That was the week that was-- WRCB and Songwriting

Hi folks, I came down with the sniffles last week so I don't remember much of the past seven days. Here are the highlights:

White Ripple Community Band covered Sloop John B on Monday. Long associated with The Beach Boys as a way to sell Pet Sounds to a reluctant record company, Sloop John B is actually a traditional song from the Bahamas. We worked on rhythm, chords, and melody within the E scale.

In Songwriting, we covered the evolution of a tune Rich wrote called "The Weakling Blues" and all the little changes that are made along the way. The beauty of a song is, it's your tune! If you're not a Beach Boy and not beholden to a record company to make Pet Sounds more palatable, you get to make all the changes you want.

Lastly, Mark shared with us his song "I've Gotten Rid of the Blues," from the song prompt of the same name a few weeks back. There was lots of singing and toe-tapping to wrap up the first session of 2016.

Next session's songwriting class starts Wednesday, March 16th at 7:30 p.m. There's still time to sign up through South Shore Art's website or by calling 219-836-1839 ext. 103.

Songwriting Class March 2nd, 2015

So last night Rich gave us an assignment: a movie producer walks in and says to you, the lyricist, "Quick, I need a song for my movie. It's called Paradise Ballroom and I need it in five minutes. Go!"

Much scribbling and cursing and crossing out later, all six of us had at least the verse. Tom had written the whole darn song! Mark's immediate mental picture was of the hotel in The Shining, and after that I couldn't get mazes out of my mind.

And you know, all of us, no matter what we'd written, all of us had done a better job than Graham Edge and Adrian Gurvitz, the original Paradise Ballroom lyricists. It was a bit of a mess.

So we don't spend a lot of time in class saying "this sucks," but there is a value in discussing why the best-intentioned song falls flat. It's hard to save your song when you have a line like this in the first verse:

Cause it's a pity if you're lettin' someone come and steal your wife

and he thinks she's still pretty

And speaking of wife stealing, we switched from bad songs to breakup songs and discussed Someday by Mariah Carey and Someday You'll Want Me to Want You, sung here by Patsy Cline, the queen of broken hearts. That led us to ask: what's your favorite breakup song? I Set Fire to the Rain, You Oughta Know and Free Fallin immediately came to mind.

For homework we're going to write a breakup song, the more painful the better. See you Wednesday!

(p.s. This is my favorite breakup song. Weird Al, call me.)

 

 



Songwriting Class February 17th, 2016

Last Wednesday we broke down two songs to see how they ticked. One, Girl by The Beatles, wins the award for the shortest chorus known to humankind.

The next song, Moonlight in Vermont... I don't remember the first time I heard it. Maybe from Maxine, she was a big Sarah Vaughan fan. I love it so much.

Two surprises for me. I never realized the song contains no rhyming lines at all, for one. Mark pointed out the other one, which brought us all up short-- "The first line has five syllables, the second line has seven, and the third line has five." A haiku. Haikus don't rhyme, and are often about nature and the seasons. A beautiful song I never realized was a poem as well.

Songwriting class February 10th, 2016

Two weeks in a row with a piano in the room! We're going to get spoiled if this keeps up.

Rich introduced a new songwriting exercise this week-- at the link is a blank sheet for folks to download and print if you need extra. Tom Bohling pulled the very memorable title Igloo Bungalow out of this, and I'm afraid it will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Lastly we discussed bridges and broke down the lyrics to Billy Joel's Piano Man, which goes to show that even in the best written songs there are still wonky lines like 'tonic and gin.' Funny how I never noticed that before: gin and tonic, tonic and gin. I would've sacrificed the words out of order for the rhyme, too. And besides, in Billy Joel's world he can order whatever he wants.

Today we got confirmation that the songwriting class will continue through the middle of May, so we're pleased about that. The new spring session will start on Wednesday, March 16th. Thank you South Shore Arts!

Songwriting class February 3rd, 2016

First off, I want to say Thank You to Shellie, J.B., and Tom for sharing their songs this week! 

Last Wednesday we got to have the rehearsal space at Munster South Shore Arts. Oh, what a difference a piano makes-- not that Rich is a slouch on the guitar or anything, but when demonstrating the full tonal range of an E-flat minor 9 chord, 88 keys will always trump 6 strings. It's back to the Board Room next week.

This week we began to tackle the question of putting music to lyrics, so this makes it the second time in a week that we've touched on the Circle of Fifths (we talked about it here for those of you in our Monday night's White Ripple Community Band class).

Here's the Circle of Fifths in all its glory:

If you have lyrics and are unsure how to add music to them, a good place to start is with the Circle of Fifths. Let's say we want to put our song in the key of C, at the top of the circle. Look left, look right, look underneath, and you have F, G, and Am. There are so many songs that use those four chords. As Rich pointed out in class last week, nearly every song from the 1950s uses C, Am, F, and G-- Sherry Baby, Stand By Me, and Teenager in Love are just three examples. They all share the same bones. It's the skin-- the lyrics, how we arrange those chords together, that makes the song your own.

Another source of music inspiration is to move counter-clockwise around the circle. Say we start with our key of C again. Going counter-clockwise around the circle gives us C, F, and B-flat.

B-flat + F + C = With a Little Help from My Friends

C + B-flat + F = Taking Care of Business

A good way to find music for your song is to sing to the lyrics you write. Or, if lyrics give you trouble, sing the melody before you have the words. Searching for words? Keep your ears open, especially for conversations. It's hard (not impossible, because nothing is impossible) to rhyme irreconcilable differences, and so much easier to sing it just didn't work out. That's the way people usually talk.

See you next week! Mark and Sherry, hope you're both feeling better.

Songwriting Class January 27th, 2016

Rich started off the class by asking this question: Why wouldn't someone like your song? And you know, there are so many reasons why someone won't care for it! Here are just a few we brainstormed:

• music is too fast or too slow
• wrong genre (don't play your country song to someone who only loves opera)
• reminds them of their ex
• the person listening to it may have just had a bad day

The point is, audience reaction to a song has nothing to do with whether or not the song is objectively, empirically, beyond a shadow of a doubt, any good. You may be nervous about putting pen to paper. There is an urge to please others and a fear that putting ourselves out there exposes us to shame and ridicule. In the end, don't let nerves stop you from writing.

And don't let the first reaction to your song be the last word. Happy Together was a monster hit by The Turtles after it was rejected by nearly every other band in the 1960s. Another great example is Jimmy Webb's All I Know-- which was deemed "silly" by the person he wrote it for that he was trying to impress.

Mark shared his beautiful song Mountain Sunset with us in class that night. One of the things that was so good about Mountain Sunset is that it did a nice job differentiating between the verse and chorus. That's why songs aren't poems exactly, although you could put a poem to music if you wanted to. Songs have more freedom to differ from the verse and the chorus, or from the bridge. 

Next week we will have other folks share their tunes if they wish, and we will begin to talk about setting words to music. This week (and always, really) listen to music that you enjoy, and to songwriters you admire. Listen, borrow, and take inspiration. Songs don't just appear in a vacuum, and we take what we need from everyone. So listen, relax, and have a notebook, pen, or a recording device handy when the mood strikes you. 

Here is one source of inspiration: Kate Bush and her Hounds of Love album. It's hard to overestimate how important this album was to a weird little kid growing up in rural Virginia. 

For a bonus, here is the song Rich mentioned at the end of class. It's Flora Purim singing Everyday Everynight, produced by Michael Columbier. (Warning: may contain jazz)

See you next Wednesday! We're having a room change February 3rd-- we'll let you know as soon as we can where we'll be next week.

Songwriting Fundamentals January 13th

Last night was our first evening in the Center for Visual and Performing Arts in Munster, and Rich mentioned a YouTube clip that I'd like to share with you.

 

 

John Cleese: 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative

Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)

Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)

Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)

Confidence (“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”)

Humor (“The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”)