxwqBJLU8A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsIbfYEizLk
And somehow this haunting song, which everyone who has ever been in a hotel bar or lounge from Dubai to Tokyo when the Filipino band has had enough playing covers and is about to pack it in for the night has heard many times. ‘Anak’ is Child in Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia/Melayu and doubtless a bunch of related dialects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n-2lPzH7Do
I first saw Cynthia Rhodes in the film Flashdance in a smaller part with the character name “Tina Tech.” Tsssst. Hot! A year later she got a part across from Tom Selleck in Runaway.
Peter Frampton called ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ the greatest song of all time. I assume he meant in the rock era but that’s high praise.
@Griffin:
My knowledge of rock music is *very* fragmentary. I’m vaguely aware that things like Progressive Rock and Concept Albums came in about the same time… but in my ignorance it seems that there’s something Sui Generis about Whiter Shade of Pale.
Happy to be shown otherwise.
Griffin & Everyone:
“Whiter Shade of Pale” cops from Bach without outright stealing. Impressive. I love Willie Nelson’s version, when he sings reverently —
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling blew away
–Willie Nelson & Waylon Jennings – A Whiter Shade Of Pale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJjbpG3v9RA
— like he was in church.
Well, in Willie’s terms, he was. That’s one psychedelic masterpiece, though the writer, Keith Reid, denies it.
I’m also fascinated by the song writing process and accounts of how songs were written. Richard Rogers was very successful with two, very different lyricists. Pretty sure Ira Gerswhin wouldn’t have gotten the gig as lyricist if his brother wasn’t one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, but Ira still came up with a few winners. Cole Porter could do both; write and compose. I think Berlin also did both for many of his songs. Lerner and Loewe kept tasks segregated. I think Jule Styne typically wrote melody and words.
Some teams worked independently. The lyricist would send words to the composer who would come up with the tune, or the composer would play a tune for the lyricists, who would invent lines to fit. Someone mentioned Taupin and Elton. I think they work that way, often separated by thousands of miles. Mark Steyn has written some wonderful essays on how a lot of great songs came into being.
I’ve written a few songs. I’m confident that one, in particular, could have been fairly popular. But recording a song and getting it airtime is a whole, different thing. That one came to me fully formed in a dream. Most of the others came as one or two lines, along with the tune, then I’d have to hash out an extra verse, or two, maybe the chorus. I’m pretty sure that if writing music were my day job I could do it, at least at a mediocre level. Lyrics seem much easier to me than melodies. A lot of people can write. And, as others have pointed out; lyrics often don’t have to be Wordsworth caliber communication.
For anyone who thinks it’s extremely difficult, watch a few old episodes of “Who’s Line is it, Anyway?” Most every episode features a few songs, ad-libbed on the spot, in real time, to a topic the comedian has been given seconds earlier. And they often end up clever and catchy. Wayne Brady is particularly good at it.
But I think truly great songs are lightning in a bottle things. Sometimes the creators don’t even know what they have done, until their creation lives in the world for a few years, or more.
This thread lists some of the many B sides that ended up being bigger hits than the A side; showing that often bands, producers, recording engineers and record companies sometimes all get it wrong, even when the finished product is in their hands.
https://forum.songfacts.com/index.php?/topic/15265-b-sides-that-out-sold-a-sides/
I’m pretty much convinced that AWSOP is a studied and considered male meditation upon distaff side themes more than hinted at in the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Tannhäuser Pilgrim’s Chorus and Ravel’s Bolero.
Bach Cribbed on a Hammond B3 FTW.
The Willie Nelson version is good — although seems to have substituted Mirror for Miller. I can get why.. but my dirty mind rebels. As for the Ceiling blowing away…
Although this counter-perversely brings to mind trompe-l’oeil ceilings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ym7FWyCzKI
Billy Holiday … Strange Fruit
She supposedly didn’t want to do this song but she did.
https://youtu.be/Web007rzSOI
@Jack:
As opposed to Nina Simone who wouldn’t bloody stop singing it 😀
Half the time in recording booth Poor Billie was pickled to the gills and didn’t know up from down, but what a presence even in that state.
—>
Old saw about Maria Callas: “Ruined her voice, but man could she sing!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9piRiiZ0C4Q
Here’s one I’m dedicating to Kamala Harris
http://www.divedesk.com/aud/jw/lie-too-much.wma
Jack,
Holiday’s, “God Bless the Child” is a great song. And, yet, as she laments, “So the Bible says and it still is news.”
I don’t know much about Billie Holiday. I didn’t know she wrote “God Bless the Child,” (wow!) nor that Frank Sinatra considered her his “single greatest musical influence.”
Her voice had a curious, fruity, swallowed quality which I find attractive but have no idea whether she trained for it or had it on the natch. Stevie Nicks can do that some too.
The older generation from me often revered her. Frank O’Hara’s most famous poem, “The Day Lady Died,” described the experience when he learned of her death. Lou Reed wrote, “Lady Day,” a passionate tribute to her. In “My Dinner with Andre” Andre Gregory relives a moment of self-loathing that he wouldn’t have had the guts to be Billie Holiday.
I enjoyed “Blood, Sweat and Tears” version of “God Bless the Child” too. Not bad for white boys.
huxley:
There’s a controversy about the degree of Holiday’s contribution to “God Bless the Child.” See this.
Now Richard Marx is married to Daisy Fuentes….from MTV and Waynes World….
}}} Some technology they use with the voices to distort them, like autotune?
You’re kidding, right? No one else even discusses this?
Hell yes, it’s autotune. Search around (with DuckDuckGo**), “Why autotune has destroyed pop music” or the like… They’ve been talking about this for almost two decades.
In moderation, it isn’t a bad tool, but it makes it cheap and easy to get a “basic pop sound” out of someone’s voice. You can probably punch Dennis Leary or Earnest Borgnine singing through it and get something that “sounds ok”.
It sucks donkey balls, but yeah.
And also, about “modern pop songs” — yeah, they are all written by a very small number of songwriters. That’s why the record industries get screwed when someone gets music past them, because then they can’t gouge the singer/musicians for the “Formula”.
This isn’t all that new, “pop” songs have often been written by a constrained group of go-tos, even in the 60s (Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart was a significant duo, for example, and you’re going, “Who?”), but after the radio-music connection softened, with P2P forcing streaming into the process, the lock on such things tightened up, considerably.
In fact, it’s been stalling out a natural correction mechanism for garbage that had cycled through Rock-pop three times during the 50s-90s:
50s: First gen — Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Frankie Valli, Buddy Holly
early 60s: The first of the Girl groups, dominated by Motown artists
60s: British Wave — lots of new talent, after the dreck that was built up by pop-incompetents were cleared out by the Girl Groups. Led by the Beatles, an invasion of british pop artists, as well as home-grown competition, showed up. By the early-mid 70s you have a lot of dreck piling up again, with a noted significant “revival” of 50s artists like Neil Sedaka and Frankie Valli. Funk strives to become the “cleanout”, but fails.
late 70s: Disco era. massive cleanout of all the mediocre artists
80s: Punk morphs into New Wave, and the “second British Invasion”. Lots of talent, though you also have pop garbage, such as anything by Starshi* in this time period, Pat Benatar, etc.
late 80s-early 90s: Hip-Hop and Rap take center stage, with Ton Loc, Salt-n-Pepa, Beastie Boys
90s: Grunge
After that, there should have been a break-cycle somewhere in the 2000s, but it never happened. I’m guessing it was an artifact of the radio-industry’s part in it, which disappeared with streaming services. And there lies the rub, of how so much music sucks these days — it’s the end-run product of pop music from the inventions and techniques of grunge in the 90s.
There’s been some minor shifts in the way things are done, some odds-n-ends like Royal and Alice Merton, that play with what’s there, but not enough. What’s really needed is a sudden influx of something that destroys interest in the current dreck and sends the Big Guys (the ones who pick what to promote) scattering for The Next Big Thing to promote.
Mind you, there’s still a LOT of great stuff being produced, you just can’t find any through POP channels, and have to find it in other ways. As I noted in a comment in the previous piece (I think it was that one… or one further back) in this “chain”, I noted some artists of interest.
============================
** Yes, DDG. After what Google did to Parler, you should be avoiding Google as much as possible. Ditto Amazon, but that’s admittedly a lot trickier.
}}} Artfldgr
Yeah, Lynne is one of the few artists that passed through the Disco era with stuff that’s still tolerable.
“Mr. Blue Sky” is a great song when you’re down. It’s on my list of “pep” songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swYdKF1MpWg
Lynne definitely has a great talent.
OH, I will also note:
Mr. Blue Sky, along with
Talking Heads – And She Was
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgSVTdAtNYE
Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g93mz_eZ5N4
Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers – Don’t Come Around Here No More
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0JvF9vpqx8
Daryl Hall & John Oates – Out Of Touch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D00M2KZH1J0
Missing Persons – Surrender Your Heart**
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17fpgsF0I7M
All qualify as songs to watch if you’re tripping on acid (yes, Done it). Whoo.
=======================
** video by Peter Max, the guy who did the trippy Beatles covers and so forth in the 60s.
Completely irrelevant segue — I bumped into this odd bit of info while looking at the above:
Graham Chapman: “Yellowbeard” is Keith Moon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so7iUjuBbJQ
They’re metal but they have great lyrics and vids based on history. Sabaton!
Leonard Cohen took forever to write his songs. It’s part of his legend. When he went to the studio to record “I’m Your Man” he decided he had to rewrite all the songs, even though he had spent two years on the lyrics already.
However, there was one song, the only one, which he says “was given” to him in the course of a few hours. He was in Edmonton, Canada during a snowstorm, when he turned a corner and ran into two women who were hitchhiking with backpacks huddled in a doorway. He invited them to his hotel room. They fell asleep on his double bed. He sat in an armchair near the window, watched the storm abate and enjoyed the moonlight. By the time the hitchhikers woke up, he had finished the song, “The Sisters of Mercy.”
_________________________________________________
Oh, the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song
Oh, I hope you run into them, you who’ve been travelling so long
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT9k5NHCdvQ
After that, there should have been a break-cycle somewhere in the 2000s, but it never happened.
OBloodyHell:
Rick Beato has a video amusingly titled, “Did I Help Ruin Rock Music?” His answer is that bands were signed based on looks and the singer. Then multi-talented record producers like Beato would be hired to handle practically everything else:
_____________________________________________________
essentially the A&R people took over the industry and they were signing people based on how they looked and they didn’t care if they had any songs because they would hire their friends or people that were signed to their own publishing companies to come in and write the songs for him and I knew this was wrong I knew it was wrong but I also you know that was the only way to be a producer in the music business at that time and I wasn’t getting the huge production projects later on it was only a handful of people that produced all the bands
–Rick Beato, “Did I Help Ruin Rock Music?” (computer transcription)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKykNgZ0U4Q
huxley,
I just finished listening to a similar themed Beato video entitled,
Why Record Labels Suck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oWsgTAXc8U
It’s long and he drops 40 names in the clip, and he is talking primarily about the recent history of the 80’s and 90’s. But, his short answer is that the were these individual A&R guys who were given total authority over bands, they wielded their power with abandon, and they didn’t know what they were doing.
I think everyone who’s ever engaged in any art has had that experience of something just suddenly being there, popping into the mind as if arriving from somewhere else. And it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with quality. I’ve heard people describe it with some really bad piece of doggerel, even of advertising copy. My impression is that it’s not usually complete works, though, but rather a phrase or a sentence, a line or two of verse, a tune. In that case it’s after the “apparition,” so to speak, that the real work begins. And it’s far more likely to happen to people already engaged in the work–to be “right there waiting,” as the title of this post says.
I’m thinking of language and music here…does the same sort of thing happen to painters or sculptors? I suppose it does, but it’s harder for me to imagine, having a less-than-zero aptitude along those lines.
Frankie Valli was not a “50s” artist, his first big hit, the Four Seasons’ “Sherry” came out in 1962. The group with Valli as lead singer was big in the mid-60s alongside the British Invasion.
TommyJay:
I agree the record labels have much to answer for when it comes to the current state of music.
Nonetheless, I do wonder why so little really good music has seeped up through the cracks. It’s not that hard or expensive to slap together a studio, make some music and put it up on YouTube.
I understand it’s hard to get attention and gain traction, but word of mouth still exists and there are plenty of blogs which can pass along news of worthy stuff.
But nothing much reaches me … at least. I’ll grant I’m not a typical case.
The country music ecosystem seems reasonably intact, but pop seems broken. Is this entirely the fault of the A&R guys?
OBloodyHell:
I am well aware of autotune and the complaints against it. What I’m not aware of is exactly what it makes voices sound like – does it add the metallic quality I hear in Lukas Marx’s vocals, for example? I know it’s supposed to correct for being out of tune, but I’m not aware of other vocal qualities it changes and how.
I’ve watched a lot of those videos about modern pop music and its flaws.
Mac:
It’s a lot easier to imagine a mediocre work and/or a fragment of a work popping into the head full-blown than it is to imagine a really fine work popping up that way, especially in its near-entirety. And yet I’ve seen it described time and again. Poems sometimes come that way – I have had it happen on occasion, and although I don’t think my poems are masterpieces I often think they’re good.
I can’t find it now, but I remember reading that Alan Paton, author of the novel Cry, the Beloved Country, says he wrote it at lightning speed as though it was dictated to him. It is an excellent book.
Neo, Rick B. has a little to say about autotune here. Unfortunately it isn’t much.
Why Boomers Hate Pop Music (at 14:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDUSFpek0PM
If I understood correctly, Autotune vocals do sound electronic, but if you want to hide the tuning so that vocals sound like vocals then they use Melodyne. I think I know the electronic sound he mentioned, but that’s a guess.
_______
huxley, Rick did say that his example of a horrible A&R guy (in 1990 +/-) would be completely different today. There is a local band that gives many free concerts, headed by a guy who is a probably a fractional billionaire; and he frequently intimates that it is just too hard to turn a profit with Spotify and Apple iTunes etc. So he doesn’t bother.
neo:
Cher is credited with the first big autotune hit:
–“Cher – Believe [Official Music Video]” (1998)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXRV4MezEw
However, the producer used extreme autotune settings as an extreme effect, not for minor corrections.
I mention this to give a sense of autotune’s range. I’m not sure why Lucas Marx is using it in a minor way. I imagine he is a competent enough singer. I guess his producer just wanted a touch of autotune in the mix.
I like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” song which is heavily autotuned to give it a certain catchiness. It worked for me, though many critics hated it.
–Rebecca Black, “Friday” (2011)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0
I think they didn’t like the song because it was fun.
Huxley,
The hip hop performer T-Pain really took auto tune to the next level of popularity with a string of heavily auto tuned hits.
I think in some ways the more extreme examples are less offensive than the many little fixes that are in virtually every recording post about 2000.
I watched a documentary about country music and Kris Kristofferson described his song writing as somewhat just coming to him. Thing is the songs he wrote after something like a drunkin night or a breakup or something that actually happened to him.
“Well, I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad
So I had one more for dessert”
This is just my guess. But I think this guy (The Weeknd) is singing with a lot of Autotune.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXYlFuWEuKI&list=RDCLAK5uy_kmPRjHDECIcuVwnKsx2Ng7fyNgFKWNJFs&index=5
jack:
I love the story of “Me and My Uncle.” John Philips (“Mamas and Papas”) wrote it while drunk at a party then forgot about it.
One day he opens the mail and finds a mysterious royalty check from Judy Collins, who had captured the chords and the lyrics at the party, then played it on a concert tour!
–Judy Collins, “Me & My Uncle” (1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WZzgsNiNSU
The Grateful Dead made the song a staple at their live shows.
…just too hard to turn a profit with Spotify and Apple iTunes etc. So he doesn’t bother.
TommyJay: I wonder about the economics of today’s music and that’s effect. Musicians can still get rich, but it looks like the risk/reward isn’t what it used to be.
A&R guys ruin more than the bands after they sign. They also swoop down on the barest glimmerings of new scenes and new talent before bands get the chance to mature on their own.
Would R.E.M. have become what they became without the Athens, GA scene?
Whenever I think about pop songwriting, and I do quite a bit, I keep coming back to the same three songs which I consider brilliantly written as to their melody, song construction, and lyrics: “This Masquerade” by Leon Russell; “Crazy” by Willie Nelson; and the single best piece of pop songwriting I’ve ever come across, John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind”.
Russell’s song is the haunting tale of a couple locked in an unhappy relationship. They try to be honest with themselves about the situation – but fail. The great lyrics convey the story with incredible clarity. Covered well by two monster talents, George Benson and Karen Carpenter.
“Crazy” is a genre-bending song that has been covered by dozens of artists. As a struggling young writer, Nelson was fortunate to have the immortal Patsy Cline give “Crazy” a wonderful reading that helped launch his career. Then, fifteen years after “The Cline” (as Patsy referred to herself) took claim to the song, along came Linda Ronstadt to record her own epic version.
John Hartford, one of the most fascinating multi-talents in all of American show business, was quoted as saying the royalties from “Gentle on My Mind” bought him freedom – which he used to live an incredibly interesting life. Glen Campbell, one of the brightest talents in American pop music history, was the vehicle which drove this song to its popularity. There is a YouTube clip of Campbell performing it for several Mount Rushmores worth of county music megastars and his performance mesmerizes the entire crew. When you are playing a guitar break and Chet Atkins sits still as a statue watching you go at it – well, they called Chet “Mr. Guitar” for a reason.
A side note to Campbell’s amazing guitar playing – his playing was so good, Campbell was a crack studio musician despite never learning to read music. How that is even possible is beyond me.
Believe it or not, Campbell and Alice Cooper were close friends who attended the same church in Phoenix and regularly played golf together. Cooper tells a story that he once owed Eddie Van Halen a favor and when it came time to call in the chit, EVH said to Cooper “Man – can you get me a guitar lesson with Glen Campbell?”
As far as songs that “came to me;” most were just lyrics and a melody (and often just fractions of both), but there were at least two that were so complete I spent a few weeks afterwards searching to make sure they didn’t already exist, to make sure a memory of an existing song that I had forgotten hearing hadn’t resurfaced in my memory. When they came to me I actually heard them as entire recordings; with all the various instruments, backup vocals. It was just as if I was thinking of an existing song in my mind and replaying it.
The instant my mind played them to me that first time I thought they were original. It felt like I was creating them in real time, but I know musicians had been fooled before by thinking they were having an original thought when it was actually something they had forgotten hearing, so I spent some time verifying that wasn’t the case.
I have also awoken from dreams on several occasions where a song had been playing, in my dream, incidentally in the background, or maybe a band was on stage, in the background, like in a movie, and when I woke up I realized the song playing on the radio, or that the band was playing, were original works. A few were good (in my opinion).
Regarding the interesting thread OBloodyHell kicked off with his history of pop music timeline; I agree with a lot of what he wrote, but I think he missed some key points.
Regarding where we are today and why the switch he (and a few others) are saying should have happened in the 2000s hasn’t happened; I think you are missing that the thing itself is dead. You shouldn’t be looking for the next big shift in pop music, just as no one is looking for the next big shift in Baroque, or Ragtime, or Big Band or Dixieland. There were confluences of history, technology and industry that led to Pop music developing and becoming huge; and those ships have sailed.
There are amazing, wonderful musicians writing, performing and recording today. The equivalents of all the artists and groups you all are listing. But there are not a handful of record companies and radio stations that control mass culture, so none of those really talented people are becoming household names. Record companies and radio stations also colluded to make a lot of marginally talented people household names, and we still have that today; but their (record companies and radio stations) reach is less broad, so even though they are big, they’re not “household” names.
Whether this is good or bad, I tend to land on the side that it is good. It’s true that Spotify and Google and Amazon and Satellite radio and some other big players have really impacted musicians’ royalty streams from airplay, this change has also broken the backs of the “Suits.” Artists have much more control over their work and their destinies. We think of the ’30s – ’90s as normal, but they were the anomaly. For the rest of the history of music most artists earned their money performing, and few, if any, were mega-wealthy.
@Neo:
Cry the Beloved Country is a wonderful book. Every country with a complicated history has one of these in it. The muse must have chosen him because he was an honest, well-intentioned man and deeply knew his material. Once. I don’t think much of his subsequent output — he got a bit of a literary bee in his bonnet about interracial sex later. A lot of them did.
The landscape he grew up and lived in — edge of the Valley of a Thousand Hills — is an earthly paradise. A few million assegai-wielding worms in the apple notwithstanding. And I’m not totally against Zulus… they sing wonderfully, brew their own beer, and have a King. Kings aren’t all bad.
The poet Roy Campbell came from same area, and the novelist Mary Renault settled in Durban and wrote her wonderful novels about the Greek and Persian worlds there.
All gone now. Mistah Kurtz, he dead.
Scott:
In the Open Thread I regaled Richard Aubrey about the Wrecking Crew, from whence Glen Campbell and Leon Russell emerged. I’m guessing you already know about the Crew.
Ah, but John Hartford … well, you are a man after my own heart. “Aereo-Plain” is one of my all-time feel-good albums. If I could come back in my next life as someone else, John Hartford would be way high on the list and I could play the banjo or fiddle, sing and pilot a riverboat on the Mississip.
–John Hartford, “Steamboat Whistle Blues”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qNS_QB76WU
You shouldn’t be looking for the next big shift in pop music, just as no one is looking for the next big shift in Baroque, or Ragtime, or Big Band or Dixieland.
Rufus T. Firefly:
That’s what I suspect. I was leading up to it. Pop music, as we know it, may simply be played out.
I have at least two John Hartford albums in the closet where my LPs are stored. They came with the wife and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard them. It’s not very convenient to get things out of that closet, so when I do I pull out a dozen or two and keep them out for weeks or months for repeated listening. I’ll include Hartford next time.
Neo: I want to say that Frost described one of his famous short lyrics as coming that way, but I could be misremembering. There’s no doubt that it happens with entire works.
Forty seconds of that Cher song was enough to confirm my impression that autotune is the means whereby a physically impossible warbly and pitch-leaping effect is imposed on a voice. I can’t stand it and won’t willingly put up with hearing it at all.
Emily Nelson: Sabaton sounds intriguing, I’ll check them out. Metal is one of my guilty pleasures.
Huxley,
A great Wrecking-Crew era bit of trivia has a funny side story I once heard told: the acoustic guitar on Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” was played by a young Glen Campbell who was so struck at being in the studio with The Chairman of the Board, he stared at Sinatra throughout the session. Ol’ Blue Eyes later told a member of his entourage he though the kid guitar player was sweet on him.
Years ago, reading Tommy Tedesco’s “Studio Log” column in Guitar Player magazine was the start of a life-long fascination with session musicians. In the era when popular music was created by live musicians in analog recording studios, these men (and women – not forgetting you, Carol Kaye) were the razor-sharp, immensely versatile musical talents that made the music – and yet nobody even knew about them.
The stories behind the Swamp Rats session players in Muscle Shoals, Alabama are equally entertaining as the tales of the LA-based Wrecking Crew.
And then there’s the Hu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM8dCGIm6yc
I can’t think of any painting/sculpture stories about the whole piece coming at once. Maybe it’s because painting and sculpture are static in time.
If da Vinci exclaimed, “Then it came to me! I’ll paint a picture of a woman smiling,” it might not be a story people bothered to remember.
huxley:
I think perhaps Michaelangelo and his sculptures. Didn’t he say the sculpture was there in the stone and he just cut away all the other parts?
Scott:
I love those behind-the-scenes music stories.
Spurred by Artfldgr’s mention of the “Traveling Wilburys,” today I got sucked into an old clip of George Harrison explaining how the Wilburys came together.
Harrison had to fill the flipside of a 12″ single for a European label immediately. He happened to be having dinner with Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison that night and explained the problem to them. Lynne said, well you need a studio and engineer. Lynne volunteered to be the engineer. Harrison figured that maybe he could use Bob Dylan’s garage studio. Orbison said he’d like to come along and watch. Harrison got Dylan’s OK, then the next day, swung by Tom Petty’s to pick up a guitar. Then Petty joined in.
With all five together in that studio Harrison decided to give them all vocal parts. Harrison called the song, “Handle with Care,” because there was a box so labeled in Dylan’s garage. It went so well in a single day, Harrison suggested they could write another nine songs in nine days and make an album.
So they did.
It’s not a funny story, but it’s interesting and a testament to the creative process. Plus George is fascinating to watch for his humility tinged with a certain impatience. An articulate fellow who knew what he wanted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZFRXJk037o
neo and huxley,
I have no visual artistic talent, but it’s almost certainly the same thing. Sometimes the concept springs from the creator’s mind, wholly hatched like Athena from Zeus, and others it’s a kernel of an idea that the artist refines as he or she plays with it and sees it coming to light.
I think perhaps Michaelangelo and his sculptures. Didn’t he say the sculpture was there in the stone and he just cut away all the other parts?
neo:
I thought of that Michelangelo quote as I commented. My “static in time” point is that we’re not surprised that an artist creating a realistic visual work starts from a definite image. It probably won’t be as detailed as the finished product, but it doesn’t vary over time, as a poem or a song must.
A poet or songwriter would be a laughingstock if he said, “I start with a dictionary, then delete all the words that don’t fit.” It’s different from painting or sculpture.
However, I agree with Rufus that ultimately creativity is the same process. The artist starts with something, then builds, brings forth and sees it through. The initial “something” may be vague or quite detailed.
I’ve never been sure how complete Michelangelo’s vision was. I really don’t believe he saw *everything* before he he picked up a chisel any more than Shakespeare knew all the end rhymes before he wrote “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes.”
What I was attempting to address, somewhat flippantly, is why there don’t seem to be many interesting stories about the genesis of visual static works as opposed to temporal verbal ones.
Of course, with modern art all bets are off, when it’s more of a process (temporal) than an image (static). There are plenty of good modern art stories.
One of Robert Rauschenberg’s most famous works is called “Bed” (1955). The story goes that Rauschenberg was flat broke. He didn’t even have money for canvas, so he decided to paint his bed!
And he did. He called it a “combine” as in combining different media. It has a certain cheeky pizzazz. Maybe even some “je ne sais quoi.” You be the judge.
https://www.artsy.net/article/ellen-tani-rauschenberg-made-his-bed-but-does-he
huxley:
But I don’t think that’s what Michaelangelo was saying. If I understand him right, I think he was not saying he was planning a certain sculpture. I think he was saying the sculpture already existed in the stone and he was “receiving” the image of it and doing the necessary work to reveal it.
As far as painting goes, I think that a lot of painters revise and paint over various parts of a painting as they go. Why isn’t this “varying over time”? And why does a poem need to “vary over time”? People sometimes say they just write the whole thing down without hesitation, as though taking dictation.
What I’ve been trying to describe is a situation in which the artist (visual or literary) describes a work of art as having been received from somewhere else or something else, and that he or she is just the agent who delivers it to the world.
neo:
The process of creation occurs over time, true. However, when I say a sculpture is static, I mean that when you perceive it, it’s there. We can argue over eye saccades and so forth, but you take in the whole thing at once.
But you can’t get a song or a poem or a movie that way. You start at the beginning and it unfolds over time from the beginning to the end.
Your point about whether the artist “receives” it or “delivers” is another issue.
FOAF: I stand corrected. But he’s much more associated with the pre-Beatles music style in my head, so I always classed him that way.
Perhaps he fits in more with the intervening “girl group” style with his falsetto… Yes, even after most of the GGs had faded… He hung around like the Supremes.
Rufus, et al.
Welllllll, allow me to modify that to refer to “Pop Rock”. Which may be dead.
“Pop” never dies. There are some moments in Amadeus where they speak of him writing Operas or the “popular” stuff that played in amusement halls… At one point, Ragtime was “pop”.
But your argument has merit as an idea.
I believe it fails in terms of music as a whole… Pop music is still, IMNSHO, based in Rock. It’s just never had the reset I argue kept it fresh and kept bringing forth new styles.
Side point: “not enough money in Spotify”
Well, I have a peripheral argument here regarding the nature of wealth collecting in an IP&Services economy… I suspect that “Big X” does not survive this century. Big Business, Big Government, Big Unions, even BIG NATIONS.
It’s got nothong to do with the OP, but… An IP&SE is a network-based economy, unlike Feudal and Industrial economies, which are Hierarchichal. Networks are about fluidity, not monolithic. They want small collectives to do the job, nothing bigger… And assemble the parts from the pieces.
That’s inadequate to explain the gestalt, but the point is, I don’t think there’s “Big Money” out there, either. When you get Big Things, you get Big Control (Amazon vs Parler)… And that’s anathema to a network economy.
P.s., a Big Nation is a Big Target. This can vastly outweigh the benefits of being Bigly, esp. when you can do the job with a loose confederation of smaller entities.
The future may be a world with 500 “nations” the size of US states…
FOAF; OBloodyHell:
Yes, Valli and The Four Seasons had their first big hit in 1962. But they’d been around in various incarnations for quite a while before that, and as “The Four Lovers” they had a minor hit in 1956 that landed them a gig on the Ed Sullivan Show. Strange to watch. I don’t hear much evidence of the falsetto – maybe one little yelp in the first song.
The Four Seasons weren’t cutting edge, but they were very very popular from 1962 right through the British invasion.
This has been enlightening. I like to write fiction, if only I could. I can do backstories that would be a full-volume bio. I can get started and set scenes. But the only plot I’m likely to get is in a cemetery.
I do short stories by starting someplace and seeing where the most likely, and most interesting, destination will be, as required or restrained by the circumstances I impose or which are in the world I’m writing of. Those I can do.
But looking at the foregoing information on writing music. How incredibly confining to come up with a song, primarily one with a possibility of commercial success.
Technical question: I am partial to “Mille Regretz” by DesPrez. Particularly the cover by Paula bar Giese–youtube. It’s old and still in a lot of repertoires. What about it makes it special. Lots of people have written lots of songs which nobody cared about or troubled to record (ink on parchment recording). This one?
ObloodyHell,
I think we are saying a lot of the same things, and I agree with your redefinition of the term, “Pop.” No argument and I debated using that term for the same reasons you list, but since it was the term used in the discussion leading up to my comment I stuck with it so folks would know I was referring to the same thing.
I agree with what you are saying about fragmentation, and that’s my point about the ’30s to ’90s being the anomaly. Since that covers some or much of most of our lifetimes we keep comparing trends to that period, and wondering why they don’t conform. To stay with the example of music; troubadors, minstrels, military bands, court musicians, church musicians… That’s about the only way any musicians earned a living. Almost all “local” followings. So now groups put their stuff on-line and sell directly to their fans, their “local” audience and travel to perform where groups of them congregate. How is Anheuser Busch hiring Sting to perform at their Christmas party different than a wealthy Medici hiring Rossini to compose a funeral mass for his uncle?
Where we may differ (I haven’t noticed you citing this) is music history is also a history of technology. There weren’t symphonies in Ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt or China. I suspect that is due to a lack of standardized craftsmanship and production processes. But once industrial standards were good enough to consistently make instruments that could stay in tune and tune to other, similarly well crafted instruments, we started having quartets, quintets, bands and symphonies. Mozart, Liszt, Beethoven… All doing wonderous things on the piano-forte shortly after it was invented. Just as the prog rock guys in the ’70s did wondrous things on Mr. Moog’s synth nearly the day after he produced his first, commercial version. And look at the history of the electric guitar. It was barely a week after folks like Les Paul started messing around with pickups that Chuck Berry was shredding licks like, “Johnny B. Goode.” And the invention of microphones allowed vocalists to be heard over Big Bands. And the nascent radio allowed those bands performances to be transmitted live to the nation. And the recently invented long playing record allowed folks to buy the music they heard and listen to it in their own homes whenever they wanted. Producers exploited technological advances like tape looping and multi-track recording very early into those developments. And when computing made digital recording and production possible, musicians pushed those technologies to the limit.
All a long way of saying, there has been no, new innovation in the technology of music lately*, so that’s why things stopped in the 2000s. Hip hop, sampling, dubstep… are all newish things that have come out of playing around with new technology developments, and some are huge, but because of the distribution side balkanizing stars in those genres are not household names.
*Except on the distribution side.
neo, I would say the Four Seasons were probably close to the “cutting edge” when they had their first big hits in 1962-3. Of course their roots were in 50s vocal groups but the records had a harder rock sound, definitely not just “neo-doowop” like some other groups of the time (Marcels’ “Blue Moon”, Earls’ “Remember Then”). They had three top 10 hits in 1964 in the teeth of the British Invasion when most American bands were trying to pretend they were English. Very impressive.
“I think I can safely say I will never write a song” – Neo.
Never say never.
Oliver Sacks, in his book “Musicophilia,” discusses people who have never had any disposition to create music but who, after a brain trauma, suddenly find themselves unable to NOT compose or learn to play an instrument.
He also discusses the phenomena of relative and absolute pitch, and speculates on why some have it and others don’t.