Media interviews are part of a musician’s life and the best interviewers – Vic Fernandes in Barbados; Carlton James and Wanita Huburn here – will come at you with stuff that makes you turn inward and unravel things you learned along the way but never articulated. Of course it requires that you be able to think on your feet, so to speak, but you get better at it as you go.
In many interviews you get hit with the process of song-writing; what comes first, music or lyrics? Faced with that question, I quickly identified that the key, before even music or lyrics, is the thing/behaviour/event, etc that says “song” to you. In other words, the observation; what you noticed. Of course that will differ from writer to writer ‒ Leonard Cohen is not noticing what Little Richard is, and vice versa ‒ and the actual creation of the song is, in a way, already underway, and that, too, differs from writer to writer and even for each writer, so some songs come from a snatch of melody, some from a phrase (‘Government Boots’), etc. So it could be from a joke you hear, or something you read, or, sometimes, just a combination of words that sound appealing together.
In some interviews, the matter of intricacy or complexity in compositions can come up sometimes with the implication that a work can only be substantial if it is complex – very convoluted melody, many and varied chords, unusual time signatures, etc.
The reality, however, is that time and again the very simplicity of a piece of music is the key reason for its popularity and, indeed, the work that is the most difficult to create is usually the piece of music that is original and interesting and beautiful. If one considers how many thousands of songs have been written and recorded, and that, as always, the new writer has only the standard handful of notes to work with, creating something new is a monstrous task, and it is no wonder writers often turn to external stimuli in their work. Dissecting them from the inside, popular songs, as opposed to jazz, or bebop, are generally not musically complex (if they are, they simply don’t become popular) but of course some are more so than others.
Some of my songs have somewhat more complexity than others, but the difference there is often more in the arrangements, or particularly in the little snatches of music I come up with for the intros or interludes for songs. Many of those bits are based on things I noticed in classical music, and while I didn’t copy the melodies, I copied the classical technique of creating something that takes you sharply away from the song – sometimes via the chorus, sometimes via a bridging phrase, presenting something else – and then leading you back to the tune.
So the song itself may not be complex, but how you present it can be somewhat so. Also, of course, some songs can be musically sparse but take powerful turns lyrically (Dylan, for example) or vice versa (ironically, Dylan applies there, too.)
Interviewers, or sometimes persons in social settings, are often curious about the song-writing process as work. Every song I’ve written was on guitar, and I’ve never used anything other than standard tuning. The guitar is actually part of the process where I may have lyrics in mind, but I’m searching for melody; for me, the guitar almost suggests things.
You have to love the instrument you’re writing on because then you are completely immersed in composing; anything awkward about playing the instrument will interfere with the flow of creation and even abort it.
I’ve never been asked about this, but another factor in song-writing is that words already formed into a phrase are usually giving you some directions for melody to start with because there is a kind of rhythm or feeling already present from the words or idea you may be using as a starting point.
The words “Moon Over Miami”, for instance, have a certain rhythm already there as you speak them, with one syllable in the first word, two in the second, and three in the third…musical tendencies are already there.
I was recently asked which Tradewinds song did I write the fastest and which one took the most time. Specifically what takes the most time in writing songs is the ‘how’ of the idea. You can usually decide very early what the song is about, what mood, what rhythm; what can take days or even weeks, is the format or the structure, as they say these days, “the shape”. For example, I knew for a long time that there was a song in what Caribbean people call “Chinee Brush”, but I could never figure out a format that worked I tried several and junked them over several months, until one day I heard a Trini guy Louis Flores, who played drums for us when the Tradewinds drummer was ill, doing an imitation of a Chinese shopkeeper speaking his garbled English.
Bang, it hit me; that was the song: an actual Chinese man selling the sexual aide in his shop and touting his merchandise; everything in ‘Wong Ping’ hangs on that. I wrote the song in half a day, but it had taken me almost a year to find the ‘how’ of the shopkeeper talking.
Think about the Glenn Campbell tune ‘By the time I get to Phoenix’; it’s a love song but look at how he presents it; the woman is away travelling and the man is going through his day imagining where she may be at various times during his day; that’s the ‘how’ of the idea of love. The quickest for me was definitely ‘Blade O’ Grass’.
I wrote that on tour (something I almost never did) in Guyana, starting from zero, based solely on a suggestion from a radio interview with Pat Cameron that morning when she urged me to “write something about Venezuela invading”. I locked myself in my room at the Pegasus, borrowed an acoustic guitar from Bobby Hunter, and had the song almost totally finished in about two hours. Mind you, that’s unusual.
Most of the time, a song that sounds so natural and so right (“how else could you say that?”) is almost always the result of hard work, and many rewrites, and sometimes junking everything and starting over from scratch.
Recently, my Canadian son Tony, who is writing a book on the Tradewinds, asked me if I consciously included what some people call “hooks” or little musical flourishes that might make the song more catchy/memorable.
That led me to say that I’ve never gone down that road in the song itself (most of my songs are really some form of narrative with not much place, really, for hooks) but I’ve often done those little catchy musical things in intros or interludes as in ‘Honeymooning Couple’; ‘Blade O’ Grass’; ‘Little While From Now’; the shift from verse to chorus in ‘Ivan’.
Actually, many musicians (me included) have been doing that sort of thing before somebody came up with the term “hook” to describe them. A good example is the keyboard/organ line in Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman No Cry’ just before the chorus; it’s a simple four-note phrase but it just launches the chorus; you can’t imagine the song without it.
