Eric,
As I said above, and as we’ve discussed, things are changing fast.
Thanks again for your ideas about songs and the songwriting business, which I always find thought-provoking and helpful.
TC

Well said, Annie.
Thanks!
Tony

Rich,
As usual, you make a lot of great points. I’m not sure I agree with you regarding ‘you better have a really good reason for breaking the rules’ as a criteria…
I don’t think it’s so much that the structures are hard-wired as that the results are hard-wired. We used to get from here to there on a horse, then a car, then a plane, etc… It’s not how we get there, but getting there that matters… ‘there’ in this case being the satisfaction of a good song.
And I do think the way we’re getting ‘there’ in songs is really changing. It’s exciting!
As always, thanks for writing,
TC

I think there are primal, near-biological reasons that over the centuries we have settled on just a few song forms that humans use over and over and over. V/C. AAA. AABA. Blues (really, a type of AAA). These forms are super-powerful at specific, different types of emotional expression and different types of story lines. On the whole, I agree that it’s great that we are now willing to accept more complexity and ambiguity. That presents opportunities for richness and variety, etc. BUT – if you depart from the most powerful and established song forms and their usual variations, you do so at a risk, and it’s important to do so with clear intention and to try to accomplish something that the usual forms cannot accomplish for your purpose.

It’s a lot like deciding to make a 3 hour movie instead of a 2 hour one, or deciding to make a 5 act play instead of a 3 act one. There are primal REASONS people like 2 hour films and 3 act plays. You’d better have a reason for departing from the structures that have served us so well emotionally, or you might not get the reaction you want!

Have any songs emerged from this more experimental recent stage that you’d put in the Great American Songbook? That you can point to as perhaps in the same category as Gershwin, Porter, Stevie Wonder, Lennon/McCartney? Which ones? Or is it more about the appeal of novelty?

Rich

Ken,
Thanks for the thoughts. Your last few sentences in particular really resonated with me.
Best wishes,
Tony

Hayward,
Thanks for the encouraging words. You cover a lot of interesting ground here, touching on the usually unforeseen consequences of always inevitable change.
Best wishes,
Tony

Joyce,
You nailed it!
TC

John,
Thanks for reading and writing.
I will be contemplating and meditating on the possible meanings of your Dylan-esque comment for days and weeks to come.
Best wishes,
Tony

Lisa,
You always have a platform and a soapbox here! Thanks for reading and commenting.
I feel your pain. You bring up so many points… some I agree with, others (maybe more) not so much.
Remember that to many of our parents and/or grandparents the music we loved as kids – and that you unfavorably compare contemporary pop music to – was “this ugly ugly sounding psycho-sexual,aggressive, witless LOUD that creeps like a soul-crushing serpent into public places aplenty.”
That doesn’t settle the case, it’s just worth considering.
Hope to hear from you again soon!
Love,
Tony

It reminds me of how television shows, premium channels in particular, migrated to handheld cameras and did away with laugh tracks and expected rhythms for punchlines.

Sometimes we write songs with pre-choruses, bridges, choruses that rise in range, traditional lyric rules, an expected number of bars or phrasing; sometimes we dispense with all of it. There are countless examples of great songs that did not adhere to formula at a time when everything was supposed to. So, how does this inform today’s songwriter beyond commentary and observation? I’m not sure but it’s interesting. All I know is you write because you want to and need to. And if it resonates with others, whatever the form, so much the better.

This is a big issue to tackle, pretty astute Tony. After listening hard with form in mind for a long time and being a musician and needing to know the “forms,” I’ve gone through phases where I’ve experienced classic forms as redundant too! Played with “collaging” or thinking texturally or thrown up compositional anomalies longer than 6 minutes with my good ole 4-track TEAC. Remember Eno, and all those guys making airport music years ago? It’s all good! And most of us didn’t realize that our trad pop songs were advertisements for themselves when we were teens hugging a transistor radio now did we? We just loved them!

But then there is this musical wallpaper, this ugly ugly sounding psycho-sexual,aggressive, witless LOUD that creeps like a soul-crushing serpent into public places aplenty. Everytime I go to buy a pair of leggings I get treated to really tasteless, low budgie “producers music” that bears no originality, does not subscribe to any brand of truth, beauty or form, and has no substance to speak of, short of nihilistic grief. And most glaringly: no melody.

There is a surfeit of that in indie music too. It’s an endless trail of imitative melisma that gets watered down into a sea of wannabee notes. And it whines a lot. Well, stands to reason that if the Ahmet Ertegun’s and the Clives are diminishing in importance,along with big brother labels, there are no standards by which good or bad art in music can be defined, or suggestively defined.

I’d say a lot of good and young musicians and artists are getting lost in the sauce, and now we have a state of a lotta amorphous yuck going on, that thankfully I’m only subjected to in stores and in public spots. Between that and the demented ice cream truck that is about a billion decibels on my block, I occasionally moan and bitch right out loud about it and the store managers and people around me laugh and agree.

Not to mention shows like the Voice that take talent and exploit it, and those people can sing, but they are not artists, and rarely evolve really, just think hmmmmmmm this is show biz, and I won the lottery…and then they take direction for the beaucoup buck machine. This approach, slick like Disney, puts a handful of the more ambitious in the limelight, but who do they sound like and how many of them have real soul, like Amy Winehouse.. or Jeff Buckley? Or real storytelling ability? Or a story to tell? Which to me is the essense of song expression.

Technology will always profoundly color how music is made and sold. But it unfortunately has made for a lot of GLOBAL schmutz in the hands of people who have nary a diatonic bone, and too many knobs to tweak.

Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t no snob. I dig bad lyrics, and think everyone should PLAY and SING music. Just not a dominance of mediocrity in the unavoidable airwaves please!!! Okay, I’m about to faint on the soap box here. Thanks for the platform. And bless you for all you do.

Love, Lisa Lowell