Does technical thinking ruin songwriting?

I’m quite a technical songwriter. I have methods of writing. I can justify my choices of rhyme, structure and language. I studied songwriting. When I hear songs I analyse them. I see songwriting as a craft (ie. something you can learn and improve with practice).

A lot of songwriters I know don’t see it this way at all. They see songwriting as a pure form of artistic expression that can be ruined by overthinking. They see justification of musical choices as a weakness, as if you’re bowing to the demands of the imagined audience instead of being authentic and true to the soul or emotional message of the song.

It’s difficult to think about this objectively. The fact that I’m even writing this puts me firmly in the thinking camp. A feeling songwriter wouldn’t write about songwriting. They would just write songs. I’m sure a carefully balanced approach is best, but I can’t do that.

So I’m going to be entirely subjective and tell you why I think songwriting needs to be approached as a craft. I hope some of you feelers might be able to help me see your side of the argument.

Songwriting is a craft, not an art

There’s no such thing as a conceptual songwriter. As an artist you are free to choose from all sorts of funky media and part of the game is to work outside the box and provoke thought and criticism. Songwriting isn’t like that. Composition is like that, but songwriting isn’t. As a songwriter you’ve signed up to write songs, and the popular song isn’t a very flexible form. It’s not quite as restrictive as being a sonnetwriter, but it’s closer to that than, say, a novelwriter.

There’s nothing to stop you exploding the confines of the form and writing 15-minute one-chord freeform poetry, but that’s not a song. You could argue that it is, but you’d be wrong (the word song refers to a pretty specific musical form, and let’s assume we’re talking about popular song, even late 20th Century popular song to keep things simple).

Given that you’ve chosen to write in such a specific musical and lyrical form, it makes sense to understand that form as deeply as possible. To study the greats. To analyse and practise and learn, until you can write so fluently that the form becomes transparent to the listener and the message, the emotion, the feeling is transmitted as purely as possible.

As a listener, there are lots of things that can make you aware of the form, and distract you from the message:

• boring bits, where a song goes on too long, repeats too much or is too formless to follow easily
• uncomfortably dissonant moments
• surprising and unprepared musical moves
• embarrassing lyrics, cheesy rhymes and empty clichés
• unnatural turns of phrase
• words wrongly stressed

Any feeling songwriter can point out a bad song. If you can recognise a bad song from a good one, you must know on some level what makes the bad songs bad. And once you know that you can avoid the bad things in your own writing and do more of whatever makes the good songs good. All feeling songwriters do this more or less consciously. So how is there still this idea that thinking about the technicalities of songwriting can ruin the feel of a song?

Are thinker and feeler songs different?

At this point, I imagine a feeler would point out that we’re talking about different kinds of song. I’m talking about heartless, muso, technically brilliant Nashville-style thinker songs, they would say, while they are talking about good, authentic, passionate songs. They may even raise an eyebrow and mention Steely Dan or drop in a quick Beatles/Stones comment.

While it’s true that I’m partial to some ‘classic’ songwriters like Ben Folds, Carole King, even occasionally Neil Diamond, most of the music I listen to and love is good, authentic, passionate music – The Band, Janis Joplin, Hendrix, The Small Faces and all that. And all of this real, true, passionate music is played over carefully crafted song forms.

Songs and recordings are not the same thing

If I were a feeler reading this, I’d probably start listing great tracks that have almost no song structure. There are loads. So I think it’s important to remember that we’re talking about songs here, not recordings. There’s a track on the Ben Folds Five demos and outtakes album Naked Baby Photos called For Those Of Ya’ll Who Wear Fannie Packs that’s just a recording of them jamming Rage Against the Machine in soundcheck. It’s a great recording, and I used to listen to it all the time, but it’s not a good song. At all.

Maybe that’s the answer. Good songs require thinking, and good recordings are about feeling. Does that ring true to any of you feelers? Or am I overthinking the whole issue? ;)

Band newsletters are SERIOUSLY DULL

The Internet is all about writing. Writing that inspires and excites, writing that informs and educates, writing in tags that make the web work, writing in 140 characters. Whatever you do in real life, it’s going to be represented on the web in writing. Yes, images and videos are important too, but they’re the cheese slice and gherkin on the Internet burger.

Coming and Crying

Today I woke up to find an email from Meaghan in my inbox. It wasn’t just to me – it was an update to all the supporters of Coming and Crying, one of the most amazing webby/creative projects around.

Meaghan works at Tumblr and I met her on the Man (hat on) tour, when I played the Tumblr office in New York. She and Melissa, both writers, have put together a book of short stories about sex. They have funded it through Kickstarter and have been documenting the whole process in blogs, on Twitter and in emails. They have had live events like the intimate readings and the latest listening session, where authors and supporters gathered to listen to studio recordings of the stories.

The update email is only for supporters (we paid for the inbox love ;), so I won’t reprint it all (there are plenty of public updates too), but here are a couple of excerpts to give you a taste:

I’m not gonna lie to you guys, because you are my safe space: writing a story that is in a BOOK with your name on it, while managing the production of a book, while working fulltime and trying to find a place to live is A RECIPE FOR CRYING TO YOUR MOTHER.

Having the book back meant one very specific, wonderful thing, and that is that while I was moving (I strongly advise anyone who is considering making a book and moving into an apartment at the same time to RECONSIDER), Melissa printed the whole thing out in a fancy Kinko’s way that costs more than an actual book. Which means that for the past 10 days or so I have been walking around town, hugging an actual physical object to my body, flipping through it, reading little pieces of it, and realizing just how goddamn good this thing we all decided to fucking go for really is.

When I first read about the C&C project on Meaghan’s blog, I signed up and handed over my money almost immediately. I hadn’t read the stories yet. Many of them hadn’t been written. They hadn’t started to make the actual book. They didn’t even know how. None of this mattered. I wanted it to succeed, and I wanted to be a part of it. And I wasn’t the only one. They raised about $5,000 in three days, completely smashing their Kickstarter target. The total donations are now $17,243.

Writing

The success of the venture rests on Meaghan’s writing. Coming and Crying is very cool, but the idea isn’t unique. There are loads of worthwhile and interesting art projects going on around the Internet, and Kickstarter is packed full of ideas. Meaghan’s Tumblr blog was popular way before she starting working for Tumblr (back when she was Jonathan Coulton’s Scarface) because it’s such a satisfying read. She comes across as honest, funny and likeable (which she is). When she writes an email to the mailing list of supporters they are inspired and excited.

We managed a tiny version of this with the Little Fish Paper Club last week. We made something personal and handmade and sent it out in handwritten envelopes to 100 people. It was beautifully designed by Bekim Mala and it arrived in the post like a present, but at its core was a piece of writing by Juju that was inspiring and exciting. When the Fishy Paper Squares arrived on Monday people were posting thank you messages and pictures on Facebook and Twitter, and thirty more people signed up for the next edition.

Juju’s story was based around the song Am I Crazy?, but that’s not what made it work. People want to connect with Juju. They can do it through the music, but on the web it’s through writing that the connections are really made. The constant conversations on Twitter and Facebook, the blog posts, the emails, the comments. It doesn’t always have to be about the music.

Band newsletters

I unsubscribed from most band newsletters ages ago because they tend to be SERIOUSLY DULL. Now I mostly just get updates from the bands I play with. But I had a dig through the email archive for some examples of good and bad writing and came up with a few. I’ve vaguely anonymised the quotes. Let’s see if any of them are as inspiring as Meaghan’s C&C email:

Keen for something completely different?

XXX and I have collaborated on a new album, Odd Frost, downloadable at this link…

And if you’re around XXX on XXX, we’ll be launching at XXX with a performance bash. Please see the ‘Nightvisions’ section of the theatre’s newsletter below.

Thanks much for your time and consideration!

Hmm… How about this?:

Goodevening everyone, i do hope that this finds you all keeping warm and well.

I am very happy to say that we will be mastering our second album in the very near future after which we will reveal plans for its release…. exciting times indeed… and there is more good news as well in the form of a very talented keyboard player who will be joining us for our show this sunday evening. So do try and make it down to the XXX for the XXX. It promises to be great evening.

I don’t mean to be mean. I’m just as bad sometimes. But you get the idea, right? Not very inspiring.

Musicians, get writing!

If you’re a musician, you need to write for the Internet all the time. Not only blogs, Myspace updates and Facebook messages, but also meta information for MP3s, Bandcamp track descriptions, Twitter biographies, interviews and endless ‘about the band’ copy. So aspire to make it great. Not just interesting, but inspiring and exciting. Don’t make people sit through any more ‘Hi, it’s me. I played a gig. Buy my album.’ emails. Brighten up their day with some great writing. And it’s not compulsory, but ending a sentence in uppercase can often make it AWESOME. ;)

More online gig listings

I’m still trying to solve the problem of online gig listings, and I’m using the new Little Fish site as a guinea pig. The problem isn’t that the listings are bad, it’s that there are lots of them, and musicians don’t want to spend much time filling in forms on the web.

I’m going with ArtistData, which promises a solution to exactly this problem, but I have to say it’s not running quite as smoothly as planned. I need to get decent gig listings up onto these sites:

• Myspace
• Facebook
• Last.fm
• littlefishmusic.com

The idea is that I put the gig info into ArtistData once, and it spews it out to the rest. Turns out it’s not so easy…

Facebook

Let’s start with the good news. It works for Facebook. The listing isn’t fancy but it uses the image I uploaded and gets the date right, which is fine for now.

Myspace

Myspace/ArtistData sync is not working at the moment, because Myspace just updated their event system. This is annoying but understandable. What’s more annoying is that Myspace’s new event editing interface is a fucking nightmare. They’ve managed to improve bits of it while making the rest impossible. Imagine having mandatory address and postcode fields and a picky band name autocomplete on a sluggish form and trying to enter data for ten gigs in a row. Not fun. At all. Can’t wait for ArtistData to catch up on this one…

Last.fm

Last.fm syncing died sometime last year and hasn’t been reinstated. A quick glance at the API suggests that it doesn’t support adding events, and it seems that the issue has been dropped on ArtistData’s end.

littlefishmusic.com

ArtistData supplies an <iframe>-based gig calendar widget to embed on your site. You can change some colours, but ultimately the layout is ugly. And it’s an <iframe>. So I’ve stumped up the extra $3.99/month for XML access to the listings (this also includes RSS feeds for gigs, blogs and news but I’m not planning on using them). When I get round to it I’ll be able to pull in the XML and display it on the site how I like. I’ll probably do it in straight Javascript to start with, then implement some sort of cache later so it’s not relying on the ArtistData site being up (they had some serious downtime today).

So far, so mediocre

At the moment, ArtistData is saving me precisely zero keystrokes. I know some of it the crap is temporary, and they do generally seem like nice people. But I do seem to be paying for very little at the moment.

I’m going to stick it out for a few months while the Myspace thing gets sorted and I get the Tumblr site working well. Hopefully I’ll be able to feed into the process at ArtistData and let them know how it feels from the ground. I’ve been signed up since beta, so I guess it’s time I gave them some useful feedback, eh?

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, I’m thankful for all the downtime in the van. There’s nothing like a bit of rock’n’roll data entry to liven up a 5 hour drive.

Has Mick Jagger been reading Andrew Dubber?

Jagger did an interesting little interview for the Beeb the other day. I heard a clip on the car radio and hunted it out when I got home. He surprised people with his informed take on the big picture of the music industry, prompting Gruber to stand up, hand on heart and proudly proclaim “A keener business mind in the music industry you will not find.” This is the bit that’s caused a stir, when Jagger is asked if he’s relaxed about the internet and downloading music:

I am quite relaxed about it. But, you know, it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don’t make as much money out of records.

But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

Dubber was there first

I like Jagger’s take, but I reckon I know exactly where he got it from. In August 2009 the New York Times published an article called Swan Songs? that said the music industry had ten years to live. Information Is Beautiful, a website that creates and reblogs great examples of data visualisations, picked up on the graphic from the article and posted The death of the music industry. That post did the rounds, and everyone reminisced about 8-track, cassette and the CDs they bought in 1999 (the height of the CD craze).

Well, not exactly everyone. Andrew Dubber wrote a piece for his site New Music Strategies called You’re looking at it wrong:

The trailing tail to the right of the graph seems to indicate the death of music business. But look to the left. This graph does not start at the beginning of the music business. And nor does it start only a short while after the beginning of the music business.

It starts in 1973.

I don’t know about you, but I was around in 1973. I wasn’t very old, but I was old enough to be aware of music. It had been around long before I had. And even though the graph would have been tiny – at least in comparison to the uncharacteristically massive spike in CD sales around 1999 – there was no crisis in the music business then.

He goes on to say that it’s actually the thin parts of the graph where the interesting stuff happened:

New and innovative kinds of music flourished in the margins. Funk, disco, punk, psychedelic, metal, and reggae all started to emerge as significant forces from that decade. Lots of tiny labels did amazing and sometimes incredibly profitable things. Risk-takers were sometimes massively rewarded. Those who kicked at the edges often flourished.

And that the music being sold in The Golden Age Of CD Sales was mostly not worth getting nostalgic over:

Skip forward to 1999 – ten years ago now – and you witness the height of corporatism in the recorded music business. A world of a few stars selling millions of copies of safe and frequently dull music. But most importantly, the business people who were teens in 1973 were able to take the music they loved from their youth and turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.

And while the interesting new genres have been created in the margins all through that history, it’s the forms (and their often watered-down derivatives) loved by those execs that have massively prospered through the recorded music boom era.

You should read the rest of the article.

Not really

I’m not suggesting that Jagger reads New Music Strategies. He probably has the internet meticulously transcribed onto an endless scroll woven from badger pubes and read aloud (only the good bits, naturally) by a room full of 17-year old virgins. And Dubber’s not the only person to have ever said something like this (although he said it earlier and more often than most).

I’m just saying, isn’t it interesting that the conversations that happen in the blogs and tweets and Unconventions and pub sessions of the new information age are starting to trickle up quicker and quicker into the higher echelons of the old music industry. I think it is.

New Jont video made from 100,000 still photos

I played piano on Jont’s new album, and All My Life is one of the songs we’ve really enjoyed rocking live with the band (we all seem to find a common musical ground in the upbeat rockabilly kind of vibe). He just sent me a link to the video for the song, and it’s amazing:

Here is the incredible new music video made by my friend, the director Simon Ratigan for the song “All My Life”, from my new album “Set It Free” (Released on my label Unlit Records and available now from www.jontnet.com). It is made from 100,000 photos taken of people Simon met wandering through the desert and in the Los Angeles area and then rendered together to make a moving image. The use of a stills camera means it was incredibly painstaking to make but the visual result is quite extraordinary. Hope you like it.

Watch it full screen and in HD if you can. The effect of full quality stills in motion is very cool:

The Digital Economy Bill is very bad for musicians. Don’t let it through.

That’s the subject line of an email I just sent to my MP (Andrew Smith, Labour, East Oxford) urging him not to allow the bill to be rushed through Parliament on Tuesday, when the election is likely to be announced.

The Digital Economy Bill gives government the power to cut off internet connections (from homes, schools, libraries) if they suspect anyone there of copyright infringement. That’s insane, and its only possible use is for major record labels to inflict or threaten disconnection in an effort to weigh down their trousers with as much gold as possible as they sink into the quicksand.

If you’re at all interested, go and read Ben Werdmuller’s post about the Digital Economy Bill. He makes some smart points.

Here’s the rest of the email:

Dear Andrew,

I am a musician and a web professional. I use the internet to publish my music, to share it and to sell it. I use file sharing services and sites legitimately and legally to distribute and download music that is produced and consumed outside of what the government sees as “the music industry”.

Threatening to disconnect citizens from the Internet for copyright infringement is a ham-fisted approach to regulation that benefits nobody except the major record labels and publishers, and completely ignores the subtleties of our online interactions and behaviour.

I am amazed that the Digital Economy Bill has got this far with a huge majority of both the music and the tech communities vocally disagreeing with it, and I believe that if it is allowed to be rushed through on April 6th it will strike a crippling blow to our digital society and economy which we will be unable to reverse for years to come.

This is why, as your constituent, I will not be voting for you or for your party if the Bill is passed.

People like me, who are concerned about this issue, will be looking to see who has done everything they can to make sure this Bill is not crashed through on the last day before an election.

I would very much appreciate it if you could do everything you can to raise this issue with ministers and party managers to make sure that these provisions receive proper debate and scrutiny in a new Parliament.

Ben Walker

MediaCamp Nottingham

The Twitter song has opened a lot of doors for me in the last year or so, and most of those doors lead to small, strip-lit rooms with flipcharts and biscuits. On Saturday I walked through the doors of Lace Market House in Nottingham to just such a scene, and entertained the assembled social media nuts, amateurs and enthusiasts with a few of my geekier songs.

The #mcn2 crowd were great, and we solved roughly 73% of the world’s problems later that evening over a few beers¹. They were armed to the teeth with the usual selection of phones, cameras and recording devices, and they documented everything online. The charge of the geek brigade was of course led by Phil Campbell, who’s just set up a new video streaming studio in the building using their super-high-speed fibre connection. As soon as I arrived he sat me down to do an interview. Phil’s always enthusiastic and knows his social media stuff, so our chat was a pleasure and turned out really well. You should watch a bit of it just to check out the quality (this was streamed live!!!):

Phil also recorded a few of my songs (Dressing Up, Box Junction Heart and a rare recording of WINKYFACE) on AudioBoo. You can hear them all over on his blog, where he’s also written a post about the rest of the MediaCamp day. I love Phil, and not just because he writes things like this:

bq. Ben Walker was on usual fantastic form and that guy seems to have been born with that guitar attached to his fingers – he did a fantastic set and he still manages to surprise me with his delivery even when tired – he just goes into performance mode. You really should book him to enhance your social media style media events. Honestly, you will not be disappointed.

The CreativeNottingham people also caught a recording of the Twitter song and a few photos, and I’m sure there are other bits and bobs around the web that I’ll find eventually.

Little Fish at the Albert Hall: videos!!!

As promised in my last quick post, here are the videos we took when we supported Them Crooked Vultures (Dave Grohl’s supergroup) at the Albert Hall last week (if you’re in a hurry or you just want to see the Little Fish set (in front of a HUGE screen) jump to Part 4):

Part 1: Arriving

Part 2: Them Crooked Vultures Soundcheck

Part 3: Little Fish Soundcheck

Part 4: Little Fish set (the first bit)

Part 5: Little Fish set (the last bit)

Little Fish at the Albert Hall

The gig last night was amazing. Video footage to come, but here’s some stuff I’ve collected from around the web. I’ll keep updating it as I find more:

Tweets

JuAyres

(Juliana Ayres)

Banda de abertura: Little Fish! Nao conhecia, mas vejam bem, sao muito melhores que o (spit) Fresno!

On 22-3-2010 19:47:40
from txt

srsaint

(Simon Saint)

Little Fish at Royal Albert Hall http://twitpic.com/1aantp

On 22-3-2010 19:55:17
from twidroid

catmacdonald

(Cat Macdonald)

Little Fish open Teenage Cancer Trust gigs. Lead singer is so Patti Smith. www.teenagecancertrust.org.

On 22-3-2010 20:00:46
from Echofon

Zed906

(Dan Berry)

Support band surprisingly good. They’re called Little Fish by the way

On 22-3-2010 20:04:36
from Echofon

GinaVicencio

(Gina Vicencio)

Little Fish are excellent!

On 22-3-2010 20:05:08
from Echofon

Spacebee77

(SpaceBee)

Little Fish (support band) Fucking Good. Make a fearsome racket.

On 22-3-2010 20:17:40
from Twitterrific

PokerGodTCP

(Tom Patrick)

Little Fish rocking out like mad people. Awesome supporting act! http://twitpic.com/1aasl5

On 22-3-2010 20:19:52
from Tweetie

solobasssteve

(Steve Lawson)

@ihatemornings Now the you’re the proper Rockness, do you become @ihatemörnings ? :)

On 22-3-2010 20:31:53
from Gravity
in reply to Ben Walker

kahunageezer

(Ken Marchant)

Little Fish have been on, great band! Roger Daltry has just been and gone – now for Them Crooked Vultures!!

On 22-3-2010 20:49:27
from Tweetie

Joff_Brown

(Joff Brown)

Has fallen in love with the lead singer of little fish tonight. Oh and them crooked vultures were absolutely breathtaking. Dave grohl = king

On 22-3-2010 23:55:22
from Tweetie

jjlevene

(Jonny Levene)

@Littlefishmusic yeahman! You guys were so awesome! Arctic monkeys were next to me and they seemed to enjoy it too :D

On 23-3-2010 13:27:45
from Tweetie
in reply to Little Fish

Photos

Attribution (need a better gallery plugin…):

• http://twitpic.com/1af99m
• http://tweetphoto.com/15454101
• http://twitpic.com/1aalxi
• http://twitpic.com/1a9oon

Video

UPDATE: I’ve posted all the videos from the gig!!

DAVE FRIGMOTHERING GROHL soundchecking his drums. Get in. ;) [on 12seconds.tv]:

Ben at the Beeb

It’s been a busy week. I played a load of gigs, and ended up on the BBC.

I got back from playing the Little Fish gig in Manchester at about 4:30am on Sunday, and by 2pm I was down in the Half Moon warming up for a Troubadour set as part of James Bell’s rather excellent Offshoot festival. I revived 12×12 and played some of my more folksy numbers (Hugh F-W, Already Know, some of the Tweet Suite) before finishing with a particularly gruff rendition of How Come My Dog Don’t Bark When You Come Around, my favourite Dr John song.

The Twitter song on the BBC World Service

In the evening I was playing some piano with Jooles from Little Fish at the Holywell Music Rooms (another Offshoot event). As we were setting up I got a call from the lovely Chris Vallance asking if he could use the Twitter song for a BBC World Service piece. I’m still quite pleasantly surprised that people contact me about using the song in podcasts, radio shows, presentations and lessons.

Like a proud parent I’m glad that something I created has done well for itself, and like an errant child the Twitter song calls home every once in a while to let me know what it’s up to. So (like an unwanted and slightly braggy Christmas family newsletter) here’s the bit of World Service radio with the Twitter song on it. It’s less than five minutes, and worth a listen even if I wasn’t on it. ;)

Little Fish on the BBC home page

And as if that wasn’t enough, I ended up making an appearance on the BBC home page on Monday. A tiny, badly lit part of a video of me playing Hammond behind Juju and Nez, but an appearance nonetheless. It was a video that BBC took of Little Fish playing the Radiohead song Just at the Oxford gig last Saturday. It was a classic BBC mix (loads of vocal, everything else dry and flat), but they filmed it on three cameras and it looked pretty cool.

The video seems to have disappeared off the BBC Oxford site since it was on the front page, but I recorded it while it was up so I could always sneakily post it somewhere…