Category: Songwriting

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Beyonce Songwriters – Over 60 on Lemonade?

I came across this Wall Street Journal video article today on Beyonce and her Songwriters. In summary, Beyonce has come under fire for using over 60 songwriters to help her write her latest album ‘Lemonade’.

But how have things evolved over the last few decades? Why do we react so strongly to this idea of so many songwriters being involved in an artist’s work?

Here’s the video. I’ll give you my thoughts after the jump.

My initial thoughts:

1) What on earth happened to the art of writing a song for the sake of writing a song? (CON)

2) Looks like this is the evolution of art (PRO)

In relation to that first thought, songwriting and collaboration as teams of songwriters is nothing new. The Beatles were hardcore collaborators in this way, spending thousands of hours writing together. Whether you like them or not, this skilled and honed approach to songwriting as a team penned some of the greatest hits of the last 100 years. Working as a team does not diminish the value of a well-written song. So that’s not the issue here.

The Beatles also wrote songs to make money. They may have loved the songs, but they weren’t sitting down in their bedroom just to write a great song (like we all imagine good songwriters seem to do, or at least that’s what my mind’s eye conjures up). Whether you agree with this attitude or not is also irrelevant, because a great song is a great song, intent is irrelevant. The final product will stand or fall on it’s own merits, not on the intent with which it was written. So that’s not the issue with Beyonce’s album here either.

You’ll note I’m practically tearing down my own ‘con’ in relation to this. I find that hard. My emotional reaction is “what the hell?!”, but my intellectual reaction very quickly tempers that to “actually, I think my emotions may be off this time”.

Where our thoughts differ from reality…

We WANT to believe that songwriting is purely expressive. We want to believe that songwriters just want to move people with their music. And I think (just my opinion) that the best songwriters put that desire first, and (combined with skill and craft) that results in timeless songs… but I think it’d be naive and ignorant to suggest that all great songs in the last 50-60 years were not written with at least the hope of the song being written becoming a huge hit and allowing them to make enough money to (ideally) make more such songs. Money is a great enabler in this regard, it’s when it becomes an end in itself that we start to take issue with art becoming a product, rather than a form of expression.

The Evolution of Music

In business, if you want to hate on something, you surely don’t hate the player, you hate the game. The game of business and making money is what can compromise people’s own integrity for the sake of money, fame or other such accolades. The music becomes a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

Everything evolves in response to pressures around it. The writing of songs is no different.

And today, when a hit can make you millions one day and be out of the charts the next, and you’re competing against increasing teams of songwriters from other artists fighting for their spot in the charts, is it any wonder why you would want to do EVERYTHING you can to secure your spot? Is it any different to companies prepping their company’s image and books for scrutiny before going public on the stock market? Is it any different to seeking the best team for a business to succeed? I’m not sure it is.

Sure, the artist, singer and musician in me says “yes, it’s totally different”… and I think in some ways it is. But in reality the music BUSINESS has more in common with that picture than people might like to realise.

Don’t like that picture?
I’m not sure I do either. But I have to respect that’s what we as consumers have enabled (we vote with our wallets after all), and that’s the beast we live with now. If you don’t like that, then start to look out for grass-roots songwriters. The ones who work a normal job and sing for pleasure in the evening. The ones that do it for the LOVE of the music and nothing else. Go and support their local show, buy their CD, and encourage them with feedback to help them make better music.

Not all great singers need to be in HMV or on a billboard, but the industry can’t show you these guys/girls. So go out and find them for yourself. You never know, you might find that next songwriter that blows your socks off.

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The Power of Singing With Simplicity

I want to talk to you today about singing with simplicity.

I was chatting with another voice coach this week about what fires them up, musically and vocally speaking. This coach (female) is massively into RnB, soul, etc. THAT’S their bag. People should be going to them, not necessarily to polish their technique on a foundational level, but because this coach gets most fired up about styling the voice in the way that they & their students want.

This is awesome. I love this. It shows an understanding of who they are, and (most importantly) WHY they do what they do.

And it got me thinking, at least from a style point of view, why do I do what I do? Musically and vocally.

Well, once about a time, I was a bassist and guitarist, and I was heavily into jazz, some of it fairly advanced. I got stuck into virtuoso musicians and, in trying to cop what they were doing, I went out and learned how to do some pretty darn complicated things. I loved it… or at least, I think I loved it… truth be told, I can’t really remember whether I ACTUALLY loved the sounds I was making – i.e. I was making sounds that I genuinely thought sounded good – or whether I loved the feeling of doing something complicated – i.e. I was making sounds that I thought sounded impressive.

And it’s that question that’s driven me over the last few years. Am I doing something because it SOUNDS good, or because I think it’s impressive? Singing with simplicity forces you to confront that question head on.

Don’t get me wrong, the two are not mutually exclusive… but it’s an interesting question isn’t it?

And when you drill down into it, there’s also a fundamental difference in what each says about you. Choosing to do something because it sounds good is about delivering OTHERS a great sound, but doing something because it’s impressive says more about your need to impress others – again, not that either are necessarily mutually exclusive or that impressing others is a bad thing, but these are definitely some powerful thought experiments for musicians to play with, and these are the outcomes I’ve reached over the years

So where does that leave me with my voice and my kind of music?

Well, the realisation that simplicity and quality go hand in hand has been huge – singing with simplicity is the crystallisation of this. It’s made me realise there is real power in simplicity. Immense power, in fact. Just singing the melody (like my blog article ‘The importance of singing the damn melody’) and committing 100% to delivering it beautifully is HUGE. It can raise the hairs on the back of people’s necks without ever breaking a sweat, and without having to do insane vocal acrobatics.

In short, I’m a big believer that if your technique is solid (and I mean REALLY solid), utilisation of range, riffs, power, etc, they all get recruited pretty naturally as a way to support the quality of your voice. I’m not even saying “sound good first, style second”, I’d go so far as to say “sound good first, and you will FIND your style through that”… in essence, style becomes a natural by-product and outworking of great technique.

This is not to say that other teachers who start with style are necessarily wrong (though there are definitely coaches out there who ONLY know how to style, and not to train a voice), nor that style should never be looked at directly/explicitly… rather, that the above thought experiments and my own personality have led me to the working conclusion that simplicity is incredibly powerful, and that this musically trumps complexity every time.

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The Importance of Singing the Damn Melody

I’ve had a number of lessons in the last few weeks that needed us to take the time to stop and visit the original melody of the song.

This is completely normal, whether in lessons or outside of lessons. Whether you are an experienced singer or brand-spanking-new to singing, it’s 100% part of the process to have to break down the melody and get it right.

Now some of you will be thinking “well, DUH Mark – of course I know that”… well, just hold on a tick, because I would almost put money on you not doing this to the fullest extent… and robbing your voice of quality in the process.

Trust me, this is a goodie. Keep reading.

The reason I bring this topic up is because in certain lessons, the student was not truly singing the full melody, but they were convincing themselves the melody they were singing was fine, when the reality was anything but.

In some cases, the singer was rushing to get to styling the song. In other cases, the singer had been singing a prep’d song for so long, they thought they had it nailed and had stopped thinking about the melody… and what they were singing had drifted from the actual melody. And in some cases, the singer had just plain-old not learned the melody to the passage they wanted to sing well enough, but had convinced themselves they had.

Why do I bring this up?

In a webinar series I attended with jazz singer Monique Thomas-Ottaviani, Monique talked about the importance of learning jazz standards from the original sheet music. Why? Because there was no definitive version of jazz standards… if you went to listen to a recorded version from a particular artists before learning it from the sheet music, you would not be getting the true melody that was originally written. Every singer imparts their own style, no matter how little they style the song.

Jazz singing has a lot of room for improvisation. Monique will happily tell you this. BUT! One of the biggest things she mentioned was that unless you “sing the damn melody”, unless you RESPECT the original melody, you have NO RIGHT to solo/improvise with your voice. That’s right. Unless you respect the melody, you haven’t earned that right.

When you take this to it’s logical (and correct!) extreme, you need REAL discipline to learn the melody and express it to it’s fullest before you start deviating and styling.

There is real power in singing a simple melody.

This idea of respecting the original melody is something I see a lot in contemporary musicians generally nowadays (not just in singers). Guitarists want to constantly solo without learning chord progressions. Drummers want to play in advanced time signatures without learning how to play ahead or behind the groove in perfect time. Bass players want to slap all their bass lines without ever learning to hold down a simple groove.

And – thanks to X-factor, The Voice, and various top-level solo vocalists – singers want to style the heck out of their songs, before they ever really learned to sing the melody well in the first place.

But when you REALLY learn the melody. When you really commit to singing that melody, and you’re not just hitting the right note in the right place, but sustaining that note with tonal clarity like a great wind instrumentalist would… man, that’s something else entirely.

THE TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Instead of spending all that time on styling, finding inordinately complex riffs, manipulating the words to enact some Adele-esque style, putting the song in an impossible key, etc, try spending THAT amount of time milking the original melody to eek out every ounce of quality. Sustaining notes, adding vibrato, understanding the power of space when introduced into a melody, experimenting with varying dynamic levels… and these things take ordinary melodies and turn them into something extraordinary.

That level of discipline, that level of serving the song, that level of “non-ego” in working on a song often negates the need for excessive style. All those things that people strive to do, e.g. riffing, extreme range, etc, suddenly become insignificant when you hear someone “sing the damn melody”.

And this does require real discipline. It requires not giving in to ego, or getting distracted by shiny things, and really committing to singing the damn melody. Trust me, when you hear a great singer start to sing, and they do this, you’ll understand why all the other stuff is no substitute for the real thing.

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Clever Use of Keys

Today I want to talk about the clever use of keys. For those of you who don’t know I grew up in Hong Kong. One of the things that you hear a LOT of in HK is canto-pop – i.e. cantonese pop music.

In canto-pop there is a HUGE love for softly sung ballads with lighter voices and higher pitched songs.. often CRAZY high pitched in order to get a much thinner and arguably more feminine sound even from the men.

Other countries in Asia have a very similar preference for pop music, and Korea is no different. A Korean student of mine (who has great taste in music!) brought in this prime example of more Asian lighter-voiced pop from Park Hyo Shin:

IMPORTANT: Even if (like me) you don’t speak Korean, just have a listen to the quality of the voice in the verses – notice how light and airy it is…

This is the result of intentionally picking a higher key than perhaps is vocally ideal for ease in the voice, then overly thinning the voice out in order to make it more comfortable to sing.

Over time this can be verrrry fatiguing or even damaging for the singers’ voice, and can also result in a singing voice that is drastically disparate from the singers speaking – i.e. they sound verrry different when they sing.

While there are many singers that do this, at a very basic level (to one extent or another) this does erode the conversational nature of the singer singing the song…

If singing is about moving people, maintaining a conversational spoken quality to the voice is of critical importance in achieving this… irrespective of style.

The Clever Use of Keys I Mentioned…

Here is another singer from Korea (also brought in my by Korean student) who keeps that conversational quality I mentioned above…

Notice how he bucks the trend of the light voiced Asian pop? There is real depth and definition to his voice, and the WHOLE range is richer for it.

I would probably put money on the notion that if the other singer (Park Hyo Shin) was given the same song, he would probably choose to place it several keys higher to achieve that more thinned out sound (NOTE: I’m reliably informed Park has adjusted his sound to be more appropriate for the natural balance of his speaking voice since that era of his recording life).

By changing the tonal centre, by way of a clever use of keys, singers can not only embrace the best bits of their voice and avoid the pitfalls of any organic instrument, but also create a more conversational spoken quality to their performance… irrespective of style or genre.

Try it yourself!

Try taking a song you feel is a bit of a reach down about 3 semitones and see how it sounds in your voice. It’s not about ego or being macho, it’s about sounding the best for your voice. Remember, 3 semitones is not the magic key change number, it’s just to get you starter in experiencing a different sensation in your voice, and to realise that a clever use of keys and key-changing of your songs is a BIG factor in how good (to great!) you can sound!

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John Mayer – Berklee Clinic

Spectacular clinic by John Mayer on ‘making it’, and how to bring all your skills together to make a marketable whole – very helpful and worthwhile watching for anyone looking to develop their own voice, whether technically, artistically, or both.

Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUwPB6bHpF8

Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXSLTdcH22k

Part 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTzJxfPI9Jg

Part 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNu0M2A2KMk

Part 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYLyXmAiIb0

Part 6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiC03q_gMG0

Part 7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlVMmX2yPkk

Part 8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxEZkcnadAw

Part 9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqKwwWK_6Pg

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Brett Domino How to Write a Hit Pop Song

Those of you who are in for lessons regularly know about my love for a songwriting guru called Ralph Murphy, but I’m also a big fan of Brett Domino and his hilarious satire on hit songwriting.

While this is not quite the same sort of intellectual level of that sort of songwriting advice, this video by Brett on ‘How to Write a Hit Pop Song’ is VERY funny.. and remarkably catchy… maybe it says something about the pop industry?

Check it out and enjoy!

Brett Domino How to Write a Hit Pop Song