You may be wondering what the “Song Creation Formula” is; that's probably why you are reading this book. You may be thinking that there is no formula; that songwriting is too subjective, too expansive and full of too many possibilities to be narrowed down to a formula. I agree: there is no one formula. There are so many ways to write a song that books could be continually written on the subject. This book provides a formula, a set of seven steps that will assist you with writing a song that is recognizable as a song if you've never written one before; or it will provide you with new perspectives on songwriting, to pull you out of a rut, break through your patterns and help you see things in a new way. Step by step, you'll have a system to follow, to test out one path to writing a song, a path that contains the basic elements of every song. I've focused on the lyrical aspects of songwriting in this book, partly because that's what I feel I understand the most about songwriting; it's what I gravitate towards. When I buy an album, the first thing I do is open up the liner notes and read the lyrics and song titles. It's that tangible, visual-kinesthetic connection to the musical creation. When I listen to a song, to understand its structure, I prefer to have the lyric sheet in front of me, to understand the overall picture of the song. Some people understand a song by focusing on the musical atmosphere that it creates. These are the people who can hear a song and instantly sing it or identify the chords. For that reason, I've included a chapter on chord progressions, written by Taylor Abrahamse, who has studied music and composition and who naturally listens to a song and can easily identify the chord progression and the musical landscape of the song. This will assist you in shaping the musical structure of your songs.
The other reason that I focus on the lyrical aspects of songwriting is that some people who write songs or want to write songs don't play an instrumentg. There's still the musical element of creating the vocal melody. However, often singers who use only their voice as their instrument find it easiest to begin with the lyrics, and then create a melody for those lyrics. I encourage you to create the melody and musical elements of your song as you go through the seven steps. You can do this with an instrument or with only your voice as your instrument.
You have a song inside of you waiting to come out, maybe many songs. It's just a matter of focusing your creativity and attention to sit down and get it on paper, write it, sing it and perform it. Songwriting allows you to express your inner creativity and connect with the world. Someone else feels what you're feeling and is looking for a song that expresses what they feel.
Songwriting means many different things to different people. For some it's a way of expressing inner thoughts and feelings, while for others it's a way of telling stories or exploring themes.
There are so many different approaches to writing a song. Some people start with chords, some with lyrics and some with a melody. Sometimes the chorus comes first, sometimes the verse and sometimes just one line. There's no one way to do it. There are people who write fragments of songs and let the ideas percolate and grow inside of them until the song comes out, maybe even weeks or years later. Others write their songs all in one go.
That's how I write songs: I sit down and write until it's done, which keeps me focused until the song is finished. It's a matter of what works for you. Anyone can create with enough focus and openness. If you feel stuck, just write without judgement. Ideas are always popping into your head. If you feel 'writer's block', you may just be analyzing your thoughts too much. Write anything that comes out and edit it later. Open your mind, open your heart and bring the song out. Let it flow like a river and you can control it later, as you go through the process and come back to edit it.
I've realized after years of attending and hosting open stages and shows and spending time around hundreds of songwriters, maybe even thousands, that anyone can write a song - not everyone can write a good song and very few people consistently write good ones, but anyone can write one. There are so many ways to write a song and anyone can do it, and do it quickly, if they focus and decide to get it done. Some people thrive creatively under pressure and some require more space and freedom. Maybe everyone has the potential to write good songs, but not everyone will tap into that potential and connect with the energy and creative flow required.
I've found that there are a lot of songwriters out there who write one good song, one that really connects with people and emotionally moves them. I've often wondered why that is. I've heard songs that I absolutely love and I want to hear more songs of that quality from that artist, because I love the song so much and they just never write another song that has the kind of energy that connects with everyone who hears it. It's an interesting phenomenon. Maybe that's why there are so many 'one hit wonders.' Maybe there is a way to tap into that brilliant creative energy consistently and some people do it. It may be any combination of awareness, practice, experimentation with different ways of writing, constant exposure to new music; it's anyone's guess.
As a songwriter, I find that my best songs come when I feel an urge to write a song. I may not know what the song is about, but I know that it's time. I sit down and pick up a guitar and the song flows out. Usually it's not the whole song that comes so easily; it's the first verse and the chorus. That's when I start to explore where the song is going. I used to write songs not really thinking about the meaning at all, just allowing them to flow through me. Then afterwards, I would read the lyrics and see if I could figure out the meaning. I didn't edit my early songs. That's something that came later and now I see the value of it. The key is to edit it to make it the best representation of the idea, while still maintaining that magical element that holds the emotion that came from your heart and your soul.
If you continue to write, you'll find that at times you feel stuck and don't know how to finish, where to start or how to make your songs sound different from the others you've written. That's when doing something different and learning from other songwriters is really helpful. I've found that learning a new tuning, a new chord or a new rhythmic pattern can help. Co-writing is also a great way to experience other perspectives on the writing process. It can breathe new life into your songwriting. Sometimes structure helps. That's where the seven-step guide comes in. It's a way for new songwriters who don't know where to start, those who have written songs and feel stuck, to start with a pattern or break their old patterns, by trying a new perspective on approaching the song.
I took a songwriting course through the Berklee College of Music online, taught by Pat Pattison. This was after almost twenty years of writing songs. I only recently started thinking about how I write songs and how to improve them, beyond focusing on just being creative and using songwriting as an outlet. Now I think about songwriting as a craft in a more conscious way. This course opened up a whole new world for me. It was very heavy on the technical side of lyric writing, storytelling and effective placement of words for the greatest impact. I learned so much about why some songs connect and why others don't connect as well as they could. I learned how to build the story, to create more meaning from the start to the finish of the song. These are the types of things that, when practised over and over again, become automatic. It's a matter of learning a formula that helps focus the creative energy into something tangible and understandable by others. Then, once you learn what's possible, you can branch out and flourish creatively, breaking the rules when you want to and writing with purpose.
The purpose of this guide is to give you a structure to write a song: a formula that produces a result. You decide how the song unfolds. This is your creation. The formula is here to guide you along a path you may or may not have been down before. After you finish this book, continue to study and search for new tools available by reading books, attending workshops, interacting with other songwriters and getting feedback from audiences. Workshop your songs in the real world and you will continue to grow and improve as a songwriter.
Whether you play an instrument or not, your voice is your instrument. Use this guide with your instrument on hand. Focus on the lyrics and melody or write the lyrics and find someone to write the melody and music with you later. This songwriting guide focuses on the songwriter as a wordsmith, one who uses tools to shape and mould creativity into a form that others can understand and be moved and inspired by. Everyone has the ability to write a song. It doesn't have to be perfect, so jump in and begin. It's easier to figure out what you want to improve on when you have something to work with. So let's get started.
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Do a one-minute brainstorming session. Fill your page with song titles, without filtering. Write everything that comes to mind. Time yourself for one minute. Then choose the title that resonates with you, the one that you feel compelled to expand into a song. If you're having a challenge deciding, close your eyes and point to a title on the page. Now you have your title. You can change it later if you want to. Decide and move on.
The title is often in the chorus of your song, although it doesn't need to be. The idea is to have a title that is memorable, so people can identify your song.
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What do you want to say? How do you want to build the idea? Reveal the details of the story or theme in the verses and the main idea in the chorus. Is it a happy song, a sad song, a love song, a song of realization? What do you want to say and how do want to build the idea? Express how the characters feel, not just with descriptions of their emotions, but with imagery that leaves the listeners with a clear picture or movie in their minds. Write down the ideas you want to include and how you want to clarify them as the song progresses. The chorus gains more meaning each time it's repeated, from the details expressed in the verses. The chorus holds the song together and reminds the listener of the song's meaning, while the verses give increasing clarity to the story or idea being expressed, as you go along from the beginning to end of the song.
Here's an example of a song outline, showing a progression of ideas. The lyrics of the verses are not written in the outline, only the summary of what those verses will express.
Title: *On the Other Side of Goodbye
Verse 1: Past: Yesterday you left me lonely. You could only say goodbye.
Verse 2: Present: Today, I understand that pain is a choice and freedom comes from letting go. I'm ready to say goodbye.
Chorus: On the other side of goodbye
I shed the heavy load
On the other side I can fly
Love is an open road
Verse 3: Future: Tomorrow holds amazing surprises and a love that will surpass what was before. I'm so glad you said goodbye.
Chorus: On the other side of goodbye ...
* The song title came from a list of titles in an assignment in the Berklee College of Music “Songwriting” course taught by Pat Pattison, in which I participated as a student. I selected this title and created the song myself
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1st Person: a) I and he/she or b) you & I (direct)
2nd Person: you and him/her
3rd Person: he and she
Be consistent, so the audience knows who's talking and to whom. Decide which approach best suits your theme and story. Are you telling your story, a story about someone else or a completely made up story? Use first or second person to bring the listener closer to the story, so they understand the feelings of the main character. You can use third person to focus more on the plot and create distance between the listener and the characters, while still drawing them into the song, like any well-told story does
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What type of rhyme scheme do you want to use? What suits your song? Is the story expressing feelings of comfort, ease and joy? If so, you can use a flowing style of rhyme. For example, if there are four lines in the chorus, rhyme the first & third lines and the second & fourth, like in the example in Step 2. If on the other hand, your story is jarring, uneasy or expressing confusion, then it doesn't need to rhyme or you can use a less obvious rhyme scheme. If you have four lines in a verse, rhyming the first and last lines and the middle two lines will create a slight sense of unease, or you can choose to exclude rhymes.
Another way to create motion and feelings of instability in a song is to have an uneven number of lines in your verses or chorus. Many songs use three-line verses or choruses to bounce along.
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Write the first verse.
Does it flow the way that you want it to, given the subject? Does it set the stage for the chorus to explode?
Are you using the five senses (touch, taste, smell, sight and sound) to create the scene for your listeners, in a way that draws them in and helps them really feel the song? You can do this by describing details of the scene, rather than just explaining where the story takes place. A clear picture is created by saying, “I feel the soft sand beneath my feet, as the waves tickle my toes and the stars twinkle in the clear night sky.” The listener understands that the character is on a beach at night, enjoying looking up at the stars and is engaged in a way that goes beyond the basic description of the scene.
Write your chorus.
Does it reveal the main idea or theme of the song? Does it lift up a level above the energy of your verse? You can achieve this by singing it in a higher key than the verses or using more major chords if the verses contain some minor chords. Does the song connect to the listener and draw them in? You can use repeated lines and memorable rhymes so that the listener remembers your chorus.
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Now write your additional verses, matching the patterns of the first one, while growing the idea or bringing it through a progression to move the story along. Refer back to your outline and look at the structure of your first verse - the rhyming pattern, the number of lines, the pattern of line lengths. Your additional verses can have slight variations; nothing too drastic. That's where a bridge can be used, if you want to introduce an idea that really doesn't fit in a verse or chorus, yet adds something to the meaning of the song.
Add a bridge if you'd like. A bridge comes between two parts of a song. It usually happens later in the song and comes either after a verse and before a chorus, or after a chorus, going into a verse. It's a thought added that is often in a different key than the rest of the song or uses different chords, to introduce a new perspective or a hint to the story that doesn’t belong specifically in the chorus or verses. It adds something new and interesting to the song. It's a transition that connects two ideas. A bridge isn’t necessary. Only add one when it fits and adds something to the song, serves a purpose, and makes the song even better.
You can also have a pre-chorus that sets up the chorus, or a post-chorus that brings you back to the verse or to the bridge. Pre-choruses and post-choruses are often very short - one or two lines - and are used to build or decrease energy, creating a smooth transition into the next part of the song.
You can also add an intro that leads into the song or an 'outro' that leads you out of the song and closes out the idea, finishes the story, fading out at the end of the sonic movie.
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Go through the song and make sure that it flows in line with the story. Do sad lyrics feel sad? Do happy lyrics feel happy? Does the structure match the story? Is the main point clear and does it stand out? Is the progression of the story interesting and unique? Do you feel the story and connect with the song?
Revisit your line lengths, number of lines and rhyming pattern. Do the verses match each other structurally, with the same rhyming pattern or number of syllables per line? Do the verses progress the idea? Does the chorus elevate above the verses and stand out?
Go through the steps again to rewrite or edit the song so it is as strong as you can make it and its structure best supports the song ideas. Now play it and record it, so you remember the melody and chords. Perform it live. See how the audience reacts. Play it for friends. Get feedback. Correct and continue. Adjust what you need to adjust for the song to connect better with the listeners. Shorten or lengthen the song; add a sing-along part. Experiment and enjoy the process.
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This is your guide; you can stray off the path and break the rules now that you know the path and how to get back on track. Practise following the path so you can always find your way back if you stray. Practise, play and enjoy. Rinse and repeat. Keep writing. Keep improving. Continue to grow and share your creativity with others.
This formula is in no way a replacement for workshops and coaching or writing with others. People become so familiar with their own habits that they often don't even notice them. It helps to have an outside perspective to identify what could make your songs even better. This guide is a way to get you going along your songwriting path, looking at your songwriting from a new perspective. It's here to help you write in a way that is different from your usual way. It's a road-map for your writing. I recommend augmenting this formula by attending songwriting workshops and songwriting circles, reading books and blogs, getting coaching and discussing songwriting with other songwriters, going to open stages and immersing yourself in songwriting and creativity.
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Now that you have an idea of a structure for writing a song, it's important to talk about inspiration. Songs are a creative art form. Yes, it's important to have a structure and know how to have the song flow, but it is also important to forget structure and allow the creativity to flow. Chris Birkett, a very successful producer, songwriter and musician, said that when it comes to writing a song, it is important to allow the song to flow through you, without thinking too much about it. Afterwards is the time to go back and edit the song. This is a great approach to take, to really feel the song and express the emotion. The energy and emotion of the song comes from your unconscious; and the editing comes from your conscious decision to mould the song into its final form.
Inspiration comes from many places, including from other songwriters. Our musical environment shapes how we connect with songs, how we create them and how they manifest themselves. After writing the seven-step guide, I realized that there's great value in exploring the source of creative inspiration, the songwriters that have shaped my perspective, some consciously, some unconsciously. So I chose to interview some of my favourite songwriters, many of whom happen to be Canadian. I started out contacting songwriters who I greatly admire and ended up interviewing some of my favourite Canadian songwriters. Since songwriting is such a subjective art and different genres and artists influence different people, it's important that I give you a bit of my background and why I chose to interview these songwriters.
I had my first taste of songwriting when I was about six years old. I had just started piano lessons and I guess I always had a creative spirit. I learned a few notes and created a simple, one line song called, “The Trumpet Song.” I have no idea why I wrote about the trumpet on the piano. I guess that's what a six year old does, connects ideas that make sense to them. I didn't make another attempt at songwriting for another three years. I wrote a short melody with lyrics, a capella and never sang it for anyone. It was called, “We'll Always Be Friends” and I wrote it about a friend who moved away. It was six more years before I wrote another song.
At age fifteen, I started writing poetry and lyrics and creating vocal melodies. Then I learned to play the guitar and had no idea where to start with songwriting. I was still studying piano, but it was classical music and I didn't know how to be creative and write the style of songs that I was listening to, on piano. I knew so little about the guitar that everything was an experiment. It was this wide open field of creative joy. I made up chords and found out what they were afterwards. This was after I learned a few chords. Armed with my brother Lars's guitar and two chords that my other brother, Jan, showed me (neither of whom actually played instruments) I started experimenting on the guitar. Then my mom hired my brother's friend Rob Smith to give me guitar lessons. He showed me a few chords and one of the most important yet simple things I ever learned about songwriting.
I was eager to write songs on guitar and had no idea where to start. I had never thought about the structure of a song or how to write one. I had learned so many classical pieces on the piano, but those songs didn't have lyrics and didn't seem to have the same structure as the pop/rock songs that I was listening to. So, Rob asked me to pick a song that I really liked and wanted to learn how to play, then he would show me the structure of a song. I chose “Heaven” by Bryan Adams. Rob identified the chorus and verses and said that it was easy - just write a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse and chorus and you've got a song. It all sounded so simple; everything clicked. Why didn't I see that before? It just wasn't on my radar. By the next week I had written a love song with an intro, three verses and a chorus. I then knew how to write a complete pop/rock song.
We learn from everyone around us and our environment. I grew up listening to the music that my brothers listened to – Phil Collins, Genesis, U2, Sting and The Police. There was also the music that everyone listened to in school – pop, rap and later, grunge. It was at age 14 or 15 that I really got into discovering music for myself, buying albums and watching music videos and interviews on MuchMusic, being in awe and inspired by all of this new music that I was hearing – Bryan Adams, Blue Rodeo, Crowded House, Nirvana, Treble Charger, Green Day, Odds, Sloan, Oasis, Chris Isaak, Barney Bentall, then Gin Blossoms and later on Jeremy Fisher. This is where my inspiration came from. A whole new world opened up.
Then when I moved to Toronto, I was introduced to the indie music scene, open stages (where people can sign up to perform), songwriters' circles and tons of concerts every night of the week. I saw indie artists performing live, like Danny Michel, Luke Doucet, Bob Egan and Oh Susanna. I got to see some of my favourite artists perform in clubs, where they would interact with the fans – Blue Rodeo, the Jim Cuddy Band, Greg Keelor, Zuckerbaby and Treble Charger. I also started going to festivals like the Stardust Picnic, Summersault and Edgefest, where I saw bands like Green Day, Our Lady Peace, Sum 41, Smashing Pumpkins, Great Big Sea and so many more that I had seen on MuchMusic. There were festivals where popular bands would play unannounced sets in small clubs, like NXNE and Canadian Music Week. This was an eye-opening experience and creatively stimulating. There was a period of a few months where I was going to shows and open stages every night of the week, playing five open stages a week and writing two or more songs per week.
Whether you're just starting out as a songwriter, or if you've been writing for years, there's always more to learn. I've met experienced songwriters at workshops who are there because they're committed to always improving as songwriters and they take every chance they get to learn more and grow. You can either grow and develop as a songwriter or stagnate and lose inspiration and motivation. Choose growth and you will connect with the passion that keeps you going and allows your creativity to expand.
These interviews are here to inspire you, show you how other songwriters got started and developed their craft, what they do when they feel stuck or in a pattern with their songwriting and what advice they have to pass along to new songwriters or those looking to grow and develop their art. Enjoy these interviews as I did, where you'll get a peek into the creative minds of some influential songwriters, respected by their peers and able to express the emotions of their songs to inspire and move audiences and listeners. They have all had success as songwriters to various degrees and have fans who love their songs. All of them have inspired me as a songwriter and as a person and I highly respect them and appreciate having had the opportunity to interview them.
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Blue Rodeo was one of the first bands whose music really moved me in a way I hadn't felt before. I think that maybe people gravitate towards a certain style of music that really connects with their soul. For me, that's alternative country or country rock. It's like my heart melts and I get this warm feeling of being home, when I hear a song that I really connect with. The first Blue Rodeo song I heard was written by Greg Keelor, the other half of Blue Rodeo's songwriting duo. “Hasn't Hit Me Yet” (from the album Five Days in July) drew me into the alt-country world, and then when I heard Jim's songs “Bad Timing” and “Five Days in May,” I was hooked.
I first got to meet Jim at an outdoor Blue Rodeo festival, the Stardust Picnic, an annual event that they used to organize in Toronto, before the annual summer show moved to the Molson Amphitheatre. One thing that I really admire, besides his amazing ability to write songs that are so moving and tell such great stories, painting a scene in your mind, is how down-to-earth and welcoming he is with his fans. He has a way of making those around him feel just as important as anyone on the stage and he makes an effort to connect with his fans. The rest of the band is like that, too. They welcome fans and appreciate those who enjoy their music. I think that it says a lot about someone, that not only are they committed to the craft of songwriting, but they take on the responsibility of everything that goes along with it, too.
Blue Rodeo has been an inspiration to so many bands and songwriters. They take it upon themselves to mentor new artists and have developed a music scene around them, bringing younger bands on tour, or having bands open for them, like Cuff the Duke, Matt Mays & El Torpedo, Justin Rutledge and Jim's son's band, the Devin Cuddy Band. Blue Rodeo are known for touring across Canada in the dead of winter each year and I've found when travelling in Canada that I come across places they've written songs about, whether it's Blue Rodeo songs or Jim's solo songs - “Whistler,” “English Bay”; there's mention of Pyramid Lake (“Cynthia”), Golden and Lake Louise (“Maybe Sometime”), the Rocky Mountains, Halifax, St. John's and PEI (“Countrywide Soul”), and a song called “Mattawa” on the new album, In Our Nature. They are truly a Canadian band.
Jim also fronts his own project, the Jim Cuddy Band. I love their music just as much as Blue Rodeo's. There are some shared members between the bands and yet the Jim Cuddy Band has a distinct sound that is different from that of Blue Rodeo.
Jim Cuddy is a songwriter whose talent runs deep and he continues to have a major impact on the Canadian music scene. You'll notice in some of these interviews, other songwriters talk about how his songwriting has influenced them or how they admire or were inspired by him and what he has accomplished.
SIGNE: Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?
JIM: When I was younger, about 12 or 13, I wrote some songs that were imitative of songs that I was learning. I kind of rewrote [Gordon Lightfoot's] “For Lovin' Me,” that kind of thing. The first real song I ever wrote was when I was about 15 and it was about high school anxiety. I played it at parties.
SIGNE: Who are your favourite songwriters?
JIM: I think there's a difference between being a huge music admirer and being a songwriting admirer. So, I started out as a huge music admirer, a fan of The Beatles and the British invasion. I love that music, but that wasn’t the kind of music that necessarily made me want to write songs. It was the singer-songwriters that made me want to write songs. Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and Gordon Lightfoot; their songs really resonated with me. Then I discovered Jackson Browne, when I was about 18. His songs had an emotional component and a melancholy that really resonated with me. I've kind of followed that muse ever since.
SIGNE: Have you ever met any of your favourite songwriters and what did you say to them?
JIM: Well, I have met them. I've met Neil Young and I've met Kristofferson, Jackson Browne and Paul Simon. I expressed my admiration, but I asked them questions about themselves and tried to hear them talk about the details of their lives. I never really had the chance to sit down and say, “What were you thinking when you wrote this?” I'm not sure that that would be of value to me. I'm not really looking for another voice. I listen to Jackson Browne songs or I listen to Neil Young songs and I have extracted everything I possibly can from those songs. I don’t really need to know what they are about. I want to enhance the songwriting appreciation and appreciation of who they are, what kind of people they are and whether I then believe what they are writing in their songs. I mean, I was a big Replacements fan and I went to see The Replacements and it was kind of weird when I met Paul Westerberg. I thought, “'You aren't this character in your songs.” It's a bit of a pose. So, that changed my appreciation of that. I think with these other guys, they are the people in their songs and so getting to know them just even briefly reinforced my ability to believe in their songs.
SIGNE: What's the song that you have written that you are most proud of and why?
JIM: Well, that's a really difficult one to answer, because every song has a reason for being written. I'm proud when I've written something that's clear. I was just driving with my daughter and a friend and her boyfriend and “New Morning Sun” came on the radio, and I had just been trashing somebody’s lyrics (laughs). So, they started trashing my lyrics. I thought, okay, as I was mockingly praising myself, “I did get this song right. This is what I meant ... if you stand still, you will miss out on opportunities. You do need to rise up and take the sky like a new morning sun.” That one I got right.
I appreciate the sentiment of “Bad Timing”. I appreciate the crazy happenstance of “Five Days in May.” Every song, for me to be able to inhabit it every night I play it, has to have some really high level of believability for me. So I can recall what I wrote about and go there for four minutes with the song.
SIGNE: Do you approach songwriting differently now, than when you first started?
JIM: Well, I think I approach it with higher standards. When I first started, I was looking to use my voice and use a style and if the lyrics didn’t entirely make sense, there was sort of an abstract enjoyment to that. After a while, I realized, I didn’t want to do that anymore. I want the songs to be clear and if there's an abstract moment, then I want to mean that. So, I think I approach it now with a greater demand for clarity.
SIGNE: There seems to be a common theme, with clarity.
JIM: I’m not looking to be didactic and I’m not looking to have a story narrative. I like twists and turns in a song. I love the abstraction of Neil Young, the imagery that means something, or one image against another image that means something. I’m looking for all ways to communicate, but I want to be clear on what I am doing. I don’t want to just throw something in because it fits rhythmically or because it sounds good. I want there to be a reason.
SIGNE: What inspires you?
JIM: Everything. I am inspired by conversations. I am inspired by the lives that are lived around me. I am inspired by the life I lead. I’m inspired by my relationship with my wife and the kids and my family and my friends. I am inspired by things I read and witness in the street. I am inspired by my travels. I walk around and absorb; then when I go to write songs, something comes up.
I can remember in New York one time, we ate at a restaurant, an Algerian restaurant and the woman who owned it was cooking. She was so beautiful, but it looked like she had a hard life. The image of her, when she smiled, has never left me. I know that sometime I will use that image. I may even write that story. That's the kind of thing that I think you take with you, just being impressed by something, having questions about how this image came to be. How did this woman come to be in New York and have a restaurant and why is it so difficult? Why is there that look of pain on her face and why is there such beautiful contrast between the pain and the beauty of her face. So, I think that everything inspires me and I'm not really able to write about it all, but it comes back at some point.
SIGNE: What do you do when you feel stuck when you're writing a song? How do you get past it?
JIM: I do feel stuck sometimes. I think everybody does when they write songs. My process is not much different than when I was first starting to play guitar. I sit in isolation with my guitar or with the piano, and I just start playing. I start singing and playing. I try to make it play, not work. Sometimes I have to tell myself to just write a song without thinking about it being for Blue Rodeo or for my own solo stuff. Just write a song to write a song, because it’s fun. Sometimes that will loosen things up. I have to have a couple of songs on the go, so that I can move one forward and then if I get stuck, I will move to another song and just work at it. I take the time. When I am actually writing for either of my projects, I go to the studio, I lock the door and don’t come out for three hours. I stay in there and sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s easy.
SIGNE: Do you usually finish the song in one sitting or do you come back to it?
JIM: Very rarely do I finish songs in one sitting. It has happened occasionally, but more often than not the songs sort of possess me for a while and they germinate for a couple of weeks, sometimes a month. I have to stay working on them, because I really am possessed by them. I hear them in my sleep. I can’t get them out of me until they're done. So, that's why I always have five or six songs on the go and maybe one I will get into and take around with me, and I will try to finish it. Sometimes I have to just force myself. With this last record, I was a little behind by the time we were recording. So, I'd go early. I'd drive to a place by some water, near Greg’s place and just sit there. I’d say, “You have to finish this song before you go to the studio.” I'd sit there with my guitar and finish the song, get it to the studio and then do the final touches. Sometimes I'm putting my nose to the grindstone and sometimes it’s just for inspiration.
SIGNE: What's the song that you've written that has the most unusual story connected to it?
JIM: It was unusual for me to write a song about the royal wedding. I didn’t think that was something I was going to write a song about: “Everyone Watched the Wedding.” I was kind of taken by the fact that so many people were going to watch it. I wondered what that was all about. That created a bit of a scene in my mind. I was a little bit surprised that it became a bit of an emotional song about having grown-up kids and watching them from a distance, instead of watching them as if you're watching over them. So that one took me by surprise, the subject matter and what went into it from my own personal life.
SIGNE: Do you have a piece of advice for new songwriters?
JIM: I talk to a lot of people about this. I think that even though you start out as a songwriter, imitating the people who you admire, you write in their way, the thing you have to strive for is to be your own songwriter. It's originality. Originality doesn’t have to mean that it’s never ever been written in the world. It just has to mean that it matters to you, that this is what you want to say, and it’s your own personal originality. The world needs more songs, but the world doesn’t need more songs exactly like other songs. It needs more songs that are unusual. So I think that striving to be original is everything. I didn’t know how to write songs when I started, but I wanted to learn. You're not born knowing how to paint, knowing how to play an instrument, knowing how to write songs. It’s a process. So, don’t get discouraged.
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Luke Doucet is another great storyteller, whose songs are evocative. He creates a clear scene for the listener and brings out the emotion of the song, so you can really picture how the narrator feels.
I first heard Luke Doucet at a songwriters-in-the-round showcase, Radio Monday, hosted by Jason Collett at Ted's Wrecking Yard, on College Street in Toronto. It was a hub for the indie music scene in Toronto in 2000-2001 and this weekly songwriters' series brought in amazing talent. I remember one night they had both Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor. Andy Maize from Skydiggers also played that night. Other members of Blue Rodeo would hang out there too. I remember meeting Bob Egan and Bazil Donovan there on a few Mondays. They are also very talented songwriters. There were usually five or six songwriters on stage and they would each play a song and tell a story about the song, taking turns and sometimes jamming or singing with each other. On that night that Luke Doucet played, Danny Michel also performed. That was a great night for discovering new music. I proceeded to buy their albums and I've been going to their shows ever since. They just keep getting better.
Luke fronted a band called Veal in Vancouver in the 90s, then in 2001 he released his first solo album, Aloha, Manitoba. This was the first album of his I heard. When he came out with Broken (and Other Rogue States) in 2005, I was blown away. This is still one of my favourite albums ever. It's the perfect break-up album.
Luke has played guitar with other artists as well, including Sarah McLachlan. Now Luke plays in a band, Whitehorse, with his wife, Melissa McClelland, and they recently released their second album, The Fate of the World Depends on This Kiss. They both front the band and write the songs. Melissa also had a solo career prior to forming the band with Luke.
I had an amazing opportunity to see Jim Cuddy perform with Whitehorse at the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto recently, during the NXNE festival. It was an awesome super-group. They played songs from Jim's solo albums, Blue Rodeo, Luke's solo albums and Whitehorse songs. It was a beautiful sonic mix that fit so well together.
SIGNE: When did you first start writing songs and how did you get started?
LUKE: I started writing songs when I was a little kid. I started playing guitar when I was about 13, and I started writing songs immediately. I mean they weren’t very good, of course, but it struck me that that was probably something I wanted to do and I didn’t think of it as something I would need to do for any kind of career aspirations. Of course, I wasn't thinking about career at all, at that point. I was just writing songs because I thought, “Why not? It's fun.”
SIGNE: Did it run in your family? Were there other songwriters in your family or was it something you started on your own?
LUKE: Well, my father was a musician. He is still a guitar player, jazz musician, and plays blues, folk and rock 'n roll. He was living in New Orleans most of my young life and then he moved to Winnipeg when I was 13. So, as I started playing music, he sort of showed up in my life, and so was able to be a really great mentor and a friend to me as a musician, for sure. He wasn’t really a songwriter and there was nobody else in the family who was writing songs per se. My mother was a writer, a creative writer. She was a nurse and she was raising six kids, so she didn’t have a lot of time to do that as an artist, but I think if she had had time she probably would had been very much inclined that way.
SIGNE: Who are your songwriting influences?
LUKE: That question about influences is always a tough one, because I think we don’t choose our influences. I can tell you who I want to sound like. I can tell you who I would like people to think I'm influenced by, but the fact of the matter is, you're influenced by your surroundings and you don’t necessarily choose your surroundings. So I would love people to say, “Oh, wow, he sounds like John Lennon,” or, “He sounds like Bob Dylan,” or, “He sounds like Neil Young,” or, “He sounds like Tom Petty,” or, “He sounds like Tom Waits.” I could go on and on. There are lots of people who I really love. I love Randy Newman. I love J.J. Cale and I love Willie Nelson. I could list 300 people that I like. In the last five years I've listened to more Sloan than anything else. That question about influences has always been a really challenging one, because like I said, I don't think we choose our influences. If you live in a neighbourhood and your next door neighbour blares Metallica day in and day out, that's going to influence you. It doesn’t mean your music is going to sound like Metallica, but it means maybe you're going to be influenced not to sound like that. Maybe you really don’t like that and so you are going to make a specific, concerted effort to never play heavy music. Your environment influences you a great deal and you don’t really choose your musical inspirations.
SIGNE: Is there a songwriter who you admired a lot and you got a chance to either meet or work with them and what was that experience like?
LUKE: Actually I've worked with a lot of songwriters over the years. I spent so much time as a young person in clubs. I started hanging out and playing music in bars when I was 15 years old. I remember when I was 15, at The Pyramid, in Winnipeg (it was called The Spectrum at that time), I would see Crash Test Dummies, who were just breaking [out]. I would see Brad Roberts [lead singer of Crash Test Dummies], who was an ambitious writer, and I found him inspiring. Then I’d see Crash Vegas (Colin Cripps and Michelle McAdorey) as they came to town to play. They were really inspiring. I saw Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm Orchestra and they were really amazing. Then Rheostatics; I got to hear Martin Tielli, Dave Bidini and Tim Vesely’s songwriting and they were really inspiring. I've had a chance to meet all those people. In many cases I've worked with them in different capacities.
SIGNE: What's your favourite song that you have written or the song that you felt the most joy or accomplishment from writing? LUKE: I don’t know that I have one. Songs are like your children in a lot of ways. You care about them a great deal at very specific times, like when they are at a young age, when your songs are brand new, they're these fresh new ideas and that’s exciting. I have songs that I just keep playing again and again, that never seem to go away. I would say that “Broken One” is one of those songs. It has a couple of different versions. That one seems to stick around and always finds its way into a set list.
Melissa and I are really enjoying playing “Devil's Got A Gun” these days. That's a fun one. In many cases I enjoy old songs that I wrote, that may be more obscure and I think, “Wow, that was a nice one.” There's a song called, “No Love To Be Made Here Now” - off Broken (And Other Rogue States) and I really like that song. I don’t play that song anymore because it tells a story and speaks to a part of my life and my background, but I don’t really need to tell that story anymore.
“Broken One” was spawned off that record as well. Melissa and I kind of reconfigured it and now it means a slightly different thing than it used to; the context has changed.
SIGNE: “Broken One” is my favourite song of yours. I have a question about another song on Broken (And Other Rogue States), called “One Too Many.” I find that the lyrics are so beautifully crafted in that song and the lines that really stand out to me are, “It takes a uniquely fucked up man to break his own heart and the right girl at the wrong time to make him do it. So, if I am the guy and you're the girl and the time is now, I'm as broke as any man could be.” Those lyrics stuck with me since I first heard them and I'm wondering when you craft lyrics like that, is it something that just flows out of you or is it something that you're carefully thinking about?
LUKE: Well, I'm always hoping to write something that people will laugh at or that will give people pause, whether it's humour, heartbreak or something more interesting. Sometimes they [lyrics] just fall in your lap, but you can only try so hard to come up with little witty quips. You always want to have them; they're great, those little turns of phrases and couplets that make people stop in their tracks. That's kind of what the whole job is about as a lyricist, but it’s easier said than done. It’s easy to say I want to have that. It’s kind of like when somebody comes up to you and says, “Hey you should write a song that everybody sings along to.” No kidding, that's what I've been trying to do my whole life; thanks. You really want to have a line in a song that makes everybody laugh or that everybody quotes to their friends. That’s the whole name of the game. Sometimes you're successful and sometimes you're not.
SIGNE: What do you do when you feel stuck with your songwriting?
LUKE: I guess I just try and think outside the box, change my paradigm. It depends on what you're stuck on. If you're stuck on lyrics, stop thinking about lyrics, think about the group, think about the guitar part, think about the melody, think about the flavour. Then maybe that will inspire a lyric. I really like something that John K. Samson said once. He was quoting somebody else and I can’t remember who. He was talking about writer’s block and he was saying that artists always complain about writer’s block, but it really is essentially a First World problem, because bus drivers don’t get bus drivers’ block and plumbers don’t get plumbers’ block, school teachers don’t get school teachers’ block. You just do your job. As a songwriter, I think it’s kind of the same. You have a job to do; you've got to write songs.
Now obviously, there's not necessarily somebody sitting there watching the clock going, “Hey, you are not producing,” but in some cases that's actually going on. Sometimes we'll be working on a record and we've got studio time booked. We have a producer hired and it’s time to have songs. You like to think that songwriting is more spiritual and creative, that the muse is a responsive lover and that whenever you decide you're ready, she is ready. That’s almost never the case. There is something to be said about sitting down with a piece of paper and a pen and a guitar in your lap and going, “Okay, today I'm going to write a song.” I would say that 50 percent of the time I do that, I get something that I like, whether I use it or not, I get something.
SIGNE: What have you learned as you've grown as a songwriter? What are one or two of the key things that you've learned?
LUKE: I used to be really hung up on telling the truth and my definition of truth has evolved. I think you can tell the truth and still lie through your teeth as a songwriter. I think your job is to be a creative writer. Listen to Tom Waits or Elvis Costello or Elliott Smith, who write really evocative, visual stories and I don’t think for a second and I don’t think anybody else should think for a second that they are telling you what actually happened in their lives. I think what they are doing is watching the world around them and embellishing on the things that they see. You see a guy crossing the street. What's he wearing? What’s the look on his face? Where is he going and how fast is he walking? What time of day is it and what part of town is he in? With those pieces of information you make something up and that doesn’t mean that you are dishonest as a writer. Honesty doesn't mean literally saying what’s happening or what’s not happening. It's interpreting the world around you in an honest way. We are creative writers; that’s our job. I used to be more of an autobiographical writer and now I've realized that my only job is to create something that moves people in whatever way. That’s what I've learned.
SIGNE: Do you do a lot of co-writing and do you co-write with Melissa when you are writing for Whitehorse?
LUKE: I do a lot of co-writing with Melissa, but the kind of co-writing we do is maybe not the kind of co-writing that people expect. It’s very rarely the two of us sitting with a bottle of wine and candlelight and composing music together. Usually Melissa writes a song and sends me a GarageBand demo and on my own time I listen to it and I go, “Hey, this is cool, what if we change this to this?” And she goes, “Yeah, okay, let's change that, but I don’t want to change that, because that’s really the core.” “Okay!” I say, "I understand now. So what about this?” Therefore we end up writing together. Now that’s not to say that we don’t send each other songs and they're perfect and they're done. Sometimes we send each other songs and in the end, it doesn't require a co-write.
I have co-written with other people. I've actually written a few songs on the new Sarah McLachlan record [Shine On] and some of those were co-writes. That was a combination of what I'm describing, sending songs back and forth to each other until we thought they were finished. We did also spend some time sitting together at Sarah’s place, working on piano and guitar to figure out how to finish things up.
SIGNE: I think that it's important to encourage people to find what they love to do and to have ambition and set goals, especially at a young age. So, I'm wondering, as a child, did you have somebody encouraging you to pursue songwriting?
LUKE: I had people encouraging me to do whatever it was I wanted to do, but to do it well. I remember my mother clearly saying to me, “I don't care if you want to suck latex for a living as long as you're good at it and you enjoy it.” Now that's pretty crass; it was meant to shock me. The point she was making is, “I'm not going to tell you what to do with your life, but I do think whatever you decide to do, you should do it really well and you should pick something that you like.”
For example, when I was in high school, I was playing music sometimes four or five nights a week and I was making a living at it, even when I was 15 or 16 years old. My mother saw that my school work was sliding and she encouraged me to drop out of school, which as you can imagine came as a pretty big shock to me. My family has always really valued learning. What she was saying to me was, “You have this thing that you care about, that you're working really hard at,” (and that was my music) and her point was, “If you're not going to work hard at school, then don’t waste your time doing two things half way; pick the thing you care about and do it really, really well.”
Now, I didn’t drop out of school. As it turns out, I found myself an opportunity to go to University of Winnipeg Collegiate, which is sort of a private high school within the university and by going there I was able to graduate early. So in a lot of ways what my mother was doing was she was kind of bluffing. I think she understood I wasn’t going to drop out of school, but she was just trying to make a point that, “Look, don’t waste your time, don’t waste my time, just do the things that you care about and do them well.” So, as it turned out I graduated early from school and ended up pursuing music full-time earlier than I had anticipated. That was the kind of encouragement that I got from my family.
I really value that and I tell my daughter that. I think time is precious, especially when you're young, because you have opportunities when you're young that you don’t have later on, and what I mean by that is you have time. Young people have time. When you're in your 20s, all of a sudden you have to make a living and pay the rent. Those things are time consuming and all of a sudden you find yourself doing a job that you may not care about as much. You can’t practice your piano or your guitar or your songwriting for six hours a day if you are washing dishes in a restaurant. The time that you have to practice six or seven or eight hours a day is when you are a kid. Then when that time goes away, all of a sudden you have to be responsible for your life and you don’t have that opportunity anymore. So, I'm constantly telling young people, “Now is the time to get really good at something.” Whether that’s songwriting or skateboarding or whatever it is that you want to dedicate your time to, you have one opportunity to get amazing at something and that is now.
SIGNE: What would be your main piece of advice for a new songwriter, whether they are young or whether they are older and just starting out with songwriting?
LUKE: Learn as many songs by other songwriters as you can; that is the most important thing. Ron Sexsmith is one of my favourite songwriters in Canada and we were on tour one time. It was a Blue Rodeo and Friends tour. It was myself, Ron Sexsmith, Oh Susanna, Justin Rutledge and Blue Rodeo on a tour bus together. We were sitting in the back lounge of the bus, every night after we finished the concert and we would be heading down the highway and all have guitars out, singing songs. No matter where the conversation went or no matter where the musical direction was going, Ron always had not one or two but five or six, eight or ten songs that he could play, and they would be rare B-sides from old Kinks' records or an obscure Gordon Lightfoot song. At some point I asked him, “How many songs by other people do you know how to play?” Ron’s a pretty humble guy and he said, “Oh, I don't know, maybe you know, a couple of hundred?” I said, “No really! How many? Like what, 300?” He goes, “No probably more.” It took me a long time to get it out of him. He figures he probably knows somewhere in the vicinity of 800 songs. Now that’s unusual, to be able to retain that kind of information in the mind. Ron has a unique mind. I believe that if he had to sit in your backyard and just plays songs until he couldn’t play any more, he would come close to 800. I bet you he wasn't exaggerating. Ron is one of the greatest songwriters in the country. I think that’s why, because when he starts to write a song, he's drawing from the legacies of the greatest songwriters who have ever lived.
If you learn how to play all the John Lennon songs off The White Album, then you've basically just spent 10 hours studying with John Lennon. That’s basically a personal lesson with John Lennon. You don’t need to sit with him to have him tell you what he thinks. You need to learn his songs and that’s the lesson.
A lot of young artists think that copying other people is somehow the wrong thing to do. That you'll never have your own voice, if you copy other songwriters and other singers and I think that’s a cop-out. The time comes later on in your career when you won’t be imitating anybody anymore. You'll be doing your own thing. Your own thing is only going to be two degrees of separation away from some of the influences. If you love Elliott Smith and you want to write just like him and you learn all his songs, there will be a time early on in your life as an artist when you will sound kind of like Elliot Smith, but at the end of the day you are not Elliott Smith because he is a totally different person. You are going to sound like yourself. People who have heroes, they don’t have one hero, they have five or ten or fifty. If you're learning 10 John Lennon songs and 10 Elvis Costello songs and 10 Elliott Smith songs and 10 Liz Phair songs and 10 Joni Mitchell songs, you're not going to sound like any of those people, you're going to sound like yourself, except you are going to have learned from the best and I can’t stress that enough.
If you're a young artist or a young anything, learn from those who came before you, learn their stuff, learn as much as you can, learn 300 songs. By the time Bob Dylan ended up in New York, when he arrived in Greenwich Village, he knew somewhere in the vicinity of 300 Woody Guthrie songs. That’s why Bob Dylan is a great songwriter. I mean obviously he's a clever guy. He has a clever mind, an enigmatic personality, is clearly really, really talented, but if he had not learned those 300 Woody Guthrie songs, he'd be a shit songwriter.
SIGNE: You know, I'm really glad that you put it in this way, because I haven't heard anyone else say it in quite the same way. A lot of people emphasize creating more and practising songwriting and having influences, but not a lot of people emphasize what you are saying about learning other people's songs. It's an interesting point.
LUKE: To me practising songwriting is learning other people’s songs. That is how you practise. Listen to Jim Cuddy, the way he writes, the guy has learned a lot of other people’s songs. You can hear it in his writing. There's a certain sophistication. Look at Sarah McLachlan, she has a photographic memory for music. She hears a Peter Gabriel song once and she can play it back to you. She’s got hundreds of songs in her [brain], that she can draw from whenever she is writing. I think that that's a step you can't really miss.
~~~~~
Singer-songwriter Suzie Ungerleider performs as Oh Susanna. Her stage name suits her style of alternative-country/folk music well. Her ballads explore the struggles that people go through in life. As a storyteller, she captures the essence of the scenes that she creates. You can feel the emotion in her music and the instrumentation perfectly suits it.
I first heard of Oh Susanna at the Free Times Cafe in Toronto around 2001. I was playing a show with Bob Egan from Blue Rodeo. (He's another one of my favourite songwriters, very talented.) At the end of the night Bob said to me, “Oh Susanna was here, did you see her?” I was new to the indie scene and the alt-country scene, so I hadn't heard her music yet. We didn't officially meet, but she was in the audience that night. Every year she hosts Oh Susanna and Friends at Hugh's Room in Toronto and I've had the pleasure of attending several of those concerts. It was there that we finally met. Every year she has a fantastic mix of amazing Canadian artists, which have included Jim Cuddy, Andy Maize (Skydiggers), Luke Doucet and so many more. She shares a band-mate with Jim Cuddy; Bazil Donovan plays bass in her band and it was through Oh Susanna that Bob Egan met Jim Cuddy and eventually joined Blue Rodeo. The Canadian music scene is such a close-knit community of artists and songwriters and Toronto is such a hub for the growth of that scene.
Not only does Oh Susanna have a knack for bringing together talented artists, she also writes beautiful, haunting melodies and lyrics.
SIGNE: Do you remember the first song you ever wrote and can you tell me a little bit about it?
OH SUSANNA: Sometimes I think I’m just making up this memory, but I found this piece of paper and it had old blues lyrics. I think I was about eight or nine and it was about a train, a typical blues song. I found it years later, I mean that was an isolated event for a few years. Then I think the next thing I tried was when I was about 11; I was really into the Stones. I wanted to write a song about getting busted for drugs; it's all about a fantasy; that was my next rock 'n roll song. Then I didn’t write for a very long time. I think it took me another eight or nine years till I was writing again in a more serious way.
SIGNE: Who are your favourite songwriters?
OH SUSANNA: Oh, jeez. I was influenced a lot by people like Kate Bush who wrote little stories, and then folk singers and country singers like Hank Williams and Tom Waits. I was more conscious about the fact that I was trying to write these folk songs when I was first starting with country songs. I was obsessed with that kind of music. Then I came later to [Bob] Dylan. Right now I listen to people who I have encountered over the years like Sarah Harmer. I love her writing. I listen a lot to Joel Plaskett.
I kind of want to include everybody, so I can never single out one or two, but I do admire people like Dylan or [Bruce] Springsteen and I also admire Sarah [Harmer] and Amelia Curran.
SIGNE: Is there somebody whose writing you really admire, who you always wanted to meet and then you finally got to meet them?
OH SUSANNA: I just get all worked up about the meeting [with songwriters I admire] and it ruins, in a way, what I’m enjoying about listening to them. The personal contact is not really what it’s about, even though it’s fun to be friends or encounter people. For example, lately I really loved this writer Joe Pug and I think I discovered him because I went to see a show and he was opening. He is an incredible writer and has a really good vibe when he is on stage. He seems very friendly and everything. So, I bought his record and then the next time I went to see him I was like, “Oh yeah, let’s hang out and try to meet Joe.” He doesn’t seem so unapproachable and he wasn’t, but I just felt like an idiot, like one of these people who wait in the crowd. It’s funny because when I meet people who admire what I do, I always love it and I appreciate it. All I could think of after that was, “What did I say that for, what did I do that for? Oh, he doesn’t care.” It ruined the real reason that I listened to the music - for the music and what he is putting out and his creation. Sometimes I get starstruck.
SIGNE: What song are you most proud of writing and why?
OH SUSANNA: It’s hard to single out songs. I would say I’ve written about 50 or 60 songs, which in the scheme of things is sort of a good amount, but not a huge amount.
I think the thing about songwriting is that you want to be mysterious and exciting and challenging. I don’t want it to be formulaic. I want to figure out something new. I like singing the songs again and again. It helps me to get back to the moment or I find new things with the song. I’m discovering that I’m loving singing and that’s my first love, the singing part. The writing stuff happened after.
SIGNE: What approach do you take to songwriting now that’s different from when you first started?
OH SUSANNA: I don’t know if there's any difference. I think that when I first started I was trying to work out a lot of feelings. I didn’t write in an autobiographical way and I still don’t really. Maybe it's something that’s going to happen more in the future, being more literal about my own experiences. I think that in the past I was trying to work out my own experiences, by writing stories about other people, but the emotions were mine. It’s an interesting process of feeling alone and feeling unsure and questioning. I think a lot of my early songs are about that. By writing those it helped me to meet people and find a place in the world. I still find myself asking millions of questions, like “What does this mean? Why do I do this?” Maybe what I want to change now is to have it be more about pleasure and joy, rather than angst.
SIGNE: What inspires you the most to write?
OH SUSANNA: I think being in a place that I haven’t been before, when I can walk around and soak up the stories of that place. For example, I was just in the Yukon and there's so much history there and [different] landscapes. I felt like I was putting together a puzzle of all the stories, and how things came to be and the landscape and how that figured into the history. It gave me a whole bunch of images and things to think about, and whether or not something comes out of that musically, I don’t know, but it did make me feel like I wanted to write.
SIGNE: Do you ever feel stuck with your songwriting?
OH SUSANNA: Oh, all the time.
SIGNE: What do you do when you feel stuck?
OH SUSANNA: A couple of things. I usually stop, which might not be such a great thing. Sometimes taking a break and just becoming curious about things helps. Maybe I go and explore something, not just for the sake of songwriting, but to go and be interested in something. Sometimes I would just write for writing's sake instead of writing for a purpose or a goal. Just do a little bit, break it down into little pieces and enjoy that creation. I think that if I feel stuck, either I haven’t done it enough or I haven’t opened myself up to doing it enough, or I'm pushing myself to get my nose to the grindstone and that takes the curiosity and joy out of it. So it’s a fine line where I want to make space to do it, because when I do it, I really enjoy it, but I don’t want to force myself into doing it. Keep your head open and your feelings open and do little bits of it all the time. There are phases where I really want to do it and other times when I just want to live my life. I always want to try to integrate those two things, the music and my life, but not to the point where I'm excluding a lot of other things which actually become inspirations in the end.
SIGNE: Have you ever co-written a song with someone?
OH SUSANNA: I have, yes.
SIGNE: What was that experience like?
OH SUSANNA: It was really interesting. It wasn’t as if we sat in the same room and wrote the song together. I wrote a few songs with my friend Bazil Donovan. He started to write songs, melodies on the guitar and he said, “Would you care to write some words for it, because I don’t feel like I can do lyrics.” So I went to his house and he had a few melodies and there was one in particular. He played me this song and it was very beautiful and he said, “I think this song is about my cousin who is addicted to heroin.” It's not an unusual topic for me to write about because I like to talk about troubles and struggles that people have and how they get through them or don’t get through them or how the people around them deal with it and the choices that people make. It was really interesting to work with a melodic map or a map of what Bazil told me. So, I wrote the song called “Billy,” from the perspective of someone who's in love with the heroin addict and I feel like that’s one of the songs that I have done with Bazil that has been really poignant. I think it brought out the best in both of us, his melody was so beautiful and it helped me to come up with something that made me rise to the occasion.
SIGNE: Do you have a piece of advice for new songwriters?
OH SUSANNA: Don’t think too much about it. It’s funny because I actually spend a lot of time thinking about it. Just go for it, but then edit. Try to write about something that means something to you - things that interest you and make you curious or make you feel something strongly. I think that those feelings will come through in the writing. There are so many ways to write and there are so many ways to make music that I hesitate to give any prescription. Feel and get your language to express your feelings and the melodies to express something strong.
SIGNE: Did you know when you were a kid that you wanted to be a songwriter and pursue this as a career?
OH SUSANNA: When I was a kid I wanted to be a singer, but it took me a very long time to admit it [to myself] when I grew up. I thought, “Oh, that’s kind of a silly fantasy.” Luckily I did a few things that kind of made me come out of the closet so to speak and other people were like, “You've got to do this!” And I got braver.
The writing was something that happened because I felt like people in bands write their own music and I was interested in doing that, but when I was younger I just thought about singing the songs.
About Jim Cuddy:
OH SUSANNA: He is like a workhorse. He is someone who just writes constantly and I admire his work ethic. He is lucky, because his kids are all grown up and he can focus on his own projects.
About balancing music and family life:
OH SUSANNA: I’m trying to set a balance of family and music. I think for women that’s harder. You can use the family as an inspiration, but it sometimes feels like before I had a family, I had all this time to explore. It didn't mean I was writing all the time and taking advantage of the time, but you feel like you're free to kind of move through the world and observe. Now I can’t reflect that much, so sometimes that’s very difficult. I feel like where the songs come from is a lot of day dreaming and reflection and time to just let your mind wander. That's the kind of writer I am. I need this space and time. I've done it under pressure. I think the most satisfying times that I have written is when I have been curious about something and able to explore it. My brain can just go there and I don’t have the time limit and the song will emerge in a natural way. I think Jim is the kind of guy who wants to get down to work. He's a workaholic. He's not so much of a day-dreamer. I’m sure he is a day-dreamer in his own way, but he seems to be someone who is disciplined.
SIGNE: He's very focused.
OH SUSANNA: He is an athlete. He is very focused. So I think he comes at songwriting from an athletic point of view, to get to the goal, to get it done. I admire that and I think some of the songs he has done are unbelievable.
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Jeremy Fisher consistently writes some of the catchiest tunes I have ever heard. His albums are full of beautiful pop melodies blended with folk roots. After releasing his first album, he toured across North America on bicycle. That's dedication. It brings to mind that timeless image of a travelling folksinger, playing music for the people and wandering the countryside following a dream.
The first song I heard of his, “High School,” was being played on MuchMusic. He was signed to Sony for his second album, Let It Shine. It's a song that connects with everyone, whether it describes what life was like for you in high school or it describes someone you knew, everyone can identify with it. When he came out with his next album Goodbye Blue Monday, it was so packed full of songs as catchy and as satisfying to listen to as “High School.” The music is so joyful, you just want to sing along on every song. He continues to write amazing songs and actually on the day of our interview, he released his new album, The Lemon Squeeze (his sixth album) which ventures into new stylistic territory, being a little less folky and more pop-oriented.
SIGNE: Do you remember the first song that you ever wrote and can you tell me a little bit about it?
JEREMY: I couldn't tell you what the first song I wrote was, because I started writing when I was a little kid. The oldest song I have that I still play is a song called “Lemon Meringue Pie,” that came out on my second record. For some reason it didn't come out on my first record, but I probably wrote it in 1998 or something like that and it's kind of a down-tempo groove where I'm sort of singing/talking. I was describing a night that I had, where I had gone out with some friends and stayed up late and we actually made a lemon meringue pie. It was kind of stupid when you look at it lyrically, but it had this double entendre thing going for it that I didn't even realize at the time. I was literally singing about making a lemon meringue pie and didn't realize the sexual connotation until I was done and listening back to the demo on tape.
SIGNE: Who are your favourite songwriters?
JEREMY: To name a few, John Prine and Randy Newman. AC/DC is the reason that I started playing music and have been a big inspiration for me, even though I don't really write songs like that. Also, Paul Simon and I should definitely give a shout out to Chilly Gonzales. He's a piano player/producer who has worked with everybody from Feist to Daft Punk. He [also] writes in every genre.
SIGNE: Have you ever met any of your favourite songwriters and what did you say to them? How did you feel?
JEREMY: I've gotten to meet a bunch of them and some of them are friends now. I don't usually talk about songwriting with people who I'm not working with. I mean every once in a while on a tour bus late at night, you might get into talking about writing, but I've never, you know talked to Jim Cuddy about his songwriting process. When we were doing a duet together at the Olympics in 2010, I noticed from learning one of his songs, “Bad Timing,” that he’s got a way of writing really, really catchy pre-choruses, which aren't typically the most catchy part of the song. They just set up the chorus, but he’s got this great sort of blue-eyed soul approach to songwriting and I always love his pre-choruses. It’s more common to talk with people about other inspiring songwriters.
SIGNE: What song are you most proud of writing and why?
JEREMY: One of my most simple songs is a song called “Fall For Anything” and as a song on its own, the melody and chords (the music) is not that interesting, but it's the lyric that has really connected with a lot of people. It's not a song that's gotten radio play or anything like that; it's one that time and time again, people tell me that they connect with. I think that's why I started doing it and why I keep doing it. It’s the striving to express common emotions or common feelings that we share with one another, that we may only be able to connect with through music.
SIGNE: Do you approach songwriting differently now than when you first started?
JEREMY: I really do, yeah. I used to write a lot more songs and come up with a lot of ideas that would never get finished. I would always start with the music and the chords and then I might kick around a song for a day or a week or a month or half a year and then finally labour over the lyrics and figure out what the song was about, based on the vowel sounds that I was making. Now I do that about half the time, but the other half of the time I have a concept of something I want to write about and I want to say something, so I might have a little couplet for a chorus or just a concept and I will work from there. I have been doing a lot more writing on the piano, whereas I always used to write on the guitar and I find that it opens me up to more melodic possibilities. It's the way you can hit the sustain pedal and let a chord ring out and play around with the melody a little more than you can on guitar.
SIGNE: What inspires you to write songs?
JEREMY: I think it's just the desire to make music. I love it; it is inexplicable why I love music. It’s a funny thing when I sit and think about it actually, when I think about why I respond to music, why people respond to music, what music even is. It’s a little bit of storytelling; it's a little bit of manipulating of emotions through sounds. It’s a lot of feeling. The beat is a huge part of music. It’s not accounted for a lot of the time, but I think that we're definitely driven by kick drums and back beats or hand claps. A great feeling beat is enough to change our mood sometimes. For me it’s a very powerful mood altering drug and I'm addicted to it. Sometimes I just really need to express something and other times I look to it to give me a feeling; so I become [part of] the song for a little while. Yesterday, I read a commencement address that the author Kurt Vonnegut gave. He said something about how great it is to have all these wonderful novels that have been written over the years and to be able to read them and invite the thoughts of all these great thinkers into our heads. I think that is what we get to do with music. Some of the greatest songwriters and singers have had really tumultuous lives; they have lived a much different experience than the rest of us and we get to bring that into our consciousness and feel that for a little while. We get to feel what Aretha Franklin feels like when she is in love, “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman,” or how Otis Redding felt moving across the country “Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay.” It’s like we get to travel the world without leaving the farm.
SIGNE: Do you ever feel stuck with your writing and what do you do when you feel stuck?
JEREMY: I try to stop, which isn't always easy. It's like hitting a dead end anywhere, whether you're writing a paper, or you're just sitting, bored, waiting in the doctor’s office and you find the end of the Internet, nothing else interesting. You think, “There's nothing in here that has any value to my life right now, but I'm still looking for something.” That's kind of what it’s like when you hit a wall in songwriting and the best thing to do is usually get up, go for a walk, get some exercise or hang out with a friend. If I absolutely have to be making music, if I have a deadline, then I will listen to music and just take the pressure off. The best thing I can do is just listen to great music and discover new music for the rest of the day. We do not give ourselves enough time to truly listen to music, because we are always trying to write our own. I definitely learned a lesson that I have to draw new things into my life for inspiration before I can sit down and write a new song on my own.
SIGNE: How long does it usually take you to write a song?
JEREMY: I rarely ever sit down and write one start to finish, although that does happen. It could be an afternoon, the best case scenario is a morning or an afternoon. However, it’s never done. A big part of songwriting is revision, editing, and so even if I write a song in an afternoon, it might be four or five months and I'll have played it a couple of times on stage and tweaked some things here and there before I'm ready to record it and sort of call it done.
I'm releasing a record today. I went into the studio and two of the songs were still not lyrically done. We started recording them anyway and it was right up until the end of mixing and getting the final touches put on one of the songs that I finished the lyrics. Sometimes it just takes that pressure of a deadline.
SIGNE: Goodbye Blue Monday is one of my favourite albums. It makes me so happy to listen to all of the songs and I feel like every single one of them is important. You worked with Hawksley Workman on that album. What was that like, working with another songwriter as a producer?
JEREMY: It was really necessary for me at that time. We did two records together; he also produced my album Flood, which is the one after that. One thing about being a solo singer-songwriter is that it’s great to be the only one in charge and to be able to make your own schedule and not have to coordinate with other people. The flexibility is really great, but when it comes time for writing and recording a new album, I go through this period of almost a depression - I don't want to call it that; it’s more like excessive loneliness and I always long for somebody to collaborate with. Luckily I have realized that's available to me. I can go out and write with a hundred people if I want and I've started doing that more often. I did a co-write on my new album with a guy named Andrew Bissell, down in Nashville. Working with Hawksley was important for me, because I had written all the songs, but I just needed someone that was more like a band-mate rather than a producer, at that time. He filled the role of a producer as well. I spent a year writing the album and I was sort of drained from it and he had all this excitement, because the songs were new [for him] and he had all these ideas for how they would go and how they would be produced and then I got reinvigorated by his enthusiasm. That was a really important step in my music-making life, working with him. I learned a lot from him.
SIGNE: What is the most unusual story you have connected to one of your songs?
JEREMY: The new album has a song called “The Bride is Dead.” It was inspired by a true story. There's a guy in Thailand whose girlfriend had passed away in a traffic accident. They'd been together for about 10 years and as he was going through the grieving process he was regretful he had never asked her to marry him. So he had a wedding for her after she died and I saw this photo online of him in a top hat and a tuxedo and dark sunglasses and there she was in a casket, in a wedding dress and he was holding her hand. It was really creepy and strange and my first reaction, like most people’s reaction probably, and probably the reason it was newsworthy, was, “That's really gross and weird and is it even legal? Are you allowed to do that?” And then I sat down to write the song just because I had a strong reaction to it and I realized that it’s not a big stretch to understand how he might have been feeling. This was the woman he wanted to spend his life with and she got taken from him earlier than he thought. You know, you can try, but you can't hang on to it forever. There's a lot of talk about forever in love songs, in love and in life, in media and stories and so on, but it does not exist. The song starts out as kind of a funny song, like a macabre dark humour and then it moves into sort of a sweet and sad resolution in the end. It’s definitely the strangest song I have ever written, but it is up there as one of my favourites and it's been going over really well live.
SIGNE: Do you have a piece of advice for new songwriters?
JEREMY: It’s really hard to give advice because everybody is different, but one thing that I learned later is that there's a lot to be said for editing and revising. So if you have a song that you think is great, then that's awesome and you should make a recording, a demo at least. Then have an open mind about playing it for people who you trust and if they give you feedback, try changing it, try writing a better chorus or try writing a better verse or changing the melody and then go back and compare it to the first version you did. Chances are your first version, your intuition, is going to be right and that may be the best version of the song, but you might surprise yourself. Revision is a very powerful tool when it comes to making a good song into a great song.
SIGNE: When you were a kid did you know that you wanted to be a songwriter?
JEREMY: When I was a kid I was a songwriter. I started writing music as far back as I can remember, playing the piano. My grandmother had one of those organs with an old drum machine in it and I loved that thing. When I say I wrote songs, I mean I made things up and I made up words; but I had greater ambition than I had ability. It wasn't until high school that I actually started writing music. I always expressed myself musically from a young age and wanted to do it as some part of my living.
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Craig Northey is a diverse songwriter who is not only the lead songwriter and front-man of the band Odds, but he has also written music for film and TV, and released an album with Jesse Valenzuela from Gin Blossoms and has co-written songs with a long list of songwriters. He is known for writing upbeat pop/rock songs, one of the defining sounds of the 90s, including Odds songs “Someone Who's Cool” and “Make You Mad,” from their 1996 album Nest. He writes fun, beautiful melodies and has a poetic lyrical style, with unique turns of phrases. Hearing his lyrics, makes me feel like he says things in a way that they've never been said before. Perhaps it's his use of metaphors that draws the listener to the song so effectively.
I only met Craig in person after the interview. The day after the Jim Cuddy/Whitehorse show at The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, Craig and his band Odds graced the same stage, inviting established Canadian songwriters to join them: (former co-front-man of Barenaked Ladies) Steven Page and Sloan's Chris Murphy and Jay Ferguson. It was fantastic.
SIGNE: How did you get into songwriting? Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?
CRAIG: I don’t really remember the first one. When I was a kid and songs would come on the radio and I would be singing along; then all of a sudden, [the song] would go in a direction that I didn’t expect and I thought, “I would never do that - I would have done this.” I think that sort of natural tendency to want to hear something that’s in your head started to bear fruit later on as I fooled around with the guitar and the piano. I started on violin. So, it’s not really much of a songwriting instrument. When I got into guitar and we were all in these kid’s rock bands as teenagers, everybody wanted to play other people’s songs, but all the people who we admired wrote their own. So, I started giving it a shot.
SIGNE: Who are some of your favourite songwriters?
CRAIG: Oh my gosh! That list is so long. Aren't one in 10 people on the planet songwriters? I suppose that without knowing it, I didn’t really think about writers per se; I was being influenced by the songs themselves. So, my favourite songwriters were The Beatles to begin with, because they left such an indelible mark with their songs. Later, taking apart and dissecting what they did was a revelation. Those were my first favourites. There have been so many since.
SIGNE: Is there one writer who you started listening to and thought, “I want to write like that?”
CRAIG: It happens all the time. I love Nick Lowe. He's been a huge influence on me, in terms of what I admire about feeling the songs. I think a lot of songwriters get into the craft of songwriting and it’s quite a compliment to have someone say that they think you're a great crafts-person of songs, but really it's a better compliment to find that the song has emotionally charged somebody or made them move, or have a visceral reaction. Whether they hate it or like it, that it got some kind of physical or spiritual reaction out of people, that’s the biggest compliment. I love Otis Redding, some of the great Soul/R&B writers, Isaac Hayes, Hayes & Porter, Steve Cropper, William Bell and a lot of the Stax writers. I love the Motown writers, like Smokey Robinson. So much of that wasn’t about trying to be clever, but it got to the point emotionally.
SIGNE: You've done a lot of co-writing. Have you had an opportunity to work with some writers who you admired and you really wanted to write with?
CRAIG: Yes, sometimes unwittingly. I had a great mentorship, and it probably should have been the first name I came up with when you asked about favourites. It was with Warren Zevon. In the early to middle part of my life, he took our band on the road as his opening band and also as his [backing] band. In my high school years, I really got into [his music]. I had a chance to get mentored every day on what it takes to be a writer and to have the discipline to do it.
SIGNE: Do you have one of your songs that you are the most proud of or you were the happiest to write?
CRAIG: I always think the best is yet to come and I don’t dwell too much on what my favourites might have been. There are certain songs, that when I sing them, retain their richness; and I can hold an interest in them. But it's probably - I figured out over the years - because I don’t play them that many times. The ones that get played over and over, I go in and out of understanding whether they're good or not, because they are just part of me. I have a lot of Odds songs that I performed often and I've lost track of how to grade them against the rest of the things I've done. Just because they were popular, doesn’t really mean they're any better than some of the other things that didn’t have the chance to become popular. So, in my own opinion, the ones that you don’t get to play too often probably hold a lot more interest.
SIGNE: Have you changed the way that you write songs, as you have developed as a songwriter?
CRAIG: Yes! When I hear the stuff that I started out doing, I'm so glad there was no Internet. I’m so glad that most people didn’t hear it, because it was shit! It was crazy! You know. You learn so much, and that stuff, that voice you have when you’re 16, 17, 18, speaks maybe to people who are also 16, 17 and 18, but doesn’t always speak to you when you’re 52. There are things you have to say at that time that you think are either important or crazy, or you're trying to impress a girl. So, you look back on them and then kind of chuckle. I think I just evolved as a person and what I have to say is more about who I am at any given point.
SIGNE: What inspires you to write songs? Is it things that happen in your life or stories that pop into your head, or other people?
CRAIG: It's things that happen in my life and also things that interest me in terms of language or someone else’s experience that seems to resonate with me. As I go around on the bus or train and I overhear people speaking or I see something or see a scenario out the window, unfolding, I paint a mental picture of it, and then imagine myself into the situation. I imagine how my life is reflected in what they are talking about. I just day dream and sometimes the kernel of an idea will come out.
A lot of times, songs come from sounds. Just picking up an instrument or hearing something as you're playing it and fooling around and all of a sudden, that sound and that shape interests you and you repeat it and repeat it, until it grows into something. Then all the things that go with the song come later, when you pick the words that best suit that shape and that mood. Earlier on, I exclusively had words written in a book and then I would just fish through it to see what chunks of words or chunks of ideas fit with the music that I came up with. Then I would start moving them around until they fit. So, sometimes the two ideas existed separately, but then they found each other.
SIGNE: Do you take a long time to build a song? Do you sometimes have songs that just flow right out in 15 or 20 minutes, or is it sort of a growing process with most of your songs?
CRAIG: I would say, it’s both. You nailed it on the head with the question. It can be 10 minutes and it can be two years. I had songs that I wrote with Colin James, that we worked on forever and just couldn’t find the handle. We knew something was great about it, but really didn’t know what was going to tie it all together and then through the process of just hammering away at it every once in a while, we got there. Then other stuff just comes out. It’s almost like being in a dream state and I think songwriters should always enjoy that moment. You don’t enjoy it so much as it's happening, because it's just happening so fast and then afterwards you should reflect on it and have a beer and say thank you to whatever that was that made that happen.
SIGNE: What do you do when you're stuck, to get through that process and to continue on with the song?
CRAIG: Some people think all great songs are the ones that happen in 10 minutes, and all the ones that you worked on aren’t great songs, but I don’t think that’s true. I have learned to be fairly pragmatic about it, especially as a family man with three children. If you have two hours, you can sit in a chair and not think you have an idea and just by sitting there, something happens. One of my friends who is well known for his comedy and also writes songs, Kevin McDonald from Kids in the Hall, calls it 'writing through the shit'. You just sit there, you start and usually the first things are crap, and eventually one thing happens that isn’t, and that’s writing through the shit.
SIGNE: What is your most important piece of advice for new songwriters?
CRAIG: Ask yourself why you do it. Sometimes, writing for the sake of writing is not a good idea. It can be a compulsion or a disease. You know, I can’t stop myself from doing it once I start, to my own detriment in my personal life. I will be thinking about a song title while I’m having a really important life discussion or argument with somebody; I'll hear something they say, while it's right in the heat of battle and my brain will say, “Wow that’s a great idea.” I’m already expanding on that idea, when they realize that I’m really not there. I’m not having the actual discussion with them and that’s really dangerous. You know you have a disease similar to alcoholism or something else chronic, if you’ve got that. Then that’s going to be your advantage, because it’s going to come from the heart and it’s going to always come from a place of integrity; and I think sometimes, as writers, a lot of people get into the game because of the romance of what they see and the lifestyle of being a musician and what they might see as fame or success, and that’s the worst place to come from. That doesn’t really make very good songs most of the time.
SIGNE: Have you been involved in some songwriting workshops and teaching new songwriters?
CRAIG: I have, yeah.
SIGNE: What’s your experience with that? Do you find that some people connect to having steps set out for them, or do people just want to be inspired creatively?
CRAIG: There are different responses. What I have noticed about it is just how exciting it is to see new songwriters coming from wherever they come from. You can walk into it thinking, “What do I have to teach anybody really, I mean I do this, but can I teach it?” Everybody goes into those situations thinking like that. It’s a really weird world to be objective about it when it’s a subjective thing. So, what’s great about it is you go into that situation with a bunch of new people and you find out you can learn from anybody, even somebody who's starting out and has not got the experience that you have - they might have a fresh perspective and a unique way of doing things that comes from their life and their life lessons and the way that they feel.
New songwriters should never get down when they hear someone like me speak about my experiences and it doesn't seem to resonate with them, because it's a subjective reality. There are formulas for making pop songs, but the stuff that you put in the songs and in those formulas can be completely different. It's hard to say, “This is the way to do it.” I think that anything that gives someone a skeleton or a framework is going to help. They might get to step five and go, “I'm done!” And that would be enough for them, just reading it and having an experiment to try.
On breaking patterns:
CRAIG: You look for ways to reinvent yourself over and over because it’s important. There are little games you can play, like this. Listen to a song that you love, that doesn't fit any of the ways that you would write a song, but you still love it and you can’t understand why it doesn’t go verse, chorus, double verse, double chorus, middle eight, chorus out (etc.) - whatever pattern you've fallen into. Find out what makes it tick by using the exact arrangement, but none of its musical elements. What you create bears no resemblance to the original thing. Brian Eno has a lot of these kinds of creativity, or reinvention strategies.
SIGNE: I wrote this book to have something for people at the workshops and also to reach out to those who want to write songs and don’t know how to start.
CRAIG: It’s a valuable thing, anything that makes it unintimidating and says anybody can do this if you just follow a few steps, because when you're looking at it [music], it seems like a bunch of glorious sounds that go together somehow in a magical way.
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Kat Goldman is a Toronto-born singer-songwriter who developed her songwriting skills while attending university in Boston, then moved back to Toronto and became a regular fixture in the local music scene in the late 90s and early 2000s, amazing everyone who heard her play. There's an honesty and heartfelt beauty to her songs that people connect with; a way of telling stories in her own unique way, with a playfulness that brings out that joyful feeling of youth in the listener. The song “Everyone's Getting Married,” from The Great Disappearing Act (2000) is a great example of this.
After releasing her first album, Shawn Colvin and Suzanne Vega's manager in New York discovered Kat, in 2001. As she was preparing to move there in 2004, she was involved in a bizarre accident in which a car went through the window of a bagel shop she was in and struck her. While learning to walk again and motivated by her experience, she wrote songs for her second album, Sing Your Song, selected by CBC as one of the best albums of 2007.
One of her best songs, “Annabel,” was covered by Grammy-nominated Winnipeg band, the Duhks. I love that song so much, that I once told her if I ever had a daughter, I would want to name her Annabel, because that song is so beautiful. It turns out that I'm not the only one who shares that sentiment. Several people have told her that very same thing. There's something about the song that connects with people's emotions. Maybe it's because it was written from the heart. It was an inspiration for Kathleen Winter's novel Annabel.
I first met Kat in 2000 at the Free Times Cafe. We became friends and played shows together and I've always loved her music. Her albums have received great critical acclaim amongst fans, press and songwriters; drawing praises from established songwriters like Dar Williams. The title track of her third album, Gypsy Girl, sparked a personal congratulations email from Ron Sexsmith. She's a songwriters' songwriter. Maybe it's from studying English literature or from finding a way to connect with words that trigger your emotions.
SIGNE: How did you first get into writing songs? Did you always know that you wanted to do this?
KAT: It’s funny. When I was 11 years old, I had started taking piano lessons with a teacher who taught pop music, because I had expressed to my mom that I wanted to learn popular music. One night I had a dream that I wrote a song and I kind of remembered it and so I woke up in the morning and wrote it down on the piano and it was the first song I'd ever written.
I didn't think about writing again after that until I was about 19 and struggling with a lot of depression. I was learning the guitar at that time. I found that picking up the guitar and starting to write about it was helpful. Then at the same time, I was starting to learn a lot of cover songs by Bob Dylan and Shawn Colvin, Dar Williams and Paul Simon. I walked into the Free Times Cafe one night and asked Glen Hornblast if I could play a Dylan song. So I played a Dylan song and he said, “Hey, would you like to do a show here sometime?” and I said, “Sure.” The thing was, I didn't have any of my own songs written yet. So I started to play shows at the Free Times and I think the first show I played there, every song was a cover song and then they asked me back to do another show. That's when I started to think, “I would really like to start writing my own stuff and be able to play it at shows.” So I started writing songs, but a lot of them were very tongue-in-cheek. I had this song called “The Prozac Song.”
“There is a pill, pill, pill for when I'm ill, ill, ill. It gives me glee, glee, glee. It makes me me, me, me. For when I am really groanin' it will raise my serotonin and it gives new definition to happy.” And the crowd would be roaring and banging their glasses and everything, but I couldn’t really take myself that seriously. So, with a lot of songs I would try to put some humour into them and it just started to become more natural and I was getting good feedback from people at shows. Then when I was about 27 I wrote “Annabel,” which took everything to another level. I definitely spent more time on that song than I had ever spent on a song before and I really put intention into it. I wanted to create a beautiful ballad that reminded me of some of the old Bob Dylan ballads that I love. So I wrote it over a few months and what really supported me to keep writing was the feedback and the validation I got at open stages and at shows, and I just started to really love it.
SIGNE: Who are your songwriting influences? I know you mentioned a couple of people who you covered. Are there other influences that you had as well?
KAT: I love and will always love Paul McCartney and Elton John (old Elton John stuff). Especially Paul McCartney. He has been a real hero of mine and continues to kind of wow me every time he puts out a record. He has a magical quality about his songwriting that I aspire to. I don’t know if I will ever reach it, but he inspires me very much.
SIGNE: Have you ever met a songwriter who you really admired and what did you say?
KAT: Dar Williams. I have been a fan of hers from the early 90s. I was living in Boston and a friend of mine played her first cassette for me and she became one of my early songwriting heroes, because she was a woman who was being really honest about her feelings and her songwriting, but she was also very clever about it. Years later I started working very fortuitously with her manager and he paired us up on a gig. He got me to open for her and that's when I first met her and I think I said to her, “You are one of my songwriting heroes.” I told her that a few times.
Also, Jonatha Brooke. I was able to meet her, doing a show with her in Toronto at the old C'est What and she always blew me away and I just couldn't believe I was sharing the stage with her. I've found that when I would open for people who are high profile songwriters, I would always get very shy, painfully shy. I just didn't know what I could say to them. I felt kind of at a loss for words. I just sort of had this feeling, like I couldn't believe I was sharing the stage with this person. I still feel a little shy around Dar Williams. I have now done about four or five shows with her. I just did a couple of shows with her this winter and I still feel shy around her. Not that she makes me feel intimidated - she is the nicest person in the world - but I think it’s my own feeling of low self-esteem: it’s my tragic flaw. I could never believe that my songwriting would match up to theirs.
SIGNE: So many people admire your songwriting.
KAT: I am so grateful for that. I place very high expectations on myself and it’s not easy for me to write a good song, a keeper. So that leaves a lot of months of the year where you can stew and be like, “Will I ever write another song again?” But then it comes and you're reminded, “This is what I'm supposed to be doing.”
SIGNE: What do you do when you feel stuck with your songwriting?
KAT: I used to do the morning pages, where you write three pages nonstop of pre-associative writing. That really helped me for many years. Sometimes I clean my bathroom floor. I find that when I scrub my bathroom, for some reason songwriting ideas come to me, or if I am cleaning my apartment (which doesn't happen often enough). I'll go for a walk or I'll be jotting down ideas and somehow, a lot of the time, magically it begins to come together; it crystallizes in a way, or the pieces of the puzzle start to present themselves. I'll be walking somewhere and suddenly I'll get a line of a lyric in my head. Often in the morning I'll wake up with a melody in my head and I think, “What is this melody?” It just relentlessly keeps playing in my head and I think that it’s trying to tell me something. I've got to pay attention to it and work with it.
Another thing that is helpful is this: I'll get a new album that inspires me (I just bought Paul McCartney's new album) and listening to what other people are doing, helps to open me up and break through some of the blocks.
SIGNE: Do you have any advice for new songwriters, something that you've learned while developing as a songwriter?
KAT: Go to open stages; try out your songs in a non-judgemental environment where you can get positive feedback from people you trust. Believe in yourself. Believe that you can do this and just keep working at it. Some of my first songs were so bad and I still write some stupid songs. I have to make that judgement call, “Is this going to be something I play in public or is this just some of the cobwebs that I need to clear in order to get to something better?” Place high expectations on yourself. Don't be satisfied with something until you really feel you know it’s a winner. Raise the bar for yourself and keep it high.
Also, if you have a line or a verse that is going nowhere; write it down; look at it on the page; and then ask the song what it is trying to say. What is the song about? That will help direct you.
SIGNE: What's the song that you feel you enjoyed writing the most or a song that you felt the most proud of writing and completing and getting out into the world?
KAT: I've had a lot of joyful moments, where a song came together in a way that was really exciting for me. One that comes to mind is “Sing Your Song,” because I wrote it after my [car] accident and I feel like in a short amount of time the lyrics sum up a lot of what my experience was after the accident. I realized that I'm not going to be here for long; we are all going to die and the point is to live your life and make art. Celebrate who you are and the things that you have in your life. I remember when I started writing “Sing Your Song.” It was just me on the piano and it was very slow. When I took it to Maury [LaFoy], my producer, he kind of took it to another level and made it this really emphatic, triumphant theme song for the record, Sing Your Song. So the production of it really changed how it was from when I first started writing it, and for me that was really exciting.
SIGNE: What inspires you to write? What gives you that spark for a song?
KAT: Sometimes I think songwriting is like the perfect defence mechanism, because it protects you from having to face some of life’s deep pains and traumas.
I think I like the challenge of putting into words and music a problem or a painful experience from my life. I can mould it and create it and perfect it and then ultimately if I make it beautiful, hopefully people will like it and relate to it. Then it means that not only do they recognize that pain in me, but they can sympathize or empathize with it, and for me that's like the ultimate validation. That's when you are really successful with a song - if it taps into other people’s souls and reaches into their lives.
SIGNE: Have you done any co-writing? What was your experience of it?
KAT: Co-writing never worked for me, because my songs are so personal and it always felt that if someone else was trying to put a line in here or there, it didn't feel like a genuine experience. I wish it had and it might just be that I didn't hook up with the right people. I remember this very funny story. At one time, in New York City, when I was working with Dar Williams' manager, I said to him, “I'm really blocked with my songwriting and I don't know what to do.” And he said, “Well come in and I’ll fix you up with this producer I know and you guys can see if you can co-write.” So I went to some building at like 33rd and 8th Avenue or something and I walked in and there were all these framed medals and pictures of Shawn Colvin (who he had worked with) and some other people, and we sat down in his office and it was like I just sat there and stared out the window whistling and stared at his face. It was such a failure. There was no connection whatsoever and now that I think of it, it was so bizarre to try to write with a total stranger, because it’s almost like a privacy thing. My songs are very personal. They're really so truthfully about me and my life that it just seems bizarre to let someone in on that process. I'm still open to it though.
For instance, I have this friend Alex Wong who was a part of this duo called The Animators, in Brooklyn a few years ago. Now he has just moved down to Nashville. I would love to write with Alex because I know him and love him and I trust him and he knows my music. So I wouldn't close the door to that. I would still be open to co-writing if it were under the right circumstances.
~~~~~
I spent the latter part of my teenage years listening to Treble Charger, Greig Nori's band. I was a huge fan, especially of the album, Maybe It's Me (1997) - and still am. That album has the perfect balance of beautiful melodies and high-energy pop-punk, with a 90s indie-rock sensibility. Like Blue Rodeo, it's a band fronted by two lead singer-songwriters with very different styles, perfectly blending together. Bill Priddle's moodier songs, like “Red” and “Ever She Flows” are a perfect balance for Greig's more up-tempo “Friend of Mine” and “How She Died”. “Fade” is a beautifully crafted melody, as well as “American Psycho” from their follow-up album, Wide Awake Bored.
I first saw Treble Charger play around 2001 or 2002 at The Warehouse in Toronto (which later became Kool Haus/Guvernment) and I only saw them play again a few weeks ago at an outdoor festival in Toronto called Roncy Rocks! I got to meet Greig at a songwriting workshop that he was teaching with Mark Zubek. Greig has an amazing grasp on the craft of writing songs and how to bring out the best in songwriters. He can pinpoint what's working about a song and what might make it better, which has led to his career as a producer, working with bands like Sum 41 and Hedley, as well as managing bands and providing advice for artists on MuchMusic's show disBand.
I had the opportunity to witness first hand his vast songwriting knowledge and ability to bring out the best in artists, by getting the chance to have a session with him, going through my songs and identifying what's working and where improvements could be made, as part of Coalition Music's Artist Entrepreneur program, which is a fantastic program that helps musicians grow as songwriters, performers and self-managed artists.
SIGNE: Do you remember the first song you ever wrote and can you tell me a little bit about it?
GREIG: I took a Gordon Lightfoot song, “Don Quixote,” the one that goes, “through the woodland, through the valley comes a horseman wild and free,” and I got a Gordon Lightfoot songbook and learned the chords to that song and then I used the chord pattern and put my own melody to it. It was the first time I figured out anything about how somebody structured a song. Using those chords for a verse and a chorus, I took the pattern and wrote a whole new melody for it and no one ever knew that that's what I had done. I remember it vividly, coming down with that song and playing it for my parents. I remember them saying, “Oh! That’s clearly better than anything you have done, that we’ve heard up to now.” So I thought, “That’s how you do it, look at chord structures from other bands.” It had a really great positive impact on me.
SIGNE: How old were you?
GREIG: I was probably in Grade 6, so I was 11. I started playing guitar when I was in Grade 5. I had a paper route at that time and I remember I used to walk around on the paper route and write songs in my head. I would write them in ways that to me they sounded like they were full songs, like how they would sound on the radio. I would hum the melody and I never even tried to play those on guitar, because I didn't know how to play guitar very well at the time.
SIGNE: Who were your favourite songwriters, when you were growing up?
GREIG: By far, the first musician who’s songs really hit me strongly was Neil Young. There were a couple of key moments when I was a kid, of certain bands and albums that were introduced to me. One was Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin. My older sister's boyfriend, who was in high school at that time, came over and played Physical Graffiti for me, and I remember hearing that record and thinking that I had never heard anything like that up to then and it really had a huge impact on me. I couldn’t listen to that album enough.
Another one that came along right at the same time was Neil Young’s Harvest record and it was the same thing, I became obsessed with it. In fact, when I discovered Harvest, I realized right away that these sounded like songs that I could learn how to play. I was just starting out on acoustic guitar. So, I went and figured them out by ear; I didn’t even go and buy a Neil Young songbook. I learned to play guitar from trying to figure out those songs. Another one that really hit me hard was Steely Dan, Can’t Buy A Thrill. It’s the first Steely Dan record. The big song that came off of that was “Reelin' in the Years.” There was also, strangely, Black Sabbath's, Master of Reality.
So I got a really great wide-spectrum introduction to music and it was all through my sister’s boyfriend who had really great taste in music. I'm thankful, because he introduced me to Steely Dan who have really polished, jazz-influenced, really technical music; he introduced me to the heavier Black Sabbath and introduced me to one of the best records that Led Zeppelin has ever done, Physical Graffiti, a great example of rock 'n roll. Then he introduced me to Neil Young’s Harvest, which is this country, acoustic rock album. I consider Neil Young to be one of the most important musicians in my life as an influence. The older I get, the more I realize that there are very few musicians who can do what he has done. He has been considered a grandfather of grunge rock; he's got this amazing heavy guitar side to him and also has an equally, if not even more accomplished, acoustic folk side. When you look at what this guy is known for and the spectrum of the types of songs that he has written, there are very few musicians out there who can be held up as being the most revered father of grunge, and also one of the world’s most important folk, alt-country, Americana artists.
I think about the bands that I have grown up with, all the classic rock bands that are out there, like AC/DC and Tom Petty. I've gone to see a lot of their shows and as they grow older their shows have lost all significance. I find very few of these musicians can put out anything that even matches or touches what they were once known for in their earlier years, but Neil Young can. The guy still puts out albums now that are just as relevant and just as important as what he was doing 40 years ago. When you go see a concert of his now, you feel as though you are seeing a concert like what you would have seen 30 years ago. In fact I did see Neil Young in the early 80s in Toronto, after Rust Never Sleeps first came out and I just saw him at Massey Hall a couple of months ago for that Honor the Treaties event. I've got to say, I have seen Neil Young about four times and what I saw two months ago was probably the best I've ever seen him play out of all the shows. He can deliver these songs in a way that has the exact same passion and intensity and his voice hasn’t changed one bit. There are very few musicians who can accomplish that.
I have this radio show that’s going to be on 102.1 the Edge and I have made a decision to only play music on the show from Neil Young’s new site, Pono [ponomusic.com]. His site is going up against iTunes. He figured out how to create MP3s with a much, much better quality. Maybe I could get an interview with him. Hopefully, I will somehow be able to meet this guy before I die.
SIGNE: Have you ever met any of your other favourite songwriters and if you did, how did you feel and what did you say?
GREIG: I am not a shy person, but I realized I can become very star struck by certain people. I met Elvis Costello, and I froze; I didn’t know what to say. I met Dave Grohl when Treble Charger toured with Foo Fighters for eight weeks, through the United States. Foo Fighters had just put out their album The Colour and the Shape which had “Monkey Wrench” and “Everlong” on it; it was a big album for them. You know, I don’t mean to say this in the wrong way, but I don’t hold Dave Grohl up to be at the same level as Elvis Costello or Neil Young, but I still froze with him too. It took me about two weeks into that tour before I could even bring myself to talk to him. I just realized that happens with people that I greatly respect, like Elvis Costello. It would happen if I ever met Neil Young or Paul McCartney.
I think these people have heard everything and what could I possibly say to them that could engage them in any way? You hope that you might be able to strike up a great, intelligent conversation with them, but I think, “What can I possibly say that’s going to engage this guy that he hasn’t heard a thousand times before?” I haven’t been able to leave any kind of impact on the people that are my heroes so far, although I do have a great Dave Grohl story.
We were about two weeks into that Foo Fighters/Treble Charger tour and I had not even spoken a word to Dave, but I was at the side of the stage for every one at the Foo Fighters' shows. I knew every word to every song that was played in their set, and I was a huge fan of The Colour and the Shape. So, we were about six shows in and I had now been sitting at the side of the stage for six shows. We started in Boston and by this point we had gotten to Montreal. It's the middle of the Foo Fighters' set and I have to take a leak and so I'm thinking, “Okay I'll wait for them to end the song and then I'll run backstage, take a pee and run back out hopefully before they know. I won’t miss too much of the next song.”
So I ran off right at the end of the song and I rushed back to the side of the stage and Dave Grohl looked over at me and then he looked out at the audience and he said, “Alright everybody, he's back. I can start the next song now.” Then he turned to me and said, “Dude I knew you didn’t want to miss the next song so I waited until you got back. You probably just took a leak backstage didn’t you?” I was nodding my head and he turned to the audience, “This guy ... in the opening band Treble Charger,” he said, “from the day that we started this tour he's been at the side [of the] stage for every show of ours; he knows every word of our songs and I can tell he is a great fan.” I couldn’t believe it, it's amazing and that says so much about Dave Grohl's personality and the kind of person he is. I had never met him yet and he still stopped the show to tell the audience to wait until I got back. Is that not amazing?
SIGNE: That's awesome.
GREIG: I didn’t even know that he knew who I was at that point.
SIGNE: Was it easier to talk to him after that?
GREIG: Oh yeah, after that it broke everything down. I just couldn’t freaking believe it. That was probably one of the most beautiful things that's ever happened to me on tour, for sure.
SIGNE: What song are you most proud of writing and why?
GREIG: By far it's the song called “Brand New Low” and I'm also very proud of the song “American Psycho,” but “Brand New Low,” to me is just one of those songs that came out and was recorded exactly in the way that I was really proud. I am very, very satisfied with that song, because I feel like it was a great achievement, that I had reached a level that I had always aspired to. The more you play your songs over the years, the more you really start recognizing and appreciating the good songs that have come out of you, because you realize that you never get tired of playing them. They always feel really good and you sing them in a different way. You sing them from your soul.
[I'm also proud of] another song that I didn’t write, that's part of the Treble Chargers repertoire. “Red” - it was written by my childhood friend Bill Priddle, the other guitar player and singer in the band. We reunited a couple of years ago and we played “Red” on stage, this song I had played hundreds of times. I turned to him and said, “You know, Bill, I have never gotten tired of playing this song. Every time I play it, I still get emotionally moved by it.” I feel the same way with “Brand New Low.” I feel the same and I'm very proud of “American Psycho,” because I see how much it connects with people. I really wish I had been able to tap into being able to write an “American Psycho” or a “Brand New Low” all the time and consistently pump them out.
Over the span of our career, Treble Charger probably stumbled across a handful of really great songs that really connected with people. Then there are other bands that are able to do that from their first record and continue to write that quality of song and continue to grow and make it even better. To me, that’s sort of what it's all about. You realize, you don’t know where these songs come from. I know a lot of musicians have said that they don’t know where their songs come from, but I do know this, that I wasn’t able to channel it as much as some other very big musicians have been able to. I feel like if I had somehow understood how to tap into and be able to channel it, so that I could consistently create that quality of song, that perhaps I would be still doing it now and have a much bigger career, but you just realize that some people have it and some don’t. We were lucky enough to have it sometimes.
I heard a really great thing in a Bob Dylan interview. The interviewer asked Dylan if he thought he would ever be able to write songs again that would be as important or as good as the songs that he wrote back when he was at his peak (from Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde records). His answer was so great. He said that he remembered the day that it left him and he remembered the day that it showed up too. [The songs] came through him and it lasted a number of years. When it left, he sat down to write and it wasn’t there.
I heard another great thing too in a Neil Young interview. The interviewer asked where the songs came from. This is the quintessential question musicians are asked. His answer was really interesting to me; he said that he believes that he is not the owner of his songs. He believes that they come through him in the same way that Dylan was explaining it. He looks at it as his responsibility as a musician to record and to play the songs; keep them alive so that people can hear them and keep himself healthy enough to continually go out and play them in the best way that they can be played, because they were given to him as a gift.
I think he is being a bit humble, but I do like the way he talked about the responsibility of having to continuously stay healthy and to continuously get out there and play in the best way that you know you can.
Why can’t I write another “Brand New Low”? I don’t know why I woke up that morning and a song that came out was so much better than other things I'd written. It is a very strange thing and I have thought about it a lot; I have talked to a lot of musicians about it. Really, the answer you inevitably get most of the time from these musicians is that they don’t know either. It just comes. It's a weird thing.
SIGNE: Do you find you write songs differently now than when you first started?
GREIG: Oh absolutely, you know I’ve said to a lot of the bands that I have worked with, the more you do it, the better you get and I really believe that with songwriting. To me it has definitely proven to be true. The more I song write, the better I get. I wish I had written more. I tend to be a procrastinator. When Treble Charger was more active, 10 years ago, I knew that I should probably be writing more and I knew that if I'd been writing more I would be getting better. My songwriting is definitely a far different approach than it was when I first began. You learn things about songwriting, little things that you figure out as you go along that allow you to write better and better songs. You learn little tricks that allow you to tap into that psyche, that give you a level of satisfying creativity.
SIGNE: What inspires you to write songs?
GREIG: I will most often be inspired by hearing another song by somebody else that captures an emotion. I never go in and listen to a song and think, “I am going to copy that chord pattern.” I don’t listen to songs like that anymore, I listen to the emotion that it has, the mood that the song evokes. Sometimes I’ll come across a song I have never heard before and it taps into me in the saddest, most melancholic sort of way, by the instruments that were used to create that mood. I want to write a song that captures that mood. It is very inspirational to me.
SIGNE: What do you do when you feel stuck with your songwriting?
GREIG: Here is one of the biggest revelations I have had: One of the things that I realized that allows you to get stuck in songwriting, is when you start realizing that you are writing the same song over and over again, using the same chord patterns. You feel like you're in a rut and one of the most important things I have learned is to put your guitar down, put your instrument down and write the song in your head, because there are no limitations there.
I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out. The second that you have a guitar in your hand and come up with a four chord pattern, you know that you might build a verse around it. Of course you have immediately limited yourself by doing that and that's why you get stuck, because you just came up with a four chord pattern, now you have to go and write a fantastic melody, something that you're trying to create some great emotion from, but you just upped the odds against you by only using those four chords. It's asinine when you think about it, right away you've put up boundaries. You have to write a melody that falls within those chords.
So one of the most important things I realized is this. Quite often a musicians will sit down, pick up a guitar and a verse will come out and then they never know where to go. Everyone always gets there and thinks, “Oh it’s such a great verse, but I can’t seem to take it anywhere.” I have learned now, if you get that verse, put the guitar down, sing the verse, walk around, sometimes for days and sing the verse in your head. Hear it like it’s a fully recorded song and that verse is just cooking along in the way that you want to hear it in a recording. In your mind, start singing the verse and then let it go. Start singing a chorus with no chords figured out; just let the melody go where you want it to go and then go back and figure out what the chords should be later. This has really drastically changed the way I write songs. Suddenly you find that you don’t get nearly as stuck, because you just got rid of all your boundaries. It's something I now share with every band I work with and let them in on this little secret.
SIGNE: Do you have a piece of advice for young songwriters?
GREIG: “Boy! Do I ever.” You know Malcolm Gladwell, who in 2000 wrote The Tipping Point: [How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference]? He said that you need to put in 10,000 hours [to master something]. Well, I really truly believe this. When musicians are starting out, I say this to them, “Do yourself a favour. Learn your craft; put time into it.” I find that bands put enough effort into their songwriting skills or they put enough effort into learning how to play guitar to just get them by. If you truly want to carve out a living as a musician then you owe it to yourself to put a lot of time into learning your craft. Become accomplished at it. Become good at it.
I don’t think that musicians spend nearly enough time writing songs. Like I said, the more you do it, the better you get. I don’t think they spend nearly enough time learning the craft of playing their instrument. I don’t think that they spend nearly enough time, once the song is written, on arranging it with the rest of the band. Generally speaking you’ll see one of the songwriters in the band bring a song to the band. If they're lucky the band will spend about an hour putting it together. Each guy puts their say into what they think they want to show up in a song. Then after that it's like, “I don’t know; that’s about all I can think of right now.”
I saw a documentary that was shot by Jean-Luc Godard, Sympathy For the Devil. He went into the studio with The Rolling Stones and he documented the writing of “Sympathy For the Devil.” He set up a camera in the studio that The [Rolling] Stones were recording in and focused on just the writing of that one song. It starts with Mick coming in and the whole band’s there and he sits on a stool and he has a very raw acoustic version of the song that he had written. He had the verse and the chorus to it, but that was about it. Every day for two weeks the band would come in and they would jam on that song - one day they would play it as a country song; the next day they'd play it as an R&B/Motown song. The next day they would play it as a reggae song and the next day they'd come in and play it as a hard rock song. Every time they played it in these different ways, something would come out of it. For instance when they played it as a Motown song, that’s where the “ooh, oohs” came in. Slowly you see that this masterpiece comes to life and the biggest lesson about what I watched was this: No wonder these songs live so long and they're still significant today, because the band spent two weeks arranging the song, to find where the song is supposed to live. Is it supposed to be a country song? Is it supposed to be a Motown song? How are your ever going to know unless you try all these different ways?
Some bands will argue. You will have a band member that will say, “Can we speed it up a little bit?” I'll see a band break up over just that suggestion. They won’t even try it sometimes, let alone playing it as a reggae song. I don’t see bands doing any of this and I think, “Learn how to play your instrument. Write songs every day or as much as you can, because you are going to get better at it.” Don’t spend an hour on a song that you just wrote and think that you are going to come up with a masterpiece and think that you have just figured out everything about that song and the best way it can possibly be played. Take a step back and really think about this. I would be asking myself, “What am I contributing to the big picture here in music, that hasn’t already been done?”
The bar has been raised very high. If you want to write and sing a song about heartbreak, there are a thousand songs or more that have been written about that and there are some really great songs, lyrically and melodically, that have tapped into that subject, that have delivered something that is near genius.
Nobody really wants to hear mediocrity or a half-assed attempt at trying to write something. Don’t under-estimate the intelligence of people. There are bands that know they're not as good as this band or that they sound exactly like that band and I think, “What are you doing it for?”
About lyric writing:
GREIG: Write the lyrics. Then take a step back to see what the core of the subject is, hone in on the essence of what it's about. Then when you figure out what it's about, take that subject, for example 'hurt in love.' That has been written about so many times and there are so many angles and clever ways of describing it.
Take a step back and look at what you know about being hurt in love. Dig deep. There are maybe four main points that you have observed personally. You could use the first thing as the subject for your first verse. Take the most important, the most powerful of those four points and make that what the chorus is about. Turn the other three into your verses and bridge.
Then ask yourself, “How can I best describe and capture perfectly that feeling that I was going through?” It sticks with you; you feel it in your stomach; it's a physical thing. You're micro-writing. You've broken your main subject into four and then broken those up into your best descriptions of those four things.
Write down all of the things you can remember about the feeling. Take a few lines and fit those words into the melody. Every band I've done it with has said that they've just written the best lyrics they've written in their lives. The amount of substance and honesty that came out of it was more than they've ever been able to dig into, tackle and achieve.
There's one goal in songwriting, to have people experience an emotion from it. If it's a fast rock song, then they want to roll down the window and drive really fast to it. If it's a love song, then they want to cry. That's what makes people react to songs, the emotion that it evokes. AC/DC has achieved that perfectly. Neil Young or Tom Petty will come up with a sad melody that can make you cry. You invoke an emotion when you figure out how to dig down deep. This will help you tremendously.
SIGNE: You were talking earlier about sometimes having a song going through your head for a while. How long does it typically take you to write a song?
GREIG: That varies pretty drastically. A lot of musicians say that some of their best songs came out in 15 minutes and I have experienced that. So, sometimes if you are really lucky a song comes out really fast and it comes out in its entirety. Other songs, you have to labour over them and they just don’t come, but you know the verse is so good that you don’t want to give up on it. I do find though that the ones that come out fastest are usually the ones that make better songs.
SIGNE: When you were a kid, did you know you wanted to be a musician and if you didn’t know, what did you want to be?
GREIG: I knew when I was walking around on that paper route when I was in Grade 5, that this is what I wanted to do. My parents told me that from the earliest days, when I was sitting in the backseat of a car and music was on the radio, I really responded to it and they always noticed that I would be the one who would be singing melodies of what I was hearing, when I could barely talk, and my sisters wouldn’t even register it. I believe that sometimes there are kids that identify with and really tune into music at a very early age and I think I was like that. I knew in Grade 5 that it was my dream.
The biggest thing that held me back was the fear of living up to what my parents’ expectations were. Parents can have a really strong hold on you. I knew my parents never took music as a career seriously. They weren't negative about it, but I could just tell that they put a lot of more value in going to university to possibly be a lawyer or a doctor. It’s not that they were pulling me down for aspiring to be a musician; I could tell that they just didn’t look at it as being a realistic goal.
When I was in first year university, I knew I didn’t really like university and I was home for the summer where I had a summer job. I was living with my parents and I was downstairs in the basement playing guitar and my dad came downstairs and said, “I've got to tell you something.” He said, “Since you were a kid, of all the years growing up through grade school and high school and everything, there's one thing that’s always remained a constant with you - and its music.” He said, “You were in bands since grade school; you were in bands all the way through high school and you’re still down here in first year university and what do you do when you get home from your summer job? You run downstairs so you can play music.” And he said to me, “I think that you shouldn’t go back to university next year and that you should try and make a go at music.” I looked at him and realized what a hold he actually had on me. That was all I needed to hear and it had this unbelievable release for me and changed everything. Thank God he did that.
Years later I thanked him for that. I don't even think he remembered it. To me it was probably the biggest thing in my life that had happened. For him, he probably thought that I would give it a shot for a year, then I'd go back to school the next year. I don’t think he understood what it meant. A lot of kids are held back by being told that their goals are unrealistic when they're not. You realize how fast you can excel at something when you allow yourself to do something that you are really passionate about. That’s what you are going to excel at in life.
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Taylor Abrahamse is a voice actor and musician from Toronto. Since a young age, Taylor has experienced a vibrant career in the arts, with lead roles in five television series, as well as many supporting roles. He was a Top 40 contestant on Canadian Idol, and has written music for Disney XD and various artists.
He co-created and wrote the music for "The Beaver Den: A New Canadian Musical," which has gained a cult following. He also has several solo album releases, is half of the duo ‘Taylor & Bryn’, and co-leads ’The Song Creation Workshop’ with Signe.
Our story begins a long time ago, in the year they call 2003. I waited in the darkness - under my duvet, headphones on – getting ready to listen to Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road for the first time. At twelve years of age, I was about to discover my unshakable love for music & songwriting.
Like it was an ancient relic, I pretended to blow dust off the double-disc CD case. Moments later, my walkman hummed to life. As the opening song, “Funeral For A Friend” began, I was transported to another world entirely. Wolves howled in the fog of ghostly barge ships, while sombre minor chords dominated the landscape through a whirling organ. A genie casted a spell on a young traveler, who found himself running through the dark woods from an unseen monster – or was it a hallucination of his painful gypsy past? The young man ran with all his might, but couldn’t escape his fate, slamming at high speed into a brick wall – leaving behind the genie to wail in its grief. As the song faded away, I looked through the skylight above at a bounty of stars - in awe of the vastness of imagination, story and song.
Here’s the twist: that song, the song that had me say, “Wow, I want to write songs and tell stories!” - had no lyrics whatsoever. That’s right. I was making up a story and the imagery that went along with it, simply through my imagination interacting with the song. Once this song opened the floodgates, I became fascinated with the depths of my own zaniness, as well as figuring out the qualities in music that had me imagine these stories.
While a lot of factors are at play in writing a song, it became clear to me that none of the things my imagination read into Elton’s song would have been possible without the structure that its chord progression provided. To put it simply, the chord progression is the order and timing of the chords that make up a song. Just as your DNA dictates many of the traits you have as a person, I would argue that a song’s chord progression suggests many of the traits a song will have. Do you have type ‘A’ blood? Do you have freckles? Does your song have an intense chorus that talks about a victory? Does your verse have a melody that doesn’t cover a wide musical range? In the case of you, many of your traits can be traced back to your DNA, and in the case of a song – its chord progression. It became clear to me that the practice of using a chord progression as the starting point for creating a song can be a very intuitive way for a beginner or intermediate songwriter to write good music with ease. Also, having common chord patterns in mind when writing can give songwriters a natural ability to write music that clearly and powerfully compliments the song’s lyrics and suggested emotions.
The reason I chose to write this chapter is that for many songwriters, writing music while utilizing knowledge of tried-and-true chord progressions is greatly uncommon - even though it is a highly effective way to write. I really consider this one of the great secrets of songwriting, and I hope the examples in the latter part of this chapter will start to illustrate just how many excellent songwriters are intentionally or subconsciously brilliant at using each other’s chord progressions to powerful effect.
“I don’t want to rip people’s music off, I want to be me!” you may say, which I get. There’s a notion that the less someone knows about what they are doing, the more they can discover their own way to do it and create something unique. While that sounds wonderful on paper, and is definitely a hat worth wearing from time to time, using that paradigm as ‘the only way for me’ can become a crutch, and doesn’t allow for the obvious alternative: why not be educated and do it your way? The more I learn about songwriting, the more the rules of songwriting become illuminated for me; and the more the rules become illuminated, the more free I am to break them intelligently, and to powerful effect.
So, how can one use education to forge a distinct musical identity? Many of the most refreshing, influential artists of our time talk about starting out as impersonators first. For example, in addition to a love for ragtime and jazz music, Paul McCartney’s music idols were early rock acts like Little Richard and Buddy Holly. This greatly influenced the music he played and wrote with The Beatles, Wings, The Firemen and beyond. While he didn’t sight-read until later in his life, Paul has a strong understanding of harmony and melody that was informed, in part, through an understanding of chords and how they interact. In one interview, he speaks of the early days of The Beatles, who once went to Bootle, England to learn a B7 chord. “We knew A, E, but we didn’t know B7. So we made a voyage across the town, we found him and said ‘Oh great Guru. Do you know B7?’ He said yeah.”1
Like Paul, I also spent a lot of time impersonating and discovering common relationships between chords. After falling in love with Elton John’s music, I began voraciously learning the chord progressions to many of his songs, and began writing songs that used them. Branching off from the chords, I also imitated the traits of his various songs – the timing of his chord changes, the speed of the song, his vocal timbre, the shape of his melodies, the instruments he would choose, and more. Particular traits always seemed to be connected to particular kinds of chord progressions, which then seemed connected to certain feelings I wanted to express. I then expanded into learning progressions and traits from other artists, then fused all these into my own ever-expanding musical identity. I got a lot further creatively by beginning with impersonation.
Then, a few months later, I noticed that certain chord progressions (or progressions that were very close), began repeating themselves across different artists. I also noticed that when two songs used similar progressions, their particular stories and emotions also tended to have similarities. The simple example of this is: songs with happy lyrics use happy sounding chords. Songs with sad lyrics use sad sounding chords. What I began doing was making sense of everything in-between those extremes.
By the time I was 15, I instantly knew the chord progression to almost any song you could throw at me, and could take advantage of them in my own writing. I’m clear that through knowing a lot of common progressions and traits, I’d given myself a large selection of choices to choose from when writing music, and also got to expand my imagination by using these chords and traits in different ways. Being a songwriter is a bit like being a mad scientist – putting all of these ideas together, to create something new; and if the townspeople like what you write, it doesn’t end like Frankenstein.
To keep the rigour of writing fun, I made my songwriting practice into a game. I would make a new album every weekend with an eight-dollar computer microphone, guitar and a keyboard. I had a program called “Band-In-A-Box,” where I could just stick in the chords, choose a style, and a whole fake band would suddenly be playing with me. When I was done, I would give it all a good listen, experiencing this aural adventure I’d just invented, and then I’d ‘release’ my album the next day at school by burning a couple copies and printing some artwork. I would also post up a ‘Top 40’ chart each week and inconspicuously stick my ‘hit’ singles into it along with the newest Outkast hit, but that’s another story. As I entered high school, I would write a song about whatever we were studying at the time, for extra credit. Always finding a reason to write solidified and expanded the possibilities in my tool belt.
Now that we’re clear that common chord progressions and impersonation can actually be the starting point of an artist discovering their originality, I want to address just one more thing before we learn how to read chords, and get to the 33+ chord progressions. I think it may well be the hidden secret to people making the most of their songwriting potential. Through leading the “Song Creation Workshop” with Signe, I’ve really gotten to see on a whole new level how some people are their own worst enemies. Whenever Signe and I run the workshop, there are usually a few people who have never written a song before in their lives, who have enlisted us to help them start writing. Often, songwriting is a dream they had a long time ago, and yet is something they have avoided, sometimes for 20 years or more. What is it inside us that keeps us afraid of expressing ourselves, and avoiding pursuing our passions? I want to ensure through this chapter and its resources that all those who may not be in a position to take our workshop can still find access to creative freedom, and I also assert that what I am about to share is valuable for songwriters at any level.
Many people have mentally blocked themselves from a place often called ‘the zone’. ‘The zone’ is an experience of forgetting oneself in the flow of whatever is being done, putting concerns and ego aside and experiencing a high level of self-expression, performance and creativity in the process. Before you start writing with these progressions, I want to give you a greater access to ‘the zone' in your songwriting.
There is a myth that finding ‘the zone’ is a needle-in-a-haystack scenario. However, it absolutely doesn’t have to be. I want you to really consider the following concept as a way to get into ‘the zone’ with ease - and it’s a doozy. I fight this one too, believe me. Here it goes. Consider that your reality is self-created – therefore, your success is self-created and your failure is self-created. In simple terms, every single moment, your experience of, and effectiveness in your own life is your own creation.
If you really take this concept to heart, and use it on-the-court in your life, the notion of your circumstances holding you back evaporates. There are no longer circumstances, just things that we have put in our own way. Thoughts like, “It’s too late for me to make music,” “The past tells me I can’t;” or, “I have to sabotage my own happiness if I want to be a really great artist,” disappear, because it’s only YOU who gets to say who you are for yourself and others. Are you those thoughts that aren’t forwarding who you want to be, or will you create new thoughts that allow you to be truly inspired? Only you get to say. You can practice creating your life to be the way you choose, every moment of it, in any situation. Every instance you practice this, will contribute to your ability to connect with your innate creativity, allowing you to be in ‘the zone’ when you write.
It is my experience that life goes a lot better when I take full responsibility for its quality, and this frees me up when I’m writing. It’s no surprise that if you love your life and believe in yourself, you tend to be more prolific. As Leonard Cohen once said, “If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”2 I invite you to consider that whenever you aren’t where you want to be with your songwriting, there is something in your life that isn’t working for you, that you aren’t taking sufficient action around - your relationships, your success – everything. If examining certain areas of your life scares you, you may have found what areas to work on.
One of the biggest roadblocks we invent for ourselves as creators can be, ‘I need to feel a certain way before I write.’ There are countless extraordinary actions that have been avoided, and wonderful songs never written, because people were waiting to feel the right way first. If you always listen to your feelings as the ‘truth’, you may be in trouble. Alternatively, if you are willing to look from a distance at those feelings, and take actions consistent with really creating your life, it will be easier to get into ‘the zone’ everywhere in life, and easier to write with freedom.
This pursuit of ‘the zone’ is a constant journey, and humans aren’t currently designed to be perpetually in the zone. However, this mode of thinking is a muscle, and can be trained to be stronger like anything else. In fact, I encourage you to look at programs and events that allow you to train in living life from your own design. Knowing ‘how’ simply isn’t enough.
I encourage you to write songs taking advantage of the progressions on the following pages without knowing everything there is to know about writing. You’ll actually find your thirst for learning about music theory may amplify when you take the risk of writing without knowing exactly what you’re doing.
In this chapter, we are going to look at some of the chord patterns that I’ve noticed over the years. I would suspect that even some veteran songwriters haven’t noticed some of these patterns before, let alone put them into words. We’ll also start understanding Nashville chord reading style, and more.
We are going to go about this in a simple way to start – covering just enough music theory for everything else to make sense.
What is a Chord?
A chord is a collection of three or more different notes played at the same time, usually on the same instrument. Chords help create the foundation on which the melody can dance.
There are many different chords, each with unique names, such as ‘C’ (C major) or ‘Ab7’ (A flat seven). The names of the chords all depend on the notes they contain. The letters you will see in a chord are 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F' and/or 'G'. Then, there are flat (b), sharp (#), diminished, and half-diminished symbols that can go with chords, plus a plethora of different numbers and ways to play the same chord that all give distinct sounds.
What is a chord progression/pattern?
A chord progression/pattern is a succession of chords played in a piece of music. They are often laid out in a chart, allowing someone who can read chords to know when in the song to start playing the next chord. Canadian pop/rock band Sloan may have summarized chord progressions best with the name of their 1996 smash-hit album: One Chord to Another.
Note: I will be using the words ‘progression’ and ‘pattern’ interchangeably throughout the chapter, so you become accustomed to both.
How do I read chords?
In the case of reading guitar chords, each of the six strings on the guitar is represented along the top of a chord box, lowest to highest. You can see a chord box for a ‘C’ chord below.
The black dots in the ‘C’ chord box represent the notes in the chord. The numbers along the top suggest the fingering (your index finger is #1, middle finger is #2, etc.) The ‘X’ represents the strings that are not played, and the ‘0’ represents strings that are played ‘open’, meaning as is, without any fingers added. Sheet music will often give guitar players a chord box, which lays out what fingers go on which frets to make the chords in question. These boxes are made from the perspective of the guitar player bending over the guitar and looking at the neck vertically.
Another way that you may see a chord written for guitar is as a guitar tab. ‘Tabs’ lay out the fret number and the string number used at any given time in a song.
Below you will see a ‘C’ chord, moving to a ‘G’ chord, in tab form. Finger numbers are not illustrated. Neither the tab nor the chord box shows how long to hold the chord for, since with tabs, it's understood that you know the timing of the song already. This is a short form that you will often see on the Internet.
0 -- 3
1 -- 3
0 -- 0
2 -- 0
3 -- 2
X - 3
More traditionally, especially if you are working on a piano, you will see the chord written on sheet music. See a ‘C’ chord below, written in a bar of sheet music. Each space and line equals a particular note. The first note is a 'C,' located at the bottom, followed by an 'E,' two notes above, then a 'G,' two notes above that. Basic major chords are all separated by these same distances.
How do I explain the chords in my song to another musician?
In addition to traditional sheet music and other forms of notation, there are two ways of explaining the chords of your song that are just about universally understood. One way is to simply write out the chords. For example, if you were playing “Twist and Shout” by Phil Medley and Bert Russell, you may write the chords like this:
| E A | B7 |
In this example, the chords are written with lines/bars separating them in the right spots, so that way, the reader knows how many beats to hold each chord for. Let's pretend it is understood that the song is in a 4/4 time signature, meaning, between each bar are four beats. In the example below, the 'E' and the 'A' chords are each held for two beats and the 'B7' chord is held for four beats. Sometimes you will also see slashes to mark out the beats, like this:
| E // A // | B7 //// |
A more versatile way of reading chord progressions is Nashville Chord Style, named after the songwriting capital of the world. The chord is assigned a Roman numeral instead of a letter. This way, an entire song can be shifted higher or lower (called ‘changing the key’) without having to rewrite all those letters. The bandleader can just say, “Play it in 'F',” and the musicians will know what to play.
Let’s say a song is in 'C'. Take our above example of “Twist and Shout.” The main chord is 'E'. Since we are playing that song in the key of 'E', we’ll represent 'E' with an upper case ‘I’:
| I // IV // | V7 // |
If you look at a piano and count up from 'E', you would go: (1) 'E', (2) 'F', (3) 'G' and (4) 'A'. Hence, the 'A' chord is represented by a Roman numeral four ('IV'). 'B' is just one up from that, so it becomes a Roman numeral five ('V'). It is also a good idea to carry over the ‘7’ quality that is included on that chord and add it to the end, as I’ve done here, so it becomes a ‘V7’ chord.
Now, say we want to play this in the key of 'G'. We know that the 'G' would be our 'I' (one) chord. Four up from 'G' is 'C' ('G', 'A', 'B', 'C') – since we only go as high as 'G' as a letter in music, and five letter names up from 'G' is 'D'. For songs with more complex chord patterns, this saves paper and time, since one copy can be played in any key with a little bit of extra math on the reader’s part.
Depending on the notes in the chord, you might see it written in a lot of different ways. For example, if a chord is minor (often having a somber, smaller sound), it will be written in smaller case letters. Therefore, if a six ('VI') chord is minor, it will be written as ‘vi’, or if a ‘III’ chord is minor, it is written as ‘iii’. You can also see numbers on the ends of the Roman numerals, suggesting additional qualities, as well as slashes, sharps and flat symbols, things that we will touch upon a little bit later in this chapter.
Is there only one chord pattern I can use over a particular melody?
No way! There is a lot of freedom in choosing what chords to use in your songs, since many chords use similar notes. The root of the chord is the note on which the chord is built. For example, in a C major chord (‘C’), the root is a ‘C’ note. Simple! However, change a couple of notes and a C major chord can become a C minor (Cm), or add another note and it can become a C minor 9 chord (Cm9), or a ‘V7’ if ‘C7’ is the ‘V’ chord in the key you are playing in. Like with processed food at a grocery store, there are many choices. Although, thankfully with chord variations, all choices are organic! Let's observe some of the chord variations a musician has to choose from, looking at Lennon/McCartney’s “Let It Be” and observing some different chord possibilities for it.
The song starts with this pattern: | C // G // | Am // F // |
Written in Nashville style, that becomes: | I // V // | vi// IV //|
Now, this gets pretty cool. In the key of C major, that ‘vi’ chord is an A minor. Making up an A minor chord are: 'A', 'C' and 'E'. The notes that make up a C major chord are: 'C', 'E' and 'G'. Notice that they share two of the same notes? When a chord’s root note is shared with another chord, those chords can usually be replaced with each other. In fact, in the case of the ‘vi’ chord, it is called the ‘relative minor’ chord because it is so similar to the ‘I’.
Let's switch those chords with each other now – the ‘vi’ where the ‘I’ used to be, and the ‘I’ where the ‘vi’ used to be:
| vi // V // | I // IV // |
You could still sing “Let It Be” over that chord progression, and it would sound fine. Give it a shot!
Are there common chord progressions?
The “Let It Be” melody would still work fine over the chord pattern variation we created, but one can intuitively feel that John and Paul made a strong choice, arguably a stronger choice (heck, they were in a little band called The Beatles after all.) Throughout music, there are some universal chord patterns you will hear a lot because, simply put: they work!
So with that in mind, here are some delicious patterns you can take advantage of.
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A Semi-Brief Chord Pattern Compendium:
33 Popular Chord Progressions Explained - And Then Some!
Note that the song examples on the following pages do not necessarily suggest that the entire song follows that chord progression. However, there will always be memorable moments in the song that take advantage of this pattern, or something very close to it. Also, some of the artists listed may not be the original performers/writers. Those listed are simply the most recognizable examples. In the case of musicals, I have listed to musical’s name, not the composer or performer.
**Major Tip: If you are having trouble distinguishing where in a song example the corresponding chord progression appears, take a good look at songcreationformula.com - where you will find the pinpointed spot in a document, as well as the extended edition of this chapter with more examples. But also, take time figuring them out on your own – this will be a valuable resource for training your ears to notice different chord progressions.**
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33 Popular Chord Progressions
1. The “Let It Be” Progression (I, V, vi, IV)
This progression has appeared in tons of songs. In fact, a famous medley by Axis of Awesome called “Four Chord Song” pokes fun at how many songs were written to fit this pattern.
Examples:
|F |C |G |Am
“You’re gonna hear me roar. O-oar, o-oar” – “Roar” – Katy Perry
| C |G |Am |F |
“Just a small-town girl. Livin' in a lonely world …”
- “Don’t Stop Believin'” - Journey
Other Examples: “No Woman No Cry” – Bob Marley & The Wailers, “When I Come Around” – Green Day, “Wrecking Ball” – Miley Cyrus, “Halo” & “Irreplaceable” – Beyonce, “I Knew You Were Trouble” – Taylor Swift, “Let It Go” – Frozen, “American Psycho” – Treble Charger, “Under The Bridge” – Red Hot Chilli Peppers, “Modern Love” – David Bowie, “How Far We’ve Come” – Matchbox 20, “Three Minute Song” – Tim Minchin, “Taylor” – Jack Johnson, “You’re The One That I Want” – Grease, “With Or Without You” – U2, “Believe” – Cher, “Hot N Cold” – Katy Perry…
It’s a bit nauseating how many songs use this pattern! And often with four steady beats between each chord change. There are also different combinations of these same chords that are very popular and used, especially in the 2010’s.
However, it is not wonder this pattern is so popular. It is designed to make people feel like something big is being overcome, and/or that it’s time to celebrate. Great for the end of the workweek to strut your peacock feathers at the club, or as a stadium anthem.
Variations on the “Let It Be” Pattern:
vi, IV, I, V (try ‘Am', 'F', 'C' and 'G’ for chords)
This pattern creates more of a sense of either ‘I’m cool’ or ‘passionately getting over a struggle.’
|vi |IV |I
“Wake me up when it’s all over …” - “Wake Me Up” - Avicii
Examples/Variations: “Love The Way You Lie” – Eminem feat. Rihanna, “Poker Face” – Lady Gaga, “On The Floor” – Jennifer Lopez feat. Pitbull, “Hurt” – Johnny Cash, “Tubthumping” – Chumbawamba, “Listen To Your Heart” – Roxette/D.H.T, “You Belong With Me” – Taylor Swift
vi, I, V (or iii), IV (or II)
In this variation, the 'V' and 'iii' chords share many notes with each other and hence, can be interchanged.
Examples: “Get Lucky” – Daft Punk, “Counting Stars” – OneRepublic, “She’s So High” – Tal Bachman, “Pumped Up Kicks” – Foster The People
**Major Tip: You may notice all of these progressions return to either a 'I' or a 'iv' chord, and always end with a 'IV' (four) chord or a 'V' (five) chord. This is not a coincidence. This creates what is called a ‘perfect cadence’ in the case of the 'V' going back to the 'I' when the pattern loops itself, and a ‘plagal cadence’ with the 'IV' going to the 'I'. If you have ever sung ‘Amen’ to conclude a hymn, that is the plagal cadence. A similar effect is created by having the 'IV' or 'V' move to a 'vi' (six) chord, but it is called a ‘deceptive cadence’, as we expect the 'I' chord.**
2. Blues/Rockabilly (I, IV, I, V, IV, I, often followed by V7)
A popular pattern with the Delta and Louisiana blues, and one that rock music ‘borrowed’ in its inception. Because it is simple, it creates freedom for musicians to play guitar solos or jam over. In the case of the greats, like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, there is a sense of structure the listener craves through the familiarity of the pattern. Meanwhile, a desire for something different is satisfied by holding the chords for uneven lengths and taking liberties with the tempo, so the song fits a more conversational flow. Since this progression is the base of most popular music, this progression can be used to support a theme of unity, as in the Michael Jackson example listed.
Examples/Variations: “Johnny B. Goode” – Chuck Berry, “I Be’s Troubled” – Muddy Waters, “Cross Road Blues” – Robert Johnson, “Rock and Roll” – Led Zeppelin, “3 Legs” – Paul McCartney, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” – Bob Dylan, “Black Or White” – Michael Jackson, “Rehab” – Amy Winehouse, “Stuck In The Middle With You” – Stealers Wheel, “I Want To Break Free” – Queen
3. Minor Blues 'n Rock Progression
(vi, ii, vi, III… in various variations)
Minor progressions in the blues often suggest more melodramatic sad themes, are about broader ideas that ‘he/she left’ or ‘lets rock’, or can come across like a sexy flirt.
Examples/Variations: “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” – James Brown, “What Was It You Wanted” – Bob Dylan, “We Made You” – Eminem, “Black Magic Woman” – Santana, “Nature Boy” – Nat King Cole, “Summertime” – Ella Fitzgerald, “Moondance” – Van Morrison, “Abracadabra” – Steve Miller Band, “Gangsta’s Paradise” – Coolio, “Pastime Paradise” – Stevie Wonder
4. Klezmer-ish! Patterns
(ii, iv, III7, iv) or ( i, iv, i, V7, i), or III, IV…
We owe a lot of thanks to this Jewish/Gypsy musical patterns. While the patterns I have listed here certainly do not encompass the entirety of a culture’s music, it is a start. These progressions are often used as dance music for weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs and other events. What distinguishes Jewish/Gypsy music is its use of the Phrygian dominant scale (also called the ‘Jewish Scale’), which is a certain selection of eight notes that the melody will use exclusively to make its melodies, which includes a flatted ‘2’, ‘6’ and ‘7’th notes in the scale to make it distinct. If you see a TV show and they cut to a Jewish neighbourhood, listen to the music that plays and you will know what scale I mean. The semitones and flatted notes create tension (and therefore excitement), like our ‘III’ to ‘IV’ pattern. Surprisingly, not only does the tension/excitement of the ‘III’ to ‘IV’s work well in “Hava Nagila,” but also in R&B and rap!
Examples/Variations: “Hava Nagila” & “Tumbalalaika” – traditional folk songs, “Hatkiva” – Israeli National Anthem, “Dance Me To The End Of Love” – Leonard Cohen, “If I Were a Rich Man” – Fiddler On The Roof, “Children’s Story” – Slick Rick, “SexyBack” – Justin Timberlake (feat. Timbaland)
5. Ragtime-ish
(At least I, II, III, V7 in different orders – also often VI, VIb)
Ragtime piano owes its popularity to players/composers like Scott Joplin, who helped inspire different related genres, such as Dixieland Jazz, Broadway musicals, film music and beyond. There’s an inherent sense of humour, joyousness & ‘delightful danger’ in these sorts of songs, since almost every chord is major. You will also frequently hear the 'II' followed by a 'IV', and a surprise flatted ‘VI’ (six) chord that creates tension, and then moving up or down a semitone to became a more stable chord. For example:
|I | |VIb7 | VI7 |II7
Honey pie, you are making me crazy, I’m in love but I’m lazy…
“Honey Pie” - The Beatles
In this case, the flat six chord with the seven added (VIb7) moves up to a normal six chord (VI7) with the seven added. Notice that the word ‘crazy’ falls on the unexpected, less-stable chord. Clever writing – it’s no accident!
Other Examples/Variations: “Laugh And Be Happy” & “Political Science” – Randy Newman, “Hello My Baby” – Michigan J. Frog, “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” – Monty Python, “Your Mother Should Know” – The Beatles, “Maple Leaf Rag” – Scott Joplin, “Show Off” – The Drowsy Chaperone
6. Rhythm Changes (I, iii, ii, V7) (B section: III, IV, II, V7)
This pattern became popular in jazz, and is also distinguished by having a brief reprieve, called the ‘B’ section in jazz circles. Initially, this progression was made famous by “I Got Rhythm,” written by songwriting legend George Gershwin. Generally it’s fast paced.
Other Example/Variations: “I Got The Blues” – Eddie Jefferson/others, “Rhythm-a-Ning” – Thelonious Monk, “Straighten Up and Fly Right” – Natalie Cole/others
7. Do-Wop Progression (I, vi, IV or ii, V)
The pattern of slow dances, heartbreak and devotion. However, because this pattern is so associated with 50’s/60’s nostalgia, songs that have darker stories to tell can use the pattern for a powerful ironic effect. In the case of “Adios Hermanos” by Paul Simon, the dark lyrics (A Puerto Rican man being sentenced to death in 1950’s Brooklyn) turns the song into a historically resonant fugue. In “F*** You” by Lily Allen, using the pattern in an up-tempo, joyous fashion along with contemptuous lyrics creates a sarcastic bite.
Other Examples/Variations: “Unchained Melody” – The Righteous Brothers, “Mercy Mercy Me” – Marvin Gaye, “Every Breath You Take” – The Police, “Stand By Me” – Ben E. King, “Wheel” – John Mayer, “Somedays” – jacksoul, “I Will Always Love You” – Dolly Parton/Whitney Houston, “Somebody Waits” – Blue Rodeo, “Love Hurts” – Nazareth, “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad” – Meatloaf, “Goodbye My Lover” – James Blunt, “Baby” – Justin Bieber, “I’ve Just Seen a Face” – The Beatles, “The Sweet Escape” – Gwen Stefani
8. “La Bamba” Pattern (I, IV, V)
This pattern was very common in the early days of rock 'n roll, hence the throwback hit “Old Time Rock and Roll” by Bob Seger takes advantage of it. Since you are playing the safest chords in music to play, it creates a sense of strength. “I am a rock,” indeed!
Other Examples/Variations: “La Bamba” – Ritchie Valens, “I Am A Rock” – Simon & Garfunkel, “Proof” – Paul Simon, “Up!” – Shania Twain, “Lolipop” – Mika, “The Duck Song” - Bryant Oden, “Stand” – R.E.M., “Rock 'n Roll All Night” – KISS, “Ordinary Day” – Great Big Sea, “Follow You, Follow Me” – Genesis, “Dance Tonight” – Paul McCartney, “I’m A Mountain” – Sarah Harmer
9. Inverted “La Bamba” Pattern (I, V, IV, sometimes V)
“La Bamba” - except the reverse. You will hear this pattern in a lot of West African guitar music, hence why it features on Paul Simon’s Graceland. It creates a sense of triumph, power and joy.
Examples: “You Can Call Me Al” & “Gumboots” – Paul Simon, “Here Comes My Baby” – Cat Stevens, “All The Small Things” – Blink 182, “How Bizarre” – OMC, “Particle Man” – They Might Be Giants, “Number One Song In Heaven” – Sparks, “Doctor Jones” – Aqua, “End Of The Line” – The Traveling Wilburys, “Yellow” – Coldplay, “If I Had $1,000,000” – Barenaked Ladies
10. Good Ol’ I-IV Pattern (I, IV)
This creates a similar sense of wholeness, but not quite at the same level as the 'I' to 'V.' Songs using this progression tend to have peaceful, yet thoughtful themes instead; except in punk music!
Examples/Variations: “Big Yellow Taxi” – Joni Mitchell, “These Days” – Ron Sexsmith, “Imagine” – John Lennon, “Since I Left You” – The Avalanches, “Time After Time” – Cyndi Lauper, “Anarchy in the U.K.” – Sex Pistols, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – The Rolling Stones, “New Morning” – Bob Dylan, “When You Know Why You’re Happy” – Mary Margaret O’Hara, “Purple Rain” – Prince, “Hammond Song” – The Roches
11. Good Ol’ I-V Pattern (I, V)
Since they are very strong chords, this progression makes a very ‘whole’ feeling. A sensation of not really going anywhere is suggested by this pattern, and/or lyrics that focus on a simple idea. For example, “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke is simply about ‘getting nasty’. In “Brand New Key” by Melanie Safka, our protagonist's only goal is to get a guy to notice her, and the song’s naïve and childish lyrics are complimented by this progression. There will often be more time between lyrics.
Examples/Variations: “Hard Road” – Sam Roberts, “Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” – Harry Belafonte, “Okie From Muskogee” – Merle Haggard, “Welcome To The Jungle” – Guns N’ Roses, “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?” – Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Nowhere With You” “Fashionable” – Joel Plaskett
12. Country Blues Progression (I, V7, I, IV, I, V7, I)
This is a classic progression of hurtin' country blues, although it can be found in different genres as well. It may include a bridge, often simply ‘V7', 'I’.
Examples/Variations: “Save The Last Dance For Me” – The Drifters/Michael Bublé, “Act Naturally” – Ringo Starr, “Paper Roses” – Marie Osmond, “Where'm I Gonna Live?” – Billy Ray Cyrus, “Surfin' U.S.A.” – The Beach Boys/Chuck Berry
13. “Lion Sleeps Tonight” Pattern (I, IV, I, V)
A very strong, joyous pattern, since it is made of all common, major chords. It can be heard clearly throughout “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens, a re-working of the South African song “Mbube” by Solomon Linda. This pattern can also be heard very clearly in “Peggy Sue” by Buddy Holly. Songs written after the 1950s often gain a sentimental quality by using this pattern. As the pattern plays, the first line of “Old” (2000), by Paul Simon reminisces: “The first time I heard ‘Peggy Sue’ I was twelve years old.” In “Veronica” (1989) by Elvis Costello, the progression is used in bittersweet fashion as a delusional old woman shares stories from her youth. Perhaps the most famous throwback is “American Pie” (1976) by Don McLean, taking advantage of the pattern in the first three lines of each chorus - a song also inspired yet again by Buddy Holly, but this time by his untimely death.
Other Examples/Variations: “Dance Dance Dance” – The Steve Miller Band, “Take It Away” – Paul McCartney, “Give Me Hope Joanna” – Eddie Grant, “Jump In The Line (Shake Señora)” - Harry Belafonte, “MMMbop” – Hanson
14. Walking Round in the Same Spot (I, IV, V, IV)
Using strong chords, there’s a familiarity that gets created with these chords and usually a joyful, or carefree quality. In the case of “Picture,” it keeps hope for a relationship within the song in the face of classic heartbreakin’ lyrics.
Examples/Variations: “Picture” – Sheryl Crow & Kid Rock, “Louie Louie” – The Kingsmen, “Wash Your Face In My Sink” – Dream Warriors, “The Joker” – Steve Miller Band, “Everybody Jam!” – Scatman John, “Blowin' In The Wind” – Bob Dylan, “You’re Still The One” – Shania Twain
15. We’re Rocking! (V, IV, I) or (VII, IV, I)
No matter what order you put these chords in, they create a sense of triumph and butt-kicking by using strong, major chords.
Examples/Variations: “Back In Black” – AC/DC, “Get Back” – The Beatles, “Tempted” – Squeeze, “Teardrop” – Massive Attack, “Ghostbusters” – Ray Parker Jr, “Born This Way” – Lady Gaga, “Record Body Count” – Rheostatics
16. Perpetual Motion! (IV, V)
This is a great pattern to create a sense of something being incomplete, because we expect to hear a 'I' chord following the ‘V’, but never do. It feels like it could go on forever, and often these songs are great to jam on. Some examples below do not do this for the entire song, but certainly use the repetitive quality for effect.
Examples/Variations: “Reelin’ In The Years” – Steely Dan, “Dreams” – Fleetwood Mac, “Father Figure” – George Michael, “Linger” – The Cranberries, “Dead Man Walking” – David Bowie, “Smooth Criminal” – Michael Jackson, “Once Upon A Long Ago” – Paul McCartney, “All Night Long (All Night)” – Lionel Richie
17. One Chord (I)
Yep! You can make a successful song without any real chord progression. I find more one-chord wonders use their simplicity to bring more attention to their odd, uncomfortable, or sometimes poignant lyrics. For example, “Everyday People” by Sly & The Family Stone uses only one chord in order to compliment its sentiment of people’s ‘oneness’. This also works in electronic music and jamming rock songs to create a sense of constant, brute drive.
Other Examples/Variations: “Coconut” – Harry Nilsson, “Jerry Was A Race Car Driver” – Primus, “Can’t Run But” – Paul Simon, “Poor Leno” – Röyksopp, “Clint Eastwood” – Gorillaz, “Devil’s Haircut” – Beck, “City Of Tiny Lites” – Frank Zappa
18. Major To Relative Minors (I to iv or iii, often back to I)
This is something that creates a sense of buoyancy and ambiguity, shifting from a major chord to a minor chord that is closely related. This relatedness is due to these chords sharing many of the same notes. If you listen to lyrics of the song examples below, in most of the examples you will find a feeling of uncertainty, with the peppier lyric fragments played overtop each song’s major chords.
Examples: “Hallelujah” – Leonard Cohen, “Over And Over Again” – Nelly feat. Tim McGraw, “Space Oddity” – David Bowie, “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” – The Flaming Lips, “Hey There Delilah” – Plain White T’s, “My Sweet Lord” – George Harrison, “Scar Tissue” – Red Hot Chilli Peppers, “Entangled” – Genesis
19. “Hit The Road Jack!” Progression (vi, V, IV, III)
This pattern 'walks down' in an addictive way that creates a sense of danger once we hit the 'III' (three) chord. It’s like someone narrowly escaping danger over and over again - hence it’s exciting! Obviously named after “Hit The Road Jack” by Ray Charles.
Other Examples/Variations: “Crabbuckit” – k-os, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” – The Animals, “Dat Dere” – Oscar Brown Jr., “Addicted” – Hawksley Workman, “Maneater” – Hall & Oates, “Seven Nation Army” – The White Stripes, “Round Midnight” – Thelonious Monk, “Swamp Girl” – Frankie Laine
20. The Lift-Up (I, IV, ii, V, may include after: iii, vi, IV, V)
This progression creates excitement by having chords that keep rising in an alternating fashion, then dropping back to ‘I’.
Examples/Variations: “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” – The Darkness, “The Love You Save” – The Jackson 5, “Come To My Window” – Melissa Ethridge, “Run Around” – Blues Traveler
21. The Good Old Neighbourly Walk-Down Pattern
(I, V, vi, iii, IV, iii or I, ii, V, or via slash chords – see below)
This effect is caused by a ‘walking bass line,’ which means it walks down from the root, using the diatonic scale* on the next page. After descending, it suddenly lifts us on a 'V' chord, then back to the 'I' chord. Songs can also suggest the walk-down without the bass being present, simply through the descent of the song’s chords. This pattern creates a sense of peace and victory. A very early, famous example of this progression is “Pachelbel’s Canon” by baroque composer Johann Pachelbel.
*Here's an example of a diatonic scale: 'A', 'B', 'C#', 'D', 'E', 'F#', 'G#' and 'A.' Play in reverse, and you have this pattern’s tendency.
Examples/Variations: “Piano Man” & “The Longest Time” – Billy Joel, “Rich Girl” – Hall & Oates, “Everywhere You Look” (Full House theme) – Jesse Frederick, “Hello Goodbye” – The Beatles, “Your Imagination” – Brian Wilson, “Your Smiling Face” – James Taylor, “1,2,3,4” – Feist, “Home” – Michael Buble, “Changes” – David Bowie, “Dan Dan Kokoro Hikareteku (Dragon Ball GT Theme)” – Field Of View, “P.F Sloan” - Jimmy Webb…
22. The “Wild World” Pattern (vi, ii, V, I, IV, ii or other, III)
This pattern has a particularly classical feel. I’ve named it here after “Wild World” by Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, where it was used with huge hit success. There is a tendency for this progression’s melody to be repetitive, without much range between notes. The melody will often drop downwards with the chords, then suddenly rise.
Examples/Variations: “Lovefool” – The Cardigans, “You Never Give Me Your Money” – The Beatles, “Love You Like A Love Song” – Selena Gomez, “I Will Survive” – Gloria Gaynor
23. Half “Wild World” (vi, ii, V, I)
While in the full progression, there is usually a calm sadness - when using just half the progression, there is often a high-octane desperation in the singer and in the lyrics. It’s often played fast.
Examples/Variations: “Ma And Pa” – Fishbone, “It’s My Life” – Talk Talk/No Doubt, “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word,” – Elton John, “Just Died In Your Arms” – Cutting Crew, “Island In The Sun” – Weezer, “Thank You” – Dido, “Lonely No More” – Rob Thomas, “Me & My Broken Heart” – Rixton
24. Cool Guy Minor Chords (ii7, iii7, vi7) or (vi7, iii7, ii7)
This is a progression that adds a sweet, saccharine coolness. Soft rock and disco that is notoriously 'poppy' with repetitive, quick melodies often become best friends with these progressions.
Examples/Variations: “Evil Woman” &“All Over The World” – Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), “Sara Smile” – Hall & Oates, “Inside and Out” – The Bee Gees/Feist, “Rollercoaster” – Major Maker, “My Old School” & “Hey Nineteen” – Steely Dan, “Take Me Out” – Franz Ferdinand, “Feel Good Inc.’ – Gorillaz
25. “Hold On To What We Got!” (IV, V, vi)
This progression can take on more serious and passionate themes. It can also represent very energized, ‘cool/sexy girl/guy’ themes. By using the deceptive cadence (the ‘iv’, instead of the ‘I’ at the end), it also creates a sense of struggle – like constantly climbing, and not quite coming up with enough yet.
Examples and variations: “Livin' On A Prayer” – Bon Jovi, “Running Up That Hill” – Kate Bush, “How To Be A Heartbreaker” – Marina and the Diamonds, “TiK ToK” – Ke$ha, “Only Girl (In The World)” – Rihanna, “Candy Candy” – Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, “Holiday,” – Madonna
Reverse Examples (vi, V, IV):
“Through & Through & Through” – Joel Plaskett, “Hey Hey, My My” – Neil Young, “Blue Collar Man” – Styx, “Back To Life” – Usher, “Say It Right” – Nelly Furtado (feat. Timbaland)
Both: “Carry On My Wayward Son” – Kansas, “My Heart Will Go On” – Celine Dion, “Somebody That I Used To Know” – Gotye (feat. Kimbra), “In The Air Tonight” – Phil Collins
26. Even More Intense! (IV, V, iii, vi)
A slight variation of the 'IV', 'V', 'vi' adds a 'iii' chord, typically held for two beats, taking time away from the 'vi' chord. A great summary of the progression is the phrase: “Something incredible,” sung in The Book of Mormon example just as the progression appears. It's truly an energizer (often with inspirational lyrics) but so intense, it can also be an energy drainer.
Examples/Variations: “Heaven (Where True Love Goes),” “Foreigner Suite” – Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens, “You And Me (But Mostly Me)” – The Book Of Mormon, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” – Aretha Franklin, “Fall” – Serena Ryder, “Rolling In The Deep” – Adele, “Never Gonna Give You Up” – Rick Astley, “Viva La Vida” – Coldplay, “Say A Little Prayer” – Dionne Warwick, “Titanium” – David Guetta, “The Show Must Go On” – Queen, “Cruel To Be Kind” – Nick Lowe, “A Public Affair” – Jessica Simpson…
27. Surprise! It’s Major
(III or I) (VI, VII, I) (IV, V, VI) (I, II, III, or other)
The surprise major chord first spread its wings in classical music, and was called a ‘tierce de Picardie’. However, that was generally just used at the end of a minor song, switching the minor ending chord to its major counterpart instead. But really, surprise major chords can appear in lots of different ways. It becomes a surprise when we throw in a major chord when we would expect to hear its minor counterpart, or expect to hear a more familiar major chord for that key. For example, in the verses of the Lenny Kravitz example below, the ear is surprised to hear ‘IV V’, with a ‘VI’ following it, since we would expect, say, a more familiar ‘I’ chord.
Examples/Variations: “Black Hole Sun” – Soundgarden, “Again” – Lenny Kravitz, “I Am The Walrus” – The Beatles, “Jzero” – Cat Stevens, “Hey Ya!” – Outkast, “One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21” – The Flaming Lips, “My Little Town” – Simon & Garfunkel
28. Surprise! It’s Minor (IV to iv)
This is used, especially in a bittersweet song, to suggest that the character is ‘breaking apart’ right on whatever word they are singing during that chord. Almost always followed right after by the ‘I’ chord. It was popularized through Do-wop.
Other Examples/Variations: “Live And Let Die”– Wings, “Surfer Girl” – The Beach Boys, “Wake Me Up When September Ends” – Green Day, “She Loves You” – The Beatles, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” – Mariah Carey, “Daughters” – John Mayer
**Major Tip: You can hear a variation of this in certain jazz standards, where the 'I' is turned into a 'i' (minor). You can then treat the ‘i’ as the ‘ii’ of another key, allowing you to shift down to different keys if you play that new key’s 'V' chord right after the 'ii'. You can hear this clearly in the ‘A’ section of “How High The Moon” (Ella Fitzgerald’s version), the ‘B’ section of “Blue Moon” or the 'A' section of “Moon River” (Sinatra’s version). And those are just examples with “moon” in the title!**
29. The Old Minor Move-a-Roo
(ii V7, iii VI7, ii V7) or (ii V, i IV7)
This is a pattern often used as a trick before the end of a section, creating a brief tension for the listener that gets released when we go back to the 'ii' and 'V7'. It can also be used to give an appropriate backing to lift and drop the melody in a jazz standard.
For those
really keen to stretch their music theory muscles,
this
pattern can also be used to modulate (the whole
song shifting up or down in pitch) into a different key. This is
caused by moving the 'ii' and 'V' chords each up by two notes to
the 'iii' and 'VI', then treating the 'VI' chord like it's the 'V'
of the new key. Treating any chord as if it’s the ‘V’ chord of
another key is a great way to bridge into a new key. Therefore, if
you have an Am to D7 as your 'ii and 'V7', then Bm to E7 would be
'iii' to 'VI7', leading to the ‘I’ of the new key. The ‘ii V, i
IV7’ option can also be used to change into a lower key, two
semitones down from where we started. Listen closely to
discover which one is being used, and know you can always look at
the files on songcreationformula.com for answers.
Examples/Variations: “I Get A Kick Out Of You” – Frank Sinatra, “One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces” - Ben Folds Five, “Who Needs You” – Queen, “Cheek To Cheek” – Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald, “Desafinado” – Antonio Carlos Jobim
30. That Chromatic Thing The Beatles Always Do
Chromatic simply means when you are dropping or raising a note by a semitone – which is the distance from one note to the one right beside it on western-tuned instruments like a piano or a guitar. There is a tendency in songs to walk down one of the notes in the chord via semitones, meaning we pass the chord through different chord names in the process. Let’s use an example to better explain.
|Am |Am/G |D/F# |F
“I look at you all, see the love there that’s sleeping”
- “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”
A slash (/) suggest that a chord is played normally, but with a different note played in the bass of the instrument below the chord. Following the slashes, we see that the 'A' goes to a 'G', then chromatically passes through an 'F#', landing on a simple 'F' chord. However, with this chromatic descent, you may not be so lucky as to have the semitones we move through be written in the bottom of the chord. Sometimes it is written as if it is contained in other places in the chord, resulting in wacky chord names - 'aug' (augmented), major/minor, 7b5, 6/9, etc.
For example:
Cm Gaug |Bb Dm
“For the benefit of Mr. Kite, there will be a show tonight on
|G
trampoline.” - “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite”
Agh! Are augmented chords the mutated GMO veggie of the chord world? They make you feel sick if you play them too long. However, musically speaking, the feeling of the augmented chord can be used to add tension and contrast in a song that can be very satisfying when released. Simply put, the C minor chord to the 'Bb'’ - we have a chromatic walk-down happening.
Other Beatles-related Examples: “Somebody Who Cares” (Paul), “Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five” (Wings), “Helter Skelter,” “Hey Bulldog,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “I Me Mine,” “I’m So Tired,” “Dear Prudence,” “Mother Nature’s Son”.
Some Non-Beatle examples: “Stairway To Heaven” – Led Zeppelin, “Dayton Ohio, 1903” – Randy Newman, “Isn’t She Lovely” – Stevie Wonder, “Time In A Bottle” – Jim Croce
You will also frequently hear these passing chords in Latin dance music in a way that has virtually become cliché. Examples of this include the opening of “Don’t You Worry Bout’ A Thing” by Stevie Wonder, and throughout the musical “In The Heights.”
31. Swooning! (I, Imaj7, often followed by I7)
This is a non-technical name for a certain walk-down you will hear that suggests being head over heels in deep, woozy love. Although this is also a semitone walk-down, it’s distinct from the others due to its romantic sound. Note that ‘Imaj7’ be confused with the '7' chord, a distinct chord often used in blues and rock-based music.
Examples/Variations: “Midnight's Another Day” – Brian Wilson, “La Vie En Rose” – Louis Armstrong/Edith Piaf and others, “Something” – The Beatles, “I Love The Nightlife” – Alicia Bridges, “Kiss Me” – Sixpence None The Richer
32. That Thing Elton John Does All the Time (I, VII, IV)
Of course Elton isn’t the only one to do this, but it is something that I got in my musical blood by listening to him. All these chords have the distance of a perfect fourth between them. Say, we are in the key of 'C'. A fourth up from 'C' is 'F' ('C', 'D', 'E', 'F'). Now, a fourth up from 'F' is 'B flat', also short-formed to 'Bb' ('F', 'G', 'A', 'Bb'). If you are at a piano, you will see that 'C' to 'F' and 'F' to 'Bb' are the same amount of piano keys apart from each other.
So, where does this show up? Often as a ‘fake out’, where the listener assumes we’re going to (or are going to stay on) the 'IV' chord, and it ends up being the 'VII' chord (A ‘IV’ distance from the ‘IV’ chord). The examples below are written as if we are in 'G'. Therefore, 'G' is 'I', 'C' is 'IV' and 'F' is 'VII'.
|G |G7 |F C |F C F C
“I can’t light, no more of your darkness…”
“Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”
|G |G |Bm |F |C F | C F |...
“Don’t wish it away, don’t look at it like it’s forever …”
- “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues”
Moving around by multiple fourths and fifths is a great way to go to unexpected places in your song with a sense of security, since those distances make the bedrock of the music we’re familiar with – after all, the blues is really just 'I' 'IV' and 'V'.
Other Elton examples/variations: “Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirty Cowboy,” “Hercules,” “Lady Samantha,” “Song For Guy,” “Little Jeannie,” “All That I’m Allowed,” “I Want Love”
Other artist examples: “Waterfalls” – TLC, “Disney Girls (1957)” – The Beach Boys, “Song For The Dumped” – Ben Folds Five, “Royals” – Lorde, “Here Comes The Sun” – The Beatles, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” – Queen, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” – Simon & Garfunkel, “Take Me Or Leave Me” – RENT
33. Sliding Up or Down (I, VII, I) (VII, I)
Here we’re sliding from a chord to an adjacent chord two semitones apart (also known as a whole tone). Sometimes, these chords are played without a third note, making them a ‘diad’ (two notes played together) and adding ambiguity as to whether the song is major or minor. The common distance between the notes in these diads will be a perfect fifth (five note space between each note) or a perfect fourth (four note space between each note). This alludes to Medieval trumpet ‘fanfare’ when played in succession. Perhaps because of the regal association of this, it’s not uncommon to hear this in rap and rock music with themes of excess and dominance.
Examples/Variations: “How Do You Sleep?” – John Lennon, “Vertigo” – U2, “In Da Club” – 50 Cent, “Temperature” – Sean Paul, “American Woman” – The Guess Who, “Burning Down The House” –Talking Heads, “I Want Candy” – Bow Wow Wow
In Conclusion
As big a list as this is – believe me, there are even MORE common chord patterns out there, all creating different effects/emotions. Maybe in my twilight years I’ll spend some time creating a master collection of them. For now, know that these patterns work, and you will also surely discover your own patterns as you train. Discovering these patterns as a teen is something I am very grateful for – not just its benefit to my own songwriting and musical improvisation, but for my capacity to appreciate the music around me in a wholly different, and deeper way.
To continue expanding your songwriting satisfaction, please see the list of resources on the following page. I highly recommend them.
Happy songwriting,
Stay in Touch:
taylorabrahamse.ca
youtube.com/tayloreh
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Song Creation Formula Support: I have provided a document that lays out the typical parts of a song, as well as details related to the above examples, showing where in the songs the chord patterns appear. This will allow you to test your accuracy as you listen for where each progression is located. You can also use chord books and online song chart databases to find chord charts for full songs. - songcreationformula.com
Extended Music Theory: It's self-explanatory, and does a great job. Diagrams help to explain additional music theory concepts. - musictheory.net
Pat Pattison: Take advantage of his online songwriting courses, available through Berklee College of Music, and you will flourish. He is the author of numerous well-known books on songwriting that I also recommend, and teaches in-person around the world. - patpattison.com – online.berklee.edu
Free Play: Improvisation In Life & Art – Stephen Nachmanovitch:
A thoughtful, highly enjoyable read that blends eastern philosophy with music, and in particular, musical improvisation. A great resource for further accessing the zone.
Songwriters On Songwriting - Paul Zollo: If you're looking for more interviews with influential songwriters, this is a fantastic resource, with dozens of interviews in one big fat volume. It’s a book I can never get enough of.
Songwriters Association Of Canada: This is an association worth joining if you’re in Canada. Not only will you have easy and discounted access to incredible songwriting workshops (such as SongStudio, songstudio.ca), you will have access to numerous perks and special networking events throughout the year. More than that; you can find collaborators and peers, which is integral to keep expanding and developing consistently as a musician. - songwriters.ca
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