Repetition in Songwriting for the Songwriters Circle http://songwriterscircle.co.uk/repetition-repetition-repetition/
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Repetition in Songwriting for the Songwriters Circle http…
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May 19 2012, 6:09am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Evolution Of A Song Songwriters Circle Never was…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/evolution-of-a-song-songwriters-circle-never-was/
Evolution Of A Song – Songwriters Circle – Never was to Be http://songwriterscircle.co.uk/evolution-of-a-song/
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February 4 2012, 5:33pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Songwriters Circle January Challenge 2012 http songwriterscircle co…
Songwriters Circle January Challenge 2012 http://songwriterscircle.co.uk/songwriterscirclejanuarychallenge2012/
December 20 2011, 11:00am | Comments »
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Write me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/18/write-hit-songwriters
Songwriters work in the shadows, knocking out tunes to order – sometimes in a matter of hours. The songwriters who work for Jay-Z, Adele, Florence and more tell Alexis Petridis how they do it – and why times are getting tough
This article titled “Write me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters” was written by Alexis Petridis, for The Guardian on Tuesday 17th May 2011 20.30 UTC Two years ago, Al “Shux” Shuckburgh found himself catapulted straight into songwriting’s premier league. The Londoner hadn’t expected much from the track he’d produced and co-written at a songwriting session with American tunesmiths Angela Hunte and Jane’t Sewell-Ulepic, about how homesick the pair were for Brooklyn. Later, Hunte sent it to Jay-Z‘s label, Roc Nation, but received a frosty response. Then EMI’s head of publishing overheard it at a barbecue, and decided it would be perfect for Jay-Z. The following night, the rapper wrote his own lyrics, recorded them, and then excitedly told Alicia Keys he had “a song that was going to be the anthem of New York” and asked her to perform on it. Back in London, Shuckburgh wasn’t even allowed to hear the track. “Well,” he says, “I could have heard it if I’d flown out to New York. But they were being so careful about anything leaking. At that point, I didn’t really have a track record, they didn’t really know who I was, so they didn’t know if they could trust me.” In fact, the first time he heard Empire State of Mind was when The Blueprint 3, the Jay-Z album it appeared on, finally leaked online. “It was very weird. I remember listening to it in my studio thinking, ‘Is this for real?’” Shuckburgh sounds more sanguine than might be expected for a man who was actively prevented from hearing a song he co-wrote. Perhaps the subsequent effect of Empire State of Mind on his bank balance and status has eased his pain. The track shifted 4m legal downloads and spent five weeks at No 1 in America, making it Jay-Z’s first US chart-topper. “It’s not like everything’s easy now,” says Shuckburgh. “But everything’s easier.“ Maybe that’s just how professional songwriters tend to be: whatever other attributes the job may require, a giant ego and a sense of preciousness aren’t really among them. This may be why songwriting tends to attract so many former performers, who have either tired of the limelight or watched it fade, and are now making some pragmatic decisions about their futures. Among the more improbable credits on recent hits were the three songs on Beyoncé‘s last album co-written by Ian Dench, formerly the guitarist of 1990s British indie dance band EMF (big hit: Unbelievable); then there’s She-Wolf by Shakira, partly the work of Sam Endicott, moonlighting from his day job as frontman of New York-based the Bravery. The washing machine technique “It’s the kind of job where the best thing you can be is invisible,” says Shuckburgh’s former mentor Eg White. “The very idea of a professional songwriter gets in the way of the singer.” White should know. He began his career as a performer – in boyband Brother Beyond and then in the critically acclaimed Eg and Alice, makers of glossy adult pop. He then went on to become one of Britain’s most successful songwriters for hire. He’s been responsible, or at least partly responsible, for Will Young‘s Leave Right Now, James Morrison‘s You Give Me Something, Adele‘s Chasing Pavements and Florence and the Machine‘s Hurricane Drunk. Tomorrow, as they have been doing for half a century, the Ivor Novello awards will turn a brief spotlight on to the shadowy world of professional songwriters, those people who ply their trade in studios and writing sessions, half-hidden from view, despite being the backbone of the music industry. Up for songwriting awards this year are the composers of such inescapable hits as Tinie Tempah‘s Pass Out, Katy B‘s Katy on a Mission and Plan B‘s She Said. As pop and R&B dominate the charts again (indie bands tend to write their own songs, or if they don’t, they keep quiet about it), the songwriter-for-hire is back in demand. At the top of the UK singles chart sits Bruno Mars, whose songwriting credits include Travie McCoy’s Billionaire and Cee-Lo Green‘s Fuck You. These songwriters do something that seems to go against every romantic notion we have about artistic creativity: they write songs to order (and apparently the current craving among UK labels is for songs that sound like Mumford and Sons, or Florence and the Machine). White, himself the winner of two Ivor Novello awards, is prevailed upon to meet an artist, form a bond, and come up with something chart-topping in the space of a day. “Sometimes less,” he says cheerfully. “Sometimes I get two hours. Someone comes over at three, we have a cup of tea, chew the cud for a bit, go: ‘All right, shall we write a song?’ And by six, they’ve gone home and we’ve fucking done it. Chasing Pavements, that took two or three hours.” Enormously affable, White seems to love every aspect of the process, even being forced to make friends with artists he’s never met before. “You immediately stop observing the niceties of gentle human contact between strangers,” he says, adding that he subscribes to “the washing machine theory” of songwriting. “I tend to play a few records and discuss them: what we need is the beat from that one, the fragility of that one. We try to keep it open, but we talk about the ways it might have precedents in different genres, smash them all together and get something different. If you just put one thing in the washing machine, you’re going to get one thing out; but if you put two or three colours in, who knows what colour’s going to emerge? Pop music is built out of pop music.” This is not an approach adopted by everyone. Jim Duguid, co-author of five songs on the debut album by Paolo Nutini, says: “Some record companies will give you a list of five songs and say, ‘We want something like this.’ But that’s like someone turning up with a BMW, giving you a load of parts and saying, ‘Can you build something like that for me?’ It’ll kind of look like it, but it won’t be right.” Duguid, who was drummer and songwriter with the old band Speedway – of which Nutini was a huge fan, doesn’t care much for knocking out a collaboration in a couple of hours, either. “I try to avoid that like the plague. A lot of industry people think, ‘Yeah, we’ll throw you together and you’ll write a hit in a day.’ But we did that in Speedway and it’s not the way the best music comes out. I like more of a social occasion, maybe three days of chatting and listening to music, then getting a couple of ideas together that reflect that.” The one thing professional songwriters seem to agree on is that times are getting tough. “Having had some success,” says Duguid, “it still shocks me how little money there is in it. I’m lucky in the sense that Paolo is one of the few artists who still sells physical CDs, and there’s money in that. With downloads – at one pence a download between three songwriters – you’ve got to be shifting a heck of a lot of records. The real money’s in getting your song on an advert or on television, but that’s getting harder, because everyone’s trying to do it.” A glorious bloody nose It’s a situation that is changing the nature of recording, says White: “Nobody wants album tracks any more, they just want singles. Before, you weren’t just chasing the money and the radio play – you could do something you really wanted to do, and had thus far been thwarted. Nobody wants the beautiful slow song that ends up as track 11 on an album but that everyone who buys the album will end up loving best of all. It’s down to iPod playing, cherry-picking, downloading. Fifteen years ago, you would hope that albums would outsell singles two to one. Now, I hear stories about Taio Cruz selling 13m downloads and 300,000 albums. And it’s not just him. Katy Perry: massive singles sales, small album sales. For publishing companies, that’s not a disaster – 13m singles is fantastic. But it’s a disaster for record companies and it’s a human disaster. The album is no longer the way people define themselves: there isn’t enough meat in there.” For a moment, White’s ebullience seems to desert him. Then he mentions Adele’s LP 21, which has just spent its 15th week at No 1 in the UK, and suddenly he perks up: he has a song on that. “Oh, that’s a glorious bloody nose to the music industry. Short-termist arses. Start fucking making music with your hearts! The record industry was saying no one was buying records any more, and then someone makes a very stoical, honest, beautiful record and people are buying it in shedloads. Because it’s nutritious.” Anyway, he says, album tracks or not, it’s a great job. “I’ve had Matt Cardle in today. We’ve both been making a fuck of a lot of noise, turning the guitars up really loud.” Matt Cardle off The X-Factor? Loud guitars? Noise? Really? “Yeah,” White chuckles. “Songwriting really is great fun.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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May 18 2011, 4:56am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Folk’s man of mystery: is Cecil Sharp a folk hero or villain?
Songwriters are given a week to write a bunch of songs about Cecil Sharp. The eight folk-music songwriting ‘celebrities’ include Leonard Podolak from The Duhks, Steve Knightley from Show Of Hands, Jackie Oates, Kathryn Roberts, Jim Moray, Caroline Herring
This article titled “Folk’s man of mystery: is Cecil Sharp a folk hero or villain?” was written by Colin Irwin, for The Guardian on Thursday 24th March 2011 22.30 UTC It sounds like some hideous TV reality show dreamed up by Simon Cowell and Andrew Lloyd Webber during a night on the lash. Dump eight folk-music celebrities in a secluded house in Shropshire and give them six days to create from scratch a suite of songs to be performed in front of paying audiences in Shrewsbury and London and then recorded for a live album. Careers have been destroyed on less whimsical ideas. The subject of their mission is Cecil Sharp, the great song collector whose work in the early years of the 20th century helped lay the foundations of the modern folk revival. Visiting them on day three at their remote hideaway – a rambling farmhouse near Church Stretton – you anticipate plenty of carnage: frayed tempers, blood on the carpet, egos splattered on walls, creativity-devouring levels of tension in the air. But no, instead, they are … dancing. Part of their brief is to incorporate Sharp’s collecting trips to the Appalachian mountains, and Leonard Podolak, an extrovert, shaggy-haired Canadian taking time out from his band the Duhks, is using this as an excuse to lighten the mood and teach the others some audience-rousing step-dance moves. “It’s going pretty well,” says Steve Knightley, frontman with Show of Hands and unofficial father of the house. “We came in on Friday, had a Chinese takeaway, listened to a talk about Sharp, got drunk and started work.” It sounds as if Knightley almost cracked it on that first night. “The women all went to bed and the rest of us sat in the kitchen strumming and talking, and in the space of that time Steve wrote three songs one after another,” says singer, writer and multi-instrumentalist Jim Moray in wonder. “He’d play a chord and off the top of his head sing something, anything, and say: ‘I’ll just record that on my phone.’ Some of the words are nonsense and don’t gel, but he goes back and develops it. I can’t do that. I can’t sit there free-associating nonsense, because I feel so self-conscious about it. But Steve has that confidence in his own ability to do that.” Operating under the umbrella of the Shrewsbury folk festival, where the Cecil Sharp Project will be staged at the end of August, project director Neil Pearson’s choice of artists reflects personal taste as much as any scientific assessment of personalities. “I had a long list of about 40 artists who I thought could make it work. I approached 10 of them first of all, and the eight who said yes are the eight we have here.” “I’m not getting involved in the creative process at all,” says Pearson, who masterminded a similar project to mark the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, two years ago. “The only thing I’ve said is that I’d like them to start and end with ensemble pieces. The rest is entirely up to them. I’m very confident the musicians we have will come up with something special.” Considering the time strictures, they do all seem remarkably laidback, gathering in little clutches around the house. Fuelled by a constant flow of iced coffee, Leonard Podolak is a loud and relentless force of nature, carrying his laptop around to treat housemates to his favourite YouTube clips, banjo glued to his arm, shouting, “I’m a Cheatham County chitlin-cooking lover …” at the top of his voice to anyone within earshot. Chitlins are a dish made from pig’s intestines, and he’s trying out a song that confronts the dietary limitations encountered by the vegetarian Sharp on his journey into the Appalachians. In the kitchen, meanwhile, some more genteel interaction involves Jackie Oates and Kathryn Roberts practising glorious harmonies on Seeds of Love, the first traditional song collected by Sharp. He heard it sung by a gardener, John England, while taking tea with his friend, the Rev Charles Marson in Hambridge, Somerset in 1903. In another room, Moray fleshes out a guitar arrangement as Knightley toys with darker images of Sharp on his deathbed, haunted by the ghosts of the singers from whom he’s collected music demanding the return of their songs. The subject of Cecil Sharp has long divided folk-song scholars. The popular image is of a charming eccentric cycling around Somerset knocking on people’s doors persuading old ladies to sing him their lovely old songs so he could save them from extinction, and preserve them through his books and lectures to provide a formidable harvest for future generations to enjoy and plunder. The conflicting modernist view is of a controlling manipulator who presented a false idyll of rural England by excluding anything that didn’t fit his agenda, moulding himself as an untouchable icon of the folk-song movement in the process. Either way it’s a compelling story. At a time when other folk song collectors such as George Butterworth were dying in the trenches during the first world war, Sharp was on a mission in the US, battling ill-health exacerbated by the oppressive climate as he obsessively attempted to unravel the heart of the old world in the purity of folk songs he found in the new. “It is strenuous work,” he wrote. “There are no roads in our sense of the word … I go about in a blue shirt, a pair of flannel trousers with a belt, a Panama hat and an umbrella. The heat is very trying …” And that’s about as much as he reveals about himself, frustrating the songwriter in Knightley, who considers Sharp a far tougher nut to crack than Charles Darwin. “With Darwin you had world-changing views, with all the reaction to that from the religious side, plus the geography, the travel, the exotic flora and fauna … and no music to distract you. With Sharp there’s this great body of work, and nothing about the man.” This may in no small part be due to Maud Karpeles, Sharp’s faithful assistant on those epic expeditions into the Appalachians, who fiercely protected his legacy following his death in 1924, writing an anodyne biography that depicted him as a saint. “What we all really want to know is: did Cecil shag Maud?’ says Knightley to nervous hilarity in the house, with enough secretive giggling over hastily written lyrics and nascent choruses to suggest such lascivious suggestions are indeed being considered as an irreverent song topic. “Sharp was definitely all about the work,” says Moray. “His diaries are informative, but they just say things like ’2pm: dinner with Miss Hamer. 6pm: theatre.’ If he had ulterior motives – whether political or whatever – they weren’t mentioned or documented. Most people have arrived at this idea of him being a controlling, sanitising man, but I don’t think it was malicious or sinister. I just think he was very driven. I don’t believe he was rewriting history the way some people imagine.” Hailing from Canton, Mississippi, Caroline Herring knows all about Sharp’s US collecting trips. “The ballads I’ve heard since childhood, like Fair and Tender Ladies, Barbara Allen, Knoxville Girl, make up the standard bluegrass tunes I first played. I jumped at the chance to come here. A folk music career in the US is not always showy and sexy, so it was a dream to come over here and work with these musicians. I go online at night and read about how they’re all stars and come back down and have pancakes with them in the morning.” It was Herring who picked up on the fact that at a time when 13% of the population in the Appalachians was black, Sharp wilfully ignored them. He collected only two songs from black singers, one of them being Barbara Allen, learned from “Aunt” Maria Tomes, an 85-year-old former slave he found smoking a pipe in a log cabin in Nellysford, Virginia in 1918. Suitably inspired by this footnote, Herring and Knightley start working up a vehement blues telling Aunt Maria’s story. Exhausted, they all gradually drift off to bed, half-written songs and scraps of tunes spinning round their heads. Yet deep into the early hours, the group’s two main mischief makers, Podolak and Cutting, are still swapping tunes, jokes and video clips before deciding to make a pancake mix for breakfast. When he surfaces a couple of hours later next morning, Podolak says he still couldn’t sleep. “When I went to bed I wrote this brilliant three-part tune entirely in my head, but I was too tired to get up and now I can’t remember any of it. I wish I had one of those frickin’ iPhones.” You wonder if Cecil Sharp might have thought the same. The Cecil Sharp Project performs at Cecil Sharp House, London, on Saturday and Sunday.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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March 25 2011, 7:39am | Comments »
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The Songwriters Circle
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/01/31/the-songwriters-circle
Today is the last day of January and thus the last day of the Songwriters Circle January Challenge. The Songwriters Circle The idea of a January Challenge was born last December and quickly solidified into a methodical approach to songwriting, open to all and conducted mainly on a dedicated drupal website and a Facebook group. Now that the month is all but over, a few questions are posed as to what happens next. I don’t like deleting content so the thirty days worth of posts in their original form will probably remain where they are. That means anybody coming along new to the songwriting community there should be able to use them to conduct their own challenge in their own time, but there will be an email option as well. Over the course of the month, I uploaded 9 videos to the Songwriters circle youtube account, and had to put one other, the scrambled eggs video onto Andy Roberts Music due to size limitations. Songwriters Circle
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January 31 2011, 12:05pm | Comments »
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Songwriters Circle January Challenge DAY 6 - Scrambled Egg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzOf-Pbe9M0&feature=youtube_gdata
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January 7 2011, 11:33am | Comments »
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