Radio 4’s Soul Music series

One of my very favourite radio series has started again on BBC Radio 4 and I thought it’s worth mentioning here. It’s called Soul Music and each week focuses on a single piece of music; either a song or piece of classical music.

It’s not a technical guide to the craft – however we often hear a variety of perspectives around one song, alongside intricate detail, that gets right into the heart of the history of the piece. For me, Soul Music regularly gets closer to somehow explaining why a piece of music is wonderful than any other radio or TV programme. Which is a magical feat. It also has a (still rare) lack of snobbery about classical versus contemporary work.

Anyway, if you can access the iPlayer, HERE is a link to episode 2, about the Shaker spiritual song ‘Simple Gifts’, which had the lyrics re-written to become ‘Lord Of The Dance’ and also appears in Copland’s ‘Appalachian Spring’. I pick this one because episode 1 was Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet which, though gorgeous, is less relevant to songwriting.

 

 

Darren Hayman’s 31 Songs In 31 Days

I’m not going to blog about it in depth now – maybe afterwards when I get a chance to listen to them all – but this is a quick flag-up for former Hefner singer Darren Hayman’s ongoing January Songs project, where he’s attempting to write a new song each day this month.

Hayman has written some beautiful songs in his time and this is a very admirable exploration of his own creativity, so if you can, get onboard HERE, where he’s using Tumblr to post the project as it continues.

Songwriting on Chrimbo radio

Howard Goodall’s fascinating history of Christmas Carols is HERE on the iPlayer.

Also this week, Stephen Sondheim is reading the Book Of The Week on Radio 4, as part of his 80th birthday celebrations. It includes a lot of fascinating stuff about lyric-writing (first episode HERE on iPlayer).

Finally, on Radio 2, in the perineum: Weds 29 Dec at 10pm, listen out for Sally Boazman: In Search Of A British Route 66. It’s a documentary about British music and roads (Sally is ‘Sally Traffic’, Radio 2’s legendary traffice and travel correspondent) – looks very interesting and I took part, talking and singing ‘M1 Song’. Worth a listen.

my songs of the year

Over on Blognostic I’ll post my review of the year in a few days. I’m still working on it, however since I’ve finished the ‘songs of the year’ section, I thought I’d stick that up here now.

To be precise, this is my Top 10 Songs of 2010 – though tracks on my Top 10 Albums of 2010 are excluded:

1. Tom Williams & The Boat – ‘In Love’
2. Caribou – ‘Odessa’
3. Isy Suttie – ‘Pearl and Dave’
4. Kate Nash – ‘Don’t You Want To Share The Guilt’
5. Kanye West ft. Pusha T – ‘Runaway’
6. Frank Turner – ‘I Still Believe’
7. Robyn – ‘Hang With Me’
8. Tinie Tempah – ‘Pass Out’
9. New Pornographers – ‘Your Hands (Together)’
10. Eminem/Rihanna – ‘Love The Way You Lie’

Also nods to: I Am Arrows, Mavis Staples, Anna Madeleine, Tim Minchin, Robyn again for ‘Dancing On My Own’, LCD Soundsystem, Emily Barker, The Fall, The Hold Steady, Warpaint and She Makes War.

Stewart Lee’s performance analysis

After looking at such a tiny detail of the Ultrasound song in the last entry, I need to mention stand-up comedian Stewart Lee‘s ferociously brilliant new book How I Escaped My Certain Fate as a great resource if you’re into developing any kind of self-absorbed analysis of your own work-in-performance.

(I did have a powerful personal reaction to the book as well, but prefer to blog it here, not on Blognostic, to focus on its value as a resource. But I did LOVE it; it punched me in the face with recognition over and over again, on different levels.)

It is partly a memoir of Lee’s abandoning of live performance after near stardom in the 1990s, his confidence shattered, then his unexpected success with Jerry Springer: The Opera, leading to a tentative, more thoughtful return to stand-up in 2004. The book features three full transcriptions of key live shows since that return, which have been annotated in intricate, lengthy detail. The shows are transcribed from specific live performances (the sets used for DVDs I think, since they were taped) rather than using some kind of generic ‘perfect’/’idealised’ script.

Lee makes a jawdropping success of writing down his insightful analysis of his own creative performance process, of breaking down each stand-up show and relating clearly how the prepared material blends with the live unfolding moment, how the set might digress or not, what he says and what he’s trying to say. It’s not just fascinating but truly useful: obviously (the task of) stand-up is a magnified, concertina’d version of (the task of) music performance: the audience feedback that happens every 3-4 minutes for a songwriter, at tacitly agreed points (between each song) happens near constantly, second-by-second for a comedian. They need to be far greater masters of crowd control than we are, especially if they’re trying to do more than tell jokes, if they have an underlying point. Thus it would be less relevant if Lee were a populist gag man but his stuff is multi-layered, a complex, ambitious beast unfolding with plot and rhythm.

Beyond the analysis, I also found How I Escaped… brutally honest, yet oddly reassuring about the continuing potential for a career in minority interest, uncompromising performance arts today. Lee’s comedic rebirth and his refusal to bow to the shit he’d bended to in the past, exactly mirrors the ‘new DIY’ approach so many of us musicians are facing/embracing. He’s not trying for an over-arching message but I took from it a determined: ‘the quality will out’.

Read it if you can.

Springsteen revisits ‘Darkness’

In November they’re releasing the massive – and long-awaited – box set revisiting Bruce Springsteen’s classic fourth album Darkness On The Edge Of Town, which many regard as his finest work. They’re including what’s likely to be an absolutely essential doc, looking back at the fraught process of making the album. After breaking through to the mainstream with Born To Run, Springsteen took three years to make and release the follow-up.

Even this short excerpt of the movie is a useful watch for songwriters – it’s a salutary lesson about letting your notebooks get out of control. Here you go:

Bruce Springsteen – “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town'” Sneak Peek from Columbia Records on Vimeo.

As for the whole thing, well, I cannot wait.

Advice from writers

One place we might not think to go for advice about songwriting is the other kind of writer. But actually prose writers –from novelists to journalists – often have a huge repository of useful tips. For a start, they’re far more willing and able to share their creative process and routines than most songwriters or rock’n’roll stars. They can complete a sentence, for a start.

I also find mostly their thoughts don’t just apply to lyric-writing but the whole songwriting process – because many tips from professional writers are about how to focus on your work, which applies to all of us. For me, procrastinating and delaying tactics are some of the hugest barriers to getting a bunch of songs completed. I’m there, right now this second, avoiding finishing some new songs by twatting around on this blog.

So here’s two things from Chuck Palahniuk’s website. Chuck is famous for his good tips that help story writers and he’s actually a killer resource for those of us who spend much of our time punching our acoustic guitar in frustration, or doing the dishes instead of nailing that shitty middle-eight. First, Palahniuk’s own 13 tips HERE. Then Craig Clevenger’s new essay on dialogue HERE. See, even hints on writing dialogue can be effective for songs.

Anyway, it’s worth seeking out your favourite prose writers of whatever genre. The best advice will be in serious interviews with them by specialist publications, or on their own websites. You won’t get that from Kings Of Leon.

*odd little update*

I just tweeted a link to this blog entry and at roughly the same moment, @infobunny tweeted a very useful link to the BBC’s archive of interviews with writers. Nice coincidence… then I clicked on the link and the first headline (refering to Virginia Woolf) is ‘Words Fail Me’, the title of my upcoming single. What a weird little circular moment. Anyway, here’s the link she posted to the fascinating BBC archive: bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/

Jon Boden’s Folk Song A Day project

Brilliant trad-folk musician Jon Boden has started a wonderful new internet project which is worth investigating. He is making a fresh recording of a traditional folk song and putting it up online every day for a whole year. Quite apart from the sheer ambition of this project, it’s a wonderful idea, in keeping with Jon’s inspiring sharp focus on updating and popularising traditional song, without ever losing sight of the repertoire’s original spirit.

He’s been going since June, so there are already more than 60 songs online.

Here’s the web link for A Folk Song A Day. You can also follow him on Twitter (although it’s an automatic upload, rather than Jon tweeting personally) because you’re reminded to listen each day.

Chopsticks At Dawn

Caught an interesting Radio 4 programme today about ‘Chinese sounding’ musical themes in western music and how they developed to become a stereotype mainstay. Despite a weird, almost defensive intro, once this gets going, Anna Chen dives musicologically fairly deep into the compositional idea of how a five note melodic riff can summon up an entire cultural difference:

Chopsticks At Dawn (iPlayer link)

reworking

We shouldn’t ever be scared to go back and totally re-work stuff, even when we thought it was complete for a while.

I have a song – working title ‘Jesus Christ’ but it’ll probably end up being called something else – which has existed as a ‘finished’ demo for over a year, was handed to my manager and Xtra Mile months before even the first Love Is Not Rescue material was handed in. This has always been a loud band tune, so it was never going on LINR. The song is a shouty attempt to reclaim the authentic Jesus from all the religious nonsense; contrasting what he said with the moralising of the church.

I love the idea but the demo has never quite worked. Mainly the chorus isn’t enough of a chorus and the music doesn’t quite fit the sentiment. Up until today, I’ve trusted that these issues would sort themselves out once I took the song in a studio and/or rehearsed it with the band.

So anyway, this morning I’d been jamming a different musical idea, with no words to fit, and on a whim tried the ‘Jesus Christ’ words – and of course, jackpot, out of the blue it’s 1000x better. Even came up with a stronger chorus, although that’ll still need some melodic work.

Ho hum. Nothing is precious.