The New Neo is one of my favorite blogs because she talks about a lot of things, like dance, that I don't know anything about. She is even interesting when she talks about things that she doesn't know much about, like song-writing: How to write a hook.
I started wondering how on earth someone writes a hook. Writing music is something I can’t imagine anyway, and I’m in awe of those who can do it. Even more so for those who can write a catchy hook that reels them in and makes for a hit. How, how, how do they keep their tune from being just some formless humming and meandering?
She quotes Tom Snow, composer of the Pointer Sisters' hit She's So Shy:
I had been plugging away for weeks trying to find a ‘hit’ hook. Everything I came up with sounded like derivative, melodic babble. Reduced to desperation one night I went into my studio after dinner and a few glasses of wine, set the Roland TR-808 to 120 beats per minute and started playing G minor arpeggios on my Prophet-5 synth. At least that was some viable form of music! That did the trick. Not having the pressure anymore of trying to come up with a smash hit, the vault opened up and within 30 minutes I had the melody, chord changes and a working title “She’s So Shy”.
That's pretty much exactly how it works: you keep plugging away with nothing happening for as long as it takes and then one day, the ideas just come to you. It is like musical creation is always something of an accident.
But here is why some people are good at composition and song-writing and others are not: two main reasons.
The professional knows when his ideas are crappy.
He also knows what to do with a good idea once he has one.
Well, sure, there are lots of details, but that is basically it. If you plunk away long enough, something is going to come to mind. Then you just have to know what to do with it.
This came to mind via a comment thread on Ann Althouse where they were talking about things like lip-syncing and Les Miz. If you think about the comparison of Dylan and Dion in the right way, it can uncover some problems and principles of aesthetics. For example, if you say Céline Dion is obviously a better singer because she has better breath-control, or tuning, or timbre then I might answer, sure, but I would much rather hear Bob Dylan sing. Why? He has an interesting timbre often just right for the song and his phrasing is also captivating. Not to mention the songs are better.
So let's make a list of the things I just mentioned:
Tuning: a lot of pop music now uses Auto-tune, which corrects imperfections in the tuning of the voice. If a note is a bit flat, it brings it up to pitch and vice versa. Here is a famous example:
What gives this its distinctive sound is the over-use of Auto-tune. You can hear the voice jumping from pitch to pitch as if it were a synthesizer. Other places, the Auto-tune was not used because you can hear Cher sliding from one note to another. A really good singer has enough technique to not need Auto-tune, but a lot of singers in pop music do not have much technique. Try to imagine Bob Dylan using Auto-tune! He sure wouldn't sound like Dylan anymore. He has made a virtue out of the imperfections of the singing voice. For him, singing out of tune is part of the expression. As a matter of fact, it can be that for every singer, even classical ones, because one of the great virtues of the voice is that it can sing slightly sharp or slightly flat--which is expressive!
Breath control: a lot of singing is about breathing. How long can you hold a note? Can you hold a note without wavering or wobbling? In much pop music notes are not held for very long. Listen to Dylan singing "Like a Rolling Stone". At the beginning the only note held for any length of time is the "you" of "didn't you" and the pitch wobbles alarmingly. Compare this to Cher's singing. Dylan tends to spit out small groups of words in clumps, Cher holds every note out.
Timbre is the slightly fancy musical word for tone-color. In pop music a lot of impurities are actively cultivated for their expressive qualities. Céline Dion cultivates a fairly pure voice as do most of the pop divas. Bob Dylan, in common with singers like Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, cultivates a gravelly or reedy tone full of impurities. This supposedly adds 'authenticity'. Here is a little Tom Waits as an example. One of the oddest things I ever saw on YouTube was a German baritone, an opera singer, doing a Tom Waits song! Of course it was better than if Tom Waits tried to do an opera aria, but still...
Phrasing is a huge and difficult to discuss topic, but I might be able to find some examples. I recall reading a book on phrasing once that turned out to be of little value because this is one of those times where written notation isn't much help. You really need to hear phrasing! Actually, a really good example is "Like a Rolling Stone". Listen to how the words of the verse tumble over one another, leading up to "didn't you" each time. This leading, this pointing forward, is one of the most important things in phrasing.
Let's listen to some Céline Dion. This is "I Surrender" from 2007. She is a terrific singer, without a doubt. As is sometimes said, she has a great instrument (her vocal cords, diaphragm, lungs, the whole physical aspect that produces the sound) which she has also trained to a high degree of perfection. She can do what she wants to do with it. Listen, for example to the phrase towards the beginning that ends with "find a way". On "way" she pushes the pitch up slightly and then slides down as an ornament. No Auto-tune here!
But I find the whole experience disappointing because the song is so bland. It seems full of emotion and expression, but it really isn't. It is too predictable for one thing. Not one harmony is unexpected. The melody, such as it is, is dull and lifeless. Go ahead, sing me the tune. Not easy is it? Because it is so unmemorable. There are no interesting contrasts in the song or the arrangement. It is all one big blanket of sound, pulsing predictably. The fact that Dion is such an excellent singer and the production is so elaborate makes it listenable, but not really enjoyable. That's for me, of course. For most people this would be just the thing because they don't actually want the music to be too interesting. Most people prefer the predictable and comfortable. But predictable, comfortable music has a pretty short shelf-life. In any case, this is perfect for Las Vegas, which is pretty much the most scathing criticism I can deliver!
Now let's hear some more Dylan for contrast. This is the original version of "All Along the Watchtower" that many, many others have since recorded.
Now this has pretty much everything against it: minimal production values, no video, no dancing, the same three chords over and over again--this song has no contrasting section, just the verse over and over. Some of the worst harmonica playing! Plus, Dylan's singing. Every note sounds like it is a strain. Every note he sings is at least a bit out of tune! Guitar, bass and drums, nothing else (but the guitar might be double-tracked as it sounds too full for just a single acoustic guitar). This has nothing going for it! Well, except the song with those amazing words. After all these years I still couldn't tell you what the song is about or what the words mean. But they are very evocative. This is one of those mysteries of music: this song and even this performance is a thousand times more interesting than the song by Céline Dion. It shouldn't be, but it is. A lot of it is that it has a unique sound, unlike any other song, especially when Dylan sings it. But there are a thousand songs like Dion's and they all sound much the same.
There is a lot about George Harrison in the news these days as a documentary by Martin Scorsese hits the air commemorating the tenth anniversary of George's death. Here is an article on George in the Weekly Standard. I haven't seen the documentary, but I found the article flawed and missing the point. It is perfectly all right to point out warts and all--I have done it in this blog a few times--but if all you talk about is non-musical aspects of a musician's life, it is safe to say you have missed the point. Sure, George may have been a bit of a split personality, as the writer says, "a religious seeker on the one side and a decadent, heedless rock star on the other", but the whole reason we are interested in George is that he wasa religious seeker on the one side and a decadent, heedless rock star on the other who was in one of the most important musical groups in history and who made a significant contribution both as a guitarist and song-writer. If it weren't for that, we wouldn't be paying a lot of attention. Andrew Ferguson, the writer of the Weekly Standard article, does at least mention George's music in one brief paragraph:
One of George Harrison’s most appealing traits was self-awareness. He would have seen (and said) how absurd such talk was. “I was never a real guitarist,” he once told his friend Klaus Voormann. And he wasn’t; he couldn’t launch the fireworks like Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck, and the disciplined technique of Andrés Segovia or Julian Bream never interested him. About his songwriting, he told an interviewer: “There’s no comparison between me and someone who sits and writes music. What I do is really simple.” Right again. He compared himself to a pastry chef, able to combine musical ingredients nicked from others to make a pleasing presentation of songcraft. He made many marvelous records, but as a source of fresh musical ideas, he said, “I’m not really that good.”
You could say the same for pretty much anyone who ever wrote a rock song, which is an extremely forgiving art form, but you can’t imagine anyone else who ever wrote a rock song admitting it.
Like most journalists, even ones who write about music, Ferguson's musical understanding is, uh, limited. I have no idea what George meant if he said "I was never a real guitarist", but he most certainly was. He got into the Beatles in the first place because he could play stuff John and Paul couldn't. It took him a long time to develop as a songwriter; being in the same group as Lennon and McCartney caused his songwriting to be seen as insignificant in comparison. But he wrote better and better songs as time went on including "Taxman", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Something"--to name three outstanding ones. As a guitarist he is also an outstanding musician. Comparisons with Eric Clapton or Julian Bream are simply inane. Most rock guitarists from Eric Clapton to Jimi Hendrix to Jimmy Page come from the blues traditions of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. George comes from another tradition, the rock and roll one of Carl Perkins:
As for Segovia and Bream, why would anyone want to compare a rock guitarist with a classical one? But have a listen to this clip from A Hard Day's Night where George does some nice solos on a classical guitar by Jose Ramirez--the builder of some of Segovia's guitars:
If you have a look at the movie, you can see George playing on the Ramirez. Now you might say, oh, big deal, he plays on a classical guitar, so what? But let's dig into it a little bit, shall we? This is Paul's song, but a lot of the unique sound of it comes from George. That opening lick is by George and it is a motif that starts and ends the song. In the second verse George contributes a nice classical-sounding arpeggio. Around 1'30 we have the guitar solo. You might say, yeah right, he just plays the melody. But here's the thing: the song is in C# minor, but it jumps, most radically, to D minor for the guitar solo and stays in D minor until the final chord: D major. The relationship of D minor to C# minor is called the Neapolitan or flat II and it is both extreme and very popular with composers since the 18th century. Who came up with it? Either Paul or George. But it gives the song a unique twist.
Ferguson's sneer at rock songs and their composers is really just ignorance. Sure, there are hundreds if not thousands of boring, repetitive rock songs based on the most rudimentary of chord progressions, but it is very hard to find a Beatles song that is not a truly unique composition. Lennon, McCartney, yes and Harrison, wrote some of the finest songs in the English language and are legitimate heirs to the long tradition from John Dowland, to Henry Purcell, to Benjamin Britten.
Back to George's guitar playing. One of the things that stands out about his solos is that they, almost unique in the rock world, are not prolix. Take my favorite Harrison guitar solo:
Where is it? Exactly at 2'58. It consists of nine notes. After a long pause, there is a little trill. That's it. But I think it is exactly the right solo in exactly the right spot. Most virtuoso rock guitarists cannot resist playing a lot of notes. That's ok, but pretty much every blues-based extended rock guitar solo sounds exactly the same. Each of George's solos was created specifically for the song and sounds different from other solos in other songs. Lots of them were on electric six string, but he did a lot with twelve string too:
And of course, he is well known for being the first rock musician to take up the Indian sitar:
But he didn't stop being a rock and roll guitarist:
There is a great solo at 1'15 that is only about ten seconds long and sounds like no other rock guitarist. Yes, and it is also George's song. The only rock song that is about tax policy that I can recall...
