Writing songs

With the new release (Heartland Variations) successfully out the door in April, and the reissue of my 1978 vinyl for Transatlantic (No More Range to Roam) taken care of in October, I’ve been able to turn my attention to songwriting—for popular writers a murky process if there ever was one. Here are a few meditations on various points in the process.

Inspiration
Unfamiliar as I am with classical processes, I still tend to guess that Mozart began with a melody and moved onward to orchestration—I can’t imagine him working from a couple of chords he liked or a rhythmic feel. But maybe I’m wrong…

For myself, there is no set pattern. The spark can be those guitar chords or a rhythm, which then are suggestive of a melody and evoke an emotional or topical sphere that leads to lyrics. Or it can be absolutely the other way around: a set of lyrics—often but not always a chorus first—which encapsulate something near the surface in the subconscious and then lead to conscious choices of rhythm, melody and harmonic underpinnings (chords). The more toward pop one moves, the more emphasis is placed on the “hook” or melody+lyrics+rhythm of the chorus. Of course in hip hop you can sometimes circumvent the compositional process for the chorus by licensing (hopefully) a sample of a hook that already been around once and proven its mettle. That’s not where I work, however. In spite of the fact that I have no pop pretentions whatsoever, the basic structure of the popular song is very strongly part of my DNA, so the notion of a repeating chorus which is in someway memorable is part of my process, as is some variant on the verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus song structure. The bridge, for those whom this is jargon, is just “something different” in the middle of the song, which tends to lighten the repetitive traditional structure, but is by no means universal.

For me the frosting is always something in the lyrics for which the source is unclear, but which resonates immediately. Here are two lines from “Bread & Justice” (written for my early 80s electric day band, the Regulars) as an example: “Nathan oozed good fortune / He held his life by a silver chain/ All around him, like a pool of light / The shimmer of his capital gain”. To find this sort of expression, you mostly have to be patient, or relax, or recognize what’s not that. It’s not a rational process, other than sitting down at the table or computer with enough frequency and time so that it will have a chance to happen.

I’ll detail the creative process for two very different songs to finish this exposé, one from London 1976 or so, the other one Pittsburgh 2009.

Ballerina
This tune was written as nearly in a classical process as I’ve ever come. At the time I was living in a squat in Islington (north London), eating erratically and having virtually reversed the normal day/night living patterns, as sometimes happens with musicians, so most of the work happened after midnight. The rather straightforward narrative lyrics came first, and were polished to a fine sheen before beginning the musical writing. For the latter I actually took a sheet of partition (music) paper and wrote the melody first without the guitar. I then actually wrote the guitar part note by note, a process that is almost totally foreign to most folk and rock composition (including mine). For the recording, Mick Linnard came up with a nice second guitar part, and my brother Jeffrey arranged some (in-house, literally) strings and the whole thing is pretty precious. Not surprisingly, this was my late father’s favorite song of mine. He was a Ph.D. in music theory…

Gas It Up
This one is the opposite extreme. Written as a groove tune for the Uptown Combo (it appears on the “Bloodshot Moon” CD) , it was re-recorded on Heartland Variations in an acoustic version. Here the inspiration was an A minor groove that suggested road movement, then an ode to another time (my youth) when cars were huge and gas cheap. I wrote the chorus first, then left it first so the song goes chorus/verse/chorus/verse/chorus with lots of space for instrumental improvisation and stretching out. The lyrics are minimal, but use the car metaphor in a reasonably effective way. For example: “The girls have got the top down/ stopped and laughin’ at the red light / I can feel that motor runnin’ / Underneath the hood tonight.” This one wrote itself quickly, I stopped my impulse to complicate things, and it has been popular and a fun tune for performance purposes, since I mostly have excellent musicians with me who need a little space on occasion.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.

Club Café

The Club Café , for those who don’t live in Pittsburgh, is a small room (150 capacity) that acts like a big room: excellent sound system, pretty good lights, sound man, booked by a promoter (Opus One Productions) who took over that function when the owner, former restaurateur Marco Cardamone, apparently decided it was too much for him. The room schedules national touring bands and songwriters as well as regional acts. For regional acts, most of the door goes to the artist, after a promotional fee that covers the sound man and some useful listings legwork. For national acts, the promoter sometimes risks a guarantee if they know both the touring act and the local audience—it’s a tightrope. On many nights there are early shows tending toward acoustic or solo acts, while late shows can be anything from punk to jazz.

I put together a mixed group of Pittsburgh (Mark Weakland, drums, Jim Spears, bass and Jack Bowen, piano from Uptown Combo) and Lexington family (Karen Jones, fiddle, Bev Futrell, mandolin/harmonica, Jeff Jones, guitar + cousin Dave Gillespie from Detroit on lead) musicians for the Heartland Variations CD release at Club Café. A great crowd of family, friends and fans both local and far-flung (José and Evangelina from Portugal won the distance prize), a big party afterwards… A nice step forward, and part of the equation in terms of figuring out how to make music work for me again not just one night but frequently enough to keep momentum going, have musicians to work with who remember the tunes, and bring in enough income to pay them something. The Club Café is one of the venue profiles that keeps live music alive, with the promoter working overtime to fill it (and the Brillo Box and Mr. Smalls theater in Pittsburgh) with viable artists who can generate enough income to keep the whole think working. The other two venue profiles are community-based organizations and individuals/couples running events in their homes. More on these later, but to get a flavor of the event and the venue, there's a short video on my web site by Bill Wade of the Post-Gazette , who was at the event as a friend.

Natasha's Bistro

Got some catching up to do… Over the last month + I went through a CD release sequence with some interesting experiences. One of them was a concert at Natasha’s in Lexington, Kentucky. The Natasha’s story is probably worth telling, in the context of trying to figure out what still works for live music these days. Gene, Natasha’s owner/manager, started out in a strip mall in a former service station, with a gift shop and an improvised performance area. My Lexington family musicians who play out as Tall, Dark and Handsome, remember starting there when Gene would push aside some of the scarf racks and break out the folding chairs on music nights.

The next move was to downtown Lexington, in a large space that was no doubt available because the area, like many downtowns, was a mix of commercial success and failure. Gene kept the gift shop going, but started some reasonably serious food and beverage service. The music was still more or less in the gift shop and the space was divided in half.

When Gene did the next major renovation, Natasha’s took a quantum leap as a performance space, as he unified the space, installed a stage and a quality sound system and sound booth, and stage lighting. The bar/restaurant side of things also went upscale, roughly from Moosewood to Silver Palate. Gene started getting enquiries from national touring acts, and took some of them in, while keeping an eclectic mix of local music, theatre, jazz, lectures and benefits in the performance space, based on his personal taste and that of his wife Natasha.

It’s not likely that Gene and Natasha are getting rich; the business arrangements for music are definitely musician friendly, with pretty much the whole door going to the performers. On the other hand, the place is a personal expression for them both and retains a community feel while offering a first-rate gathering place for all sorts of events, musical and otherwise. The CD release event, as you can see, started in the daylight, with all ages present. A good listening environment, without it being straight concert or impossible to get a beer during the music.


So why don’t more places like this exist? Hours, I would guess. Gene probably puts in his 80 or so hours a week, similar to those of a dairy farmer or someone running a convenience store, or a French baker (those croissants start at about 3 AM). Most of us aren’t up to that. Luckily Gene is…

Elijah Wald's New Book

Elijah Wald has been performing music and writing about it for awhile, and our paths have crossed recently a couple of times, first at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in Mexico City, and then again in Pittsburgh, when he came through on his book tour and I was alerted by mutual friends and went down to hear him. We had a little public discussion about the dearth of opportunities for live performance these days—that’s another story—and I picked up a copy of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (here's the amazon page). Elijah was pretty straightforward about the title being chosen for commercial intent, but every single reviewer on Amazon, for example, slagged him for it nevertheless. Having gotten through the book myself, I’m not against the title; his primary thesis IS that the Beatles, once they removed themselves from the multi-ethnic, dance-driven soup that had always been American popular music, DID change the way popular music was incubated and (not) performed. One of the consequences was virtually the end of interracial bills. He cites Woodstock as an example, with the only two black performers being Greenwich Village folkie Richie Havens and fresh-off-the-boat-with-his-limey-rhythm-section Jimi Hendrix.. I take that back, I’d seen him opening for the Rascals in Central Park in 1967 when he WAS fresh off the boat (and actually exchanged a few words and a handshake with him at the Fillmore East). Woodstock was 1969—Linda and I probably flew over it on our way to Europe for 10 years. Hendrix was dead little more than a year later.

Not to get distracted: Wald traces the history of American popular music when performance and recording opportunities were virtually segregated, but when influences still flowed freely across racial and ethnic divides. One of his key arguments is in favor of the Paul Whiteman legacy, who, as he points out, tends to be dismissed by hard-core jazz critics, while being cited favorably by many jazzers themselves, including Duke Ellington, for his orchestral approach to jazz big-band performance, his commercial success, and his introduction of vocalists (including Bing Crosby).

He also does a careful job of parceling out the credit for the beginnings of rock and roll, including Chuck Berry, Elvis, and Carl Perkins and emphasizing that none of them were working in isolation. Another of Wald’s primary points is that—contrary to the rock historians’ preferred narrative, rock and roll, then rock, did not manage a scorched-earth entry onto the popular music scene: do-wop, crooners, Motown, Chubby Checker and many others shared the charts throughout the Sixties. It was in the aftermath of Sargent Pepper that the album-oriented FM format (and others) started to devolve into today’s atomized media formats and audiences.

Whatever you think of this thesis—and Wald stops there, other than a few marginal references to later developments like hip hop—the book itself is a thoroughly researched and carefully written history that dislodges some comfortable assumptions about popular music, rebuilding its story into a much more complex mosaic.

Kingston Stories

In the summer of 2007, I went to Kingston, Jamaica for a meeting of the Association for Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus just outside of Kingston. I was inspired to do this by a proposed panel on international hip hop involving Tony Mitchel (Global Noise), Bronwen Low from McGill and several others I had met in Mexico city the previous year at another conference. Another big factor was the personal encouragement I got from Kingston resident and popular music scholar Dennis Howard, whom I’d met and bonded with in Mexico City as well. As a longtime reggae fan, I felt like the notion of a personal visit to Trenchtown had some existential validity. Here’s Dennis and I in front of the national stadium and statue of Jamaican track legend Don Quarrie. Jamaica's national soccer team, whose team name is the Reggae Boyz, also plays here.

Island music has been intertwined with American and European popular music at least since the mambo craze of the 40s and 50s, but for boomers like me, it was Bob Marley and Chris Blackwell’s Island Records that brought it to the front of my consciousness in the late 60s with the reggae, rocksteady and ska styles. Blackwell was born a Londoner, but grew up in Jamaica and was able to parlay his familiarity with the local music scene into an enormously successful independent label which ended up back in London (where I spent a night in their studios in 1978 recording some demos).


Needless to say, Blackwell was long gone from Kingston in 2007 and the Trenchtown area didn’t have much going on in terms of music, and most of the commercial activity was informal. Dennis and Peter Tosh’s former manager Herbie Miller gave me a tour, which included meeting Dennis' father in his store, taking a few pictures in front of the Bob Marley statue, and cruising by the locations of famous studios and outdoor concert locations in the early reggae era. Herbie had perfectly plausible visions of turning the area into a tourist destination based on reggae stars and history. (See here for an update on that initiative.)

Live music in Kingston is pretty weak, right now, however, with the combination of sound systems and dancehall taking up most of that space. A sound system can get your attention: on weekends the parties in open spaces can be heard for blocks; when the legendary Stone Love system arrived in a dump truck and set up on campus, the massive subwoofers brought people out of buildings for a half-mile around, and made you question your bowel control.

Kingston itself has a reputation for violence, with more razor wire in evidence than is comfortable. My hotel told me to take a cab up to the Hilton for a drink; I looked out the door and it was 50 yards away. I walked. Most tourists to Jamaica end up on the north coast at Ocho Rios or Montego bay. Kingston draws more intrepid tourists but the city’s infrastructure isn’t strong, public transport inconsistent, and movement after dark needs to be cautious. Like many major cities, major capital has attempted to avoid inner-city constraints by building from scratch outside the center (think La Défense in Paris, Greenwich outside of London, Puebla in Mexico City), but New Kingston, as Dennis pointed out, was poorly planned, neglecting basic things like parking. The small maquiladora sector has now moved entirely to Asia and the economic base of the country was faltering even before the international crisis hit, with both sugar and tourism having problems.

This kind of an environment often puts the onus on the individual, and Dennis is no exception. As he completes his graduate work, he continues to run a production / event planning company with his partner, Jackie, which includes a gorgeous property up on Blue Mountain where a bunch of us were hosted for a meal at the conference end. In the meantime, he’s an accomplished scholar already, with his academic training buttressed by hands-on experience with many of the greats of Jamaican music. His blog is a must-stop for people interested in that history.

Think Local, Act Global

Got a note from Anneliefs Brown the other day, drumming up support for a band from Soweto that she manages. She’s Dutch, by the way… She and the band are hoping to leverage Internet power to pre-finance a new recording. A certain number of artists are doing this these days, some very successfully. If you want to contribute, or just see how they’re doing, go to the band's page at the Africa Unsigned website.

For people following social media trends, this hardly raises an eyebrow. If it works it will be, however, extraordinary. Not in terms of the Internet powering the experiment, but rather in terms of the intercontinental, cross-cultural component of the whole thing. From where I sit in the US, most of the social networking seems to be among like-minded souls, which in music means there are really high language and culture barriers. The chances of the hipsters from Chicago or Atlanta signing on to the latest Argentine hip-hop act or indie rock band are actually infinitesimal, in spite of their easy availability. There is what the French call a certain amount of nombrilisme (belly-button gazing) in the whole scene, where ever-more-obscure acts from Omaha break big in social media, but mostly from the same subculture: white, English-speaking, over-educated, under-employed.

But hey, prove me wrong! Support local live music, then follow my $10 to Africa Unsigned…

The Listening Room

Listening and popular music don’t necessarily go together. This was brought home to me again when (my wife) Linda and I were attempting to listen to a fine set by a young Pittsburgh singer-songwriter named Brooke Annibale at the Club Café. We had gotten there later than we should have, and found seats at the bar. Before long it became clear that a multi-generational group between us and the stage were not there for the music—turning their backs to the stage and raising their voices as the music began. In that Pittsburgh’s Carson Street on the South Side is home to dozens of bars without the annoyance of music and that there was a $7 cover charge to get in to the Club Café, it was a bit puzzling as to why a dozen or so people were intent on ruining the experience of the 90% of the room who were listening. Does this make the Club Café exceptionally bad in this regard? No, it’s the best room in Pittsburgh outside of concert halls for listening to music.

The notion of listening to popular music is a recent one. Popular music, even folk music, has had as a primary function providing a sound track for other activities, mostly dancing and socializing, throughout its history. When what is now known as classical music was “popular,” that was its function as well. Virtually every musical genre you could think of began life as a dance music (see Elijah Wald’s new book How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll for a real nice history—more on this later). Somewhere in the 60s, when jazz became “America’s classical music” (as NPR endlessly reminds us), FM album-oriented formats flourished, folk made it to the concert hall, and Sergeant Pepper and Dylan came along to intellectualize rock ‘n roll, listening became a common experience. Listening rooms included rock clubs with tables, coffee houses, and all the showcase clubs up and down Bleeker Street in New York. Not much left of any of that: the tables have come out of the rock clubs, the coffee houses are gone, and the Bleeker St. clubs offer a continuous stream of artists playing short nameless sets for $5 entry. At least there’s some money involved: Austin’s Sixth Street and Nashville’s Broadway offer mostly top-notch musicians playing for tips.

My personal experience includes playing the UK folk circuit in the 70s, mostly composed of the back rooms of pubs, but where people paid a few quid to listen attentively to the locals and to the traveling featured performer. As a listener my recent high points have come at the BlueBird café in Nashville and at the Mississippi Studios in Portland, Oregon. The BlueBird, particulary, showcases the wealth of Nashville songwriting talent (and you pay to get in). On a column opposite the front door (the actual place is in a strip mall) is the admonishment (S-s-s-h-h-h!). The room takes listening very seriously and enforces its no-talking rule. Mississippi Studios until recently was run by a cooperative (like Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs now is)) and was set up with pews and folding chairs—and a huge sound system.. All these are exceptional now. A dominant form of supplying entertainment for drinkers now is the “open stage” where unpaid performers play to indifferent audiences talking as loudly as they need to make themselves heard.

There is an argument to be made that the most common listening environment at the moment is the space between two earbuds. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to find a space where people are listening to popular music and support it. Or start one yourself…