Let's talk music

Over at youtube, a "fan" calling himself JohnnieFab left this nice comment under Half Past Forever's "Know" video:

"This is exactly the kind of generic, effortless, meaningless faux-rock that keeps talented musicians, performers, and composers from getting main stream exposure. As long as this kind of music is being played by mtv and radio stations, kids will be robbed of the opportunity to hear music with artistic integrity. It makes me cringe."

This one actually made me kind of laugh. But then it made me kind of think.

What music will still be around thirty years from now? What is it about this music that made JohnnieFab have such a strong reaction to it? Is my music really robbing people of the opportunity to hear music with artistic integrity? Well, it's an age-old debate. Do you have to make music that sounds like crap in order to have artistic credibility and intergrity? Or do you simply try to write great songs? I would contend for the latter.

Radiohead is in my top favorite bands - admittedly I don't listen to them all the time because that can get boring very quickly. But, across the board, Radiohead is one of the most inventive, chance-taking and experimental bands of our time, maybe of all time. But as their albums have gotten weirder and weirder, fewer and fewer people listen to them. Some bands seem to brandish this about as a badge of honor, but is it really something to be proud of?

The very nature of music is that it is a language to be enjoyed by others. From the very beginning, composers wrote music to be enjoyed by the people they wrote it for. From the dark ages on really through the twentieth century, the whole art of composition was a wholly commercial endeavor. Composers worked for rich people and wrote music for their parties. Rich people were the original publishers and record companies - the rich people owned every song their composer wrote. The composer was, in return, paid handsomely for his efforts, but if he didn't play the political system, many times great composers would end up penniless and dying young (i.e., Mozart).

Now, jazz music was where things started to change. Jazz was a free form of music where, originally, African-Americans would get together and simply play. It grew from the Spirituals that were sung during the slavery days, and from "tribal" beats. Jazz is and was a free form - there were no barring rules as there was in classical music. In jazz, whatever comes and happens and feels good IS good. Suddenly instrumentalists were actually straying away from written music and "riffing" - of course classical musicians thrashed against this new form of music because it went against everything they had been taught. But jazz stayed and stayed and became more and more popular.

Soon, pop music (short for popular music) was jazz and off-shoots of jazz, and the revolutionaries like Miles Davis then became more and more experimental in response to jazz now being the pop music of the day. Then rock and roll came in. Elvis, Cliff Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and many more took pop jazz one step further and mixed in a little blues and a whole lot of backbeat. Then along came the Beatles and their incredible ability to write a pop ditty. But with the Beatles a lot of things changed, aside from the sugary sweet sounds of "I Want to Hold Your Hand".

The Beatles were one of the first artists to write their own songs. In the early 1960's an artist writing their own songs was relatively unheard of - everyone did covers of each other while Tin Pan Alley writers (like, surprisingly, Neil Diamond and Carole King) churned out cheesy hits for bands to sing ("I'm a Believer" anyone?). Not only did the Beatles write their own songs, but soon even they became bored with their success at writing hooks, so they became experimental.

And this is where I think the rub lies. If you listen to the "experimental" Beatles, and break the songs down to just the song themselves, they are simply pop songs. "A Day in the Life" or "Strawberry Fields Forever", though surrounded by interesting elements, they are simple pop songs.

The Beatles gave life to a whole lineage of bands that seem to lose the song and focus on the experiment - Pink Floyd (though I love a lot of their stuff, it sometimes is hard to find the song) on down to Radiohead. And somehow, this music is considered artful while a band who writes hooks is not artful.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love experimental music: I listen to Radiohead on a regular basis, I listen to Sigur Ros a lot, bands like Muse and Mutemath and Starsailor have littered my CD player for years. I love the experimental and off-the-wall, not-so-marketable stuff. It whets my appetite and makes me long to be a better musician, and to understand how the experiments were put together.

But as I kind of moved from being a simple songwriter to what I feel like is a genuine musician (no, I don't put myself in the class of some of these people I am speaking of), I started to wonder - do I want to make experimental stuff that wil never sell, but will make me very happy? Or do I want to make a living doing music and still create great art? And when I looked at the example of especially the Beatles, I understood that great art and marketability are not mutually exclusive.

So, here is the process of how I write songs.

#1 - I find a great tune. Usually, I'll sit around with an acoustic guitar (sometimes electric, if Sarah's not around) and just play around until I find a cool chord progression that I like. I try to challenge myself to use different chord progressions and, as my guitar playing skills have bettered, I try to mess around with riffs. Once I've found a great chord progression I will then begin to fashion a melody around it. I'm odd, I think, in that I usually write words at the same time as the music - many times it's just jibberish that I'm singing over the chords...sometimes the jibberish ends up in the song, sometimes I completely re-write the lyric.

#2 - I find a great subject matter. Wierdly enough, usually, the subject matter is decided by how the tune is coming together. I'd say over half the time, the jibberish that I sing while I'm riffing or jamming ends up being the lyric of the song, or at least the general idea of the song. I try hard to paint word pictures with my music, so the music and lyrics work very tightly with me...or at least I try to make them work very tightly together.

#3 - I then find the right setting. I am somewhat odd as a songwriter (at least the songwriters I know) in that as I'm writing a song, in my head I can hear how the production will be put together. With the album that is out now, I knew how nearly every song was going to be produced before I got into the studio...I just heard it in my head. This makes it easy for me, but tough sometimes for my band - but I think it worked out great. Some songs are just simple pop songs that don't need anything more - "Tunnel Vision", "Waiting", "Rise" and others are the kinds of songs that just need a simple arrangement (with flourishes I'll talk about later). Songs like "Convenience", "Naive", "Gone" and others needed complex arrangements. I always try to go where the song takes me - I do not like to force something on a song that it doesn't need.

#4 - Finally, I add as many layers as possible. All of my songs are pretty basic pop songs - verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo or bridge-chorus-out. What I do to try and make it more interesting is adding in interesting elements that get stacked. For instance on "Know" the song that JohnnieFab had such a violent reaction to, we started off with a pop song, but added in a keyboard line on the verses and the bridge that fleshes out the chord progression (which is actually not a normal pop chord progression - 1 to minor 5 to 4 to 1). We added a contrapuntal string line that takes up a lot of space. And in the background, there is a tinkly pad that we surrounded with reverb to create space in the back of the mix. All of these things took what could've been a boring production to what we felt like was an interesting production.

Now, do most of my songs take risks from a songwriting standpoint? No...I'm not writing "Bohemian Rhapsody" here. I write pop songs. I usually have a general rule that if I sat down and played these songs to a crowd with just an acoustic guitar and vocal that I could pull them off. Is it as interesting with just an acoustic? No. But the songs have the ability to stand on their own.

Are most of my songs commercial? Yes. But my process in writing commercial songs is no different than my process of writing more experimental songs. The day I sell out is when I "sit down to write a hit". Up until now, I've just written the best I could and what comes to my heart and mind. Hopefully that will never change.

So, to conclude, I'll say this: I don't think that my music is robbing kids of the opportunity to hear real music with artistic integrity. I hope, if anything else, my music is a gateway drug to bands like Muse, MuteMath, Sigur Ros and Radiohead - cause, man, they're great, too.