Sunshine Beauty – a geek summer anthem from Ben Walker on Vimeo.
I’ve had this song kicking around in various states since before Christmas, but since today felt like the first day of summer I decided to finish it off. I let my email subscribers see it yesterday as a special treat (I’ve been sending them a weekly email about social media and music).
I’ll be playing it for the first time at Ben’s Big Gig next Friday! ;)
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I don’t know if it’s an extension of my character, or a subconscious desire to write like Ben Folds or Little Feat, but I like my lyrics to be funny but deadpan. To the point that my songs might easily seem very earnest and humourles if you weren’t really listening.
But sometimes that backfires. Sometimes people just don’t want to listen so hard. I play them my witty lyrical insights into modern society and all they hear is “La la la la. Dum dum de dum dum.” Because in their minds they are running through shopping lists, trying to remember the name of that great Steven Seagal film they saw last night, or maybe just concentrating on the way I’m fretting a G13 chord (usually 3X345X – a great shape).
So it’s good to have some songs that boldly state their purpose in the first bar or two. The Twitter Song was one of those – I knew I had about five seconds to make people laugh, hence the “Twittaaaaahhh” backing vocals – and Make A Difference is another: it opens with a mouth trumpet solo. I learned this beautiful skill from watching endless episodes of A Bit of Fry & Laurie as a teenager. You can see some fine examples of Hugh Laurie’s mouth trumpet virtuosity in this compilation of Soupy Twist endings (the MT kicks in at about 0:58).
I sit firmly in the eco camp, and this is not a climate change denial song or a lame attempt to poke fun at those who are actually trying to effect change. It’s a satire of the North Oxford greenies. I’m sure this type exists everywhere. They are well-meaning and very organised, but rather inward-looking as a community. They carry a Bag For Life around the Organic Farmers Market once a week, eat an expensive Organic Fried Breakfast and that’s their contribution.
Of course, I only mock because I am one of them. I used to cycle down to the Organic Farmers Market in Wolvercote every Sunday, but now I’ve settled down with my own Organic Box Delivery from Abel & Cole (whom I heartily recommend). So it’s a subject close to my heart. And it’s great that people can find it amusing and entertaining on different levels: “Isn’t it funny how these greenies behave?”, “Isn’t it funny how these middle class eco-wannabes behave?”, “Isn’t Ben a posh twit?”, etc.
Last weekend I got the band back together to start rehearsing all these new songs I’ve been writing. When we came to Make A Difference, we had to make some tough decisions. It needed to have the comedy Latin intro, but could the verses really be that quiet and folky? And what about harmonies? Hmm…
I’m quite happy with what we came up with after half an hour or so. It has much more of a Kinks feel than before, and I like its strumminess. What do you think?:
Last Saturday I took the train down to London to jam with Nigel Hoyle. I didn’t know exactly what to expect. When musicians talk about having a “jam” I get a horrible premonition of standing around with a bunch of halfwits in a grotty room playing blues riffs and grinning incessantly.
But with Nigel, I was optimistic. He produced the Jont album we recorded in December, and was brilliantly businesslike through the whole process. During rehearsals he would sit in the corner, singing arrangement ideas into his phone, writing notes and recording the whole thing on his MacBook. And he wore a jacket and tie all the time. So when he phoned me up to ask if I wanted to come and invent Space Country with him, I was confident that I would at least get an interesting day.
I wasn’t disappointed. I arrived at the tiny studio (one of a stable of six or so) and settled into a corner. Nigel had borrowed a Fender Rhodes for me to play, which he put through a Fender Twin and which produced (I’m not sure why I was surprised) that classic Rhodes sound. He was playing a beautiful old Gibson acoustic that sounded like three pianos playing perfectly in tune. We chatted for 30 seconds then got down to business.
Nigel had an idea. He had recorded a guitar sequence onto his phone and had it sitting on his computer, ready to go. A simple, soulful idea in A minor with some nice voicings and an unexpected twist. I played along, and we decided on a structure that seemed to work, with an A major chorus and a bridge in C with quicker harmonic movement that gave the tune a lift when it was needed.
I put down a few takes, adjusting the click speed each time to get the feel just right: relaxed and groovy, with just enough swing and no drag. I abandoned the sustain pedal, which was making rumbling noises, and settled on a series of voicings that I would never usually play on the piano. It’s always refreshing to spend some time on a different instrument (like organ or electric piano or monosynth), because the limitations force you to create new ways of expressing the music you’re imagining.
After a couple of breaks for tea and toast (with Marmite, of course) we had the Rhodes, acoustic guitar and bass parts down. We added some of Logic’s looped beats as a placeholder drum track, and sat back to listen. I recorded a quick 12-second video on my phone:
We have the beginnings of a great sounding track. Now we’re both coming up with melody ideas, and when we meet again in a couple of weeks we’ll see how they all fit together. I can’t wait.
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Beaten Up was an exercise in textbook songwriting, and it turned out really well. It doesn’t push any boundaries, and it’s not edgy in the slightest, but it works as a song. And I like it.
I’m trying to relate each of these articles to an aspect of songwriting or creativity. This one is about writing songs by the book.
During the 50/90 I was very good at always having my notebook to hand so I could record title ideas. I overheard someone say they felt “beaten up” and wrote it down. When I sat down with a guitar to start writing the song I wanted to find the perfect way of setting the title, so I spent a while singing “Beaten up” to a load of different tunes and rhythms. It’s always a good idea to try to match the contour and rhythm of natural speech for a title. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a good start. In this case, it was perfect. By this time I was singing “Beaten up and beaten down”, which I liked. Say it aloud, and you’ll naturally raise the pitch on “up”, and lower it on “down” because of the structure of the phrase. It’s a bonus that the cheesy word-painting is built in…
With the chorus saying (essentially) “I feel crappy”, I started building a structure around it based on the tried and tested “contrasting sections” model. If the chorus is set in the present, you set the verse in the past or future. The chorus is a general statement, so the verses deal with specifics. The chorus melody goes quite high, so the verse melody is lower. And so on. I ended up with something like this:
Simple yet effective. There’s no need to over-complicate song structure. In fact, it’s usually a bad idea. People have very specific ideas of what to expect from a song, and usually you only ever want to surprise them with one aspect. Pop songs are all about familiarity.
I wanted this to be a real campfire strumalong of a song, so I went with some classic progressions in D. The verse progression (G, D/F#, Em, D) was straight from Van Morrison’s Caravan (the Last Waltz version with The Band, obviously ;o).
The bridge (D/F#, G, A, D/F#) was a slight variation on the Alanis Morissette Ironic chords with the classic guitar trick of holding the same notes on the top two strings and changing the bass note. I like a bridge that teases you with inversions, never quite hitting the root of chord I, so when the chorus kicks in you get a real sense of return. If I had used a straight D chord at the end of the bridge progression you would get the feeling that it was complete without another chorus, and that’s not good. A bridge’s only harmonic function is to make you ache for the chorus.
The only harmonic surprise in the chorus is the F#7 chord on “back around” (lifted from Ben Folds – think Tom and Mary) that gives the section a bit of character that it might otherwise have lacked.
The melody is quite simply built around the chord notes, but it has a couple of good hooks: the title line, and the “sick and tired” line, which I used as a piano hook to tie it all together. My favourite thing about the melody is the rhythm. It sings really easily, and I spent ages getting all the lines to scan perfectly. Sometimes that means ditching great ideas because their syllables just don’t fit. But you end up with a song that sounds familiar, catchy and easy to play along to. Beautiful campfire fodder.
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I’m not a person who can plan five years into the future while debating politics and writing an essay on the cultural significance of gendered pronouns in literature. I prefer to focus on a well-defined problem and work out a solution. My mind likes systems.
Maybe it’s a man thing, maybe it’s a left brain thing. For whatever reason, I’m a crafter of solutions and not a spewer-forth of emotion. As a songwriter, I set myself up a musical or lyrical problem, and solve it. I write a chorus, then I use the verse to construct a proof of the chorus statement (although it’s usually more of a proof by example than a watertight mathematical theorem).
This problem-solving nature is almost certainly connected to the general male problem of trying to solve emotional problems whose answers neither exist in the logical space nor would be at all useful. The idea of using maths to prove your love to someone started me off writing Ten, with the image of a mad scientist sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by sheets of scribbled paper desperately trying to make logical sense of his love so that he can prove it and stop worrying.
Once I had this image as a starting point, writing the song became an exercise in pop songcraft. That’s the way I write, and there’s a part of me that thinks it’s the best way. I generally keep this kind of fighting talk quiet, but this weekend I found an unpublished letter by T. S. Eliot hanging in a downstairs bathroom that seems to prove me right:
…how else is one to write a poem except as an exercise? It seems to me the only way to get the proper humility of the writer towards the thing-to-be-written. One lets the thing-to-be-said look after itself. The opposite method produces expression of ideas, or personal sentiment, or usually a mush of undigested ideas and vomited emotions. All the thought about what the poem is to say should take place some time before the poem is started. Once begun, it becomes an exercise in form. And the other thing is to keep a big dictionary and look up the words one uses.
Now I won’t try and use the last line to justify the use of a rhyming dictionary. This would be an invalid logical step, and anyway I want to save the rhyming dictionary debate for another time…