There Are Never Enough Good Songs
There’s so much new music out there, people don’t have time to listen to it all. They tend to play the stuff that fits easily into the background. Like the soundtrack for our lives, music sets the tone for everything we do. These days we prefer our music loud and loaded with attitude over soft and sexy. Like fast food, if it’s filling it’s fine.
Cover bands became a trend in the seventies. It was a good way for a working band to make a living. You can still see tribute acts – Abba, Beatles, Stones lookalike artists who sound like icons of the sixties and seventies. in small halls and community auditoriums across America. But, if you’re interested in more than just making a living, on doing more with your art, if you want to be recognized and respected for your God given talent, you need to develop your own sound. If you want people to like your music, you’ll have to set yourself apart from the rest. You’ll have to get people to listen to your music; to slow people down long enough to really hear what your music has to say and to develop a taste for your music.
Not everyone can write great songs. It takes a special gift to do that. But everyone can interpret a song and in that interpretation develop a new and different sound. Play what you want to play the way you want to play it. Don’t always copy somebody else. Of course, when you’re starting out, it’s only natural to pattern yourself after someone. Dylan followed in Woodie Guthrie’s steps in the early days of his career. Anyone who wants to be a song writer should listen to as much good music as possible.
Some writers sit down every day for two or three hours, at least, to write, whether they are in the mood or not. Others wait for inspiration. One summer, I went to the cottage to spend a few days with my guitar, a pen and paper. I was in the mood to write; confident at least one good song would come from the experience. I played for hours but nothing came out; nothing memorable. Disappointed, I left wondering what had gone wrong. Months later, after a few similar experiences, the reason for my failures occurred to me. Song writing is a journey of the heart not the brain. The mind can’t tell the heart what to feel anymore than the brain can decide when to write a song.
There are many different song writing techniques. Bob Dylan claims that he never set out to change pop song writing or society, but clearly, unlike rock stars before him, his goal wasn’t just making the charts. Dylan says,”Popular culture usually comes to an end very quickly. It gets thrown into the grave. I wanted to do something that stood alongside Rembrandt’s paintings”.
Still, Dylan once said he wrote songs so fast in the ’60s that he didn’t want to go to sleep at night because he was afraid he might miss one. He soaked up influences so rapidly that it was hard to turn off the light at night. Dylan found subject matter in newspapers. If the story is big enough, it tells itself in a song.
Neil Young takes a completely different approach. He can apparently go for months, even a few years without writing a single song. The way he writes is completely different. One day, completely out of the blue like the divine manifestation of an epiphany, he’ll write four songs in a row. A day or two later, he’ll write a few more songs. The songs would come so suddenly and effortlessly that he can barely write the words on paper fast enough. Once he has enough songs for an album, he’s be in and out of a recording studio producing an album with very few changes to his original inspiration almost overnight.
Of all the good things this world has to offer, for a musician, song writing must top the list. There are never enough good songs. Original songs written from the heart are enchanted. Songs are meant to be shared. In that sharing, you’ll experience the first delirious crowning achievement of your career. You’ll begin to develop your own sound.