New Monday #63
Today, we're talking about stealing. Cleverly stealing.
When my son was ten, he wrote a song that won a statewide art contest called "PTA Reflections." There's a theme, students from all grade levels make art in all mediums, but mostly visual art. Some win, most lose, there are prizes, etc.
The theme my son had to deal with was "Believe. Dream. Inspire." He found it cliché and trite.
His finished song was incredibly depressing, about how much he hated his school.
He'd been playing piano for a few years. He asked me, "How do I write a song?" I told him, "Take a song you already know how to play and put the chords in a different order."
He took the chords from "Go Down Moses" and turned them into The Dream Song.
We pause and stare upon this boy
But then he stops, stares in the sky
And he begins to dream
Of Cabaret and popcorn
And rockstars and concerts
And interstellar travel
And back to his old school
He's a ghost in his homeroom
He says hi, friends pass him by
He wakes up in his own bedroom
And he begins to dream
The lyrics came from his head, which had been stuffed full of ideas from movies, TV shows, mix-tapes I made him when he was a baby. He listened to everything from Billie Holiday to Ben Folds Five. He could recite all the words to "Nantucket Sleighride" when he was three.
Is flipping the chords around stealing? Nope, no more than assembling words that have gotten into your head is stealing. It's source material. Influences. Stealing.
Was it Stravinsky who said, "Mediocre artists borrow; great artists steal." Or perhaps it was from Picasso: he evidently said, Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. Picasso designed sets for Stravinsky's ballets in the 1920s. The two knew each other. One of them said it; the other stole it.
Steal these Thoughts
Appropriating ideas is nothing new. Classical composers were blatant about, quoting phrases from each other—they called it "tipping the hat." Jazz musicians do the same thing. I produced bands in musical scenes and they were always stealing from influencing each other. This is why musical "scenes" typically have a certain sound to them. Grunge didn't come about because anyone in Seattle was concerned about being original.
Speaking of originality, it’s overrated. And it’s almost impossible to achieve on purpose. And it’s not something you need worry about. Assume you're a unique individual and have your own way of pulling ideas together. Do that and try not to be blatant about it.
Most of this episode is from a songwriting perspective, but the ideas apply to anything you’re up to creatively. You can nick production ideas as fluently as you can nick musical ideas. Especially when you’re beginning, trying to make your records sound like someone else’s, getting ideas off productions you like and aping them, this is not only how you make records, it’s how you learn how to make records.
Hide the Evidence
Don't think theft. Let’s think about how we squeeze ideas out of our feeding activities. We want to maneuver our brain such that it manipulates stolen ideas into something distinctively ours. That’s where we’re grabbing the originality from, because originality isn’t in the influences, it’s the way you use them.
Here's a song by the Beach Boys.
Girl Don't Tell Me is the first to feature Carl Wilson as lead vocalist. Does it sound familiar?
Compare this bit, with the riff and the drum fill, to this by some other band.
Honestly, the songs are so close you can sing the lyrics of one over the other. Brian Wilson was pretty explicit about Girl Don't Tell Me: he was trying to write a Beatles song.
Lift the Lyrics
Get a magazine or a newspaper, and a razor blade, and cut out interesting words and phrases. Have nothing in mind. Just cut stuff out that appeals to you and throw it in a pile. Once you get a decent amount, spread them out on a table and move them around, put them beside each other and form lines and ideas. Your imagination will make connections without really trying.
I can't begin to tell you how incredibly effective this. This is one of Bowie's tricks. He'd cut up magazines or even his own writings in his notebooks. If your lyrics suck or you're frustrated by that aspect of writing, use cut outs.
Or flip it over. Artist Austin Kleon is all about stealing. He wrote a book called Steal Like an Artist. Highly recommended. He takes newspaper articles and blacks out most of it using magic markers. The words that are left are the poem. Here's a quick video on how to do "blackout poetry."
Klepto the Chords
Obviously, stealing chords and melodies happens all the time in music. Here are a few ways to do it:
Put the chords of a song—yours or someone else's—on note cards or sticky notes. Do one chord per card or at the most two. Then rearrange the order of the cards and see what you get. Make lots of cards with the weirdest chord in the song and use it often and everywhere. Throw in a few chords that are "outside" and don't harmonically work with the rest and see what you get.
Here's a fun Brian Eno trick: lay the chords out and point to the chord you want the band to play with a stick. Eno used to do this with song sections written on a whiteboard. I've done it with chords stuck all over a serving tray I held in front of a pianist.
I love bridges. No one writes good bridges anymore. When I was producing I would often push bands to write bridges. Sometimes I would take a guitar, slam a chord out and tell them, "That's the first chord of the bridge. Looks like you're modulating. Have it done by tomorrow."
I had bands steal a bridges off The Monkees album Headquarters. Headquarters is the first record The Monkees actually played their own instruments on, and Mike Nesmith wrote a cluster of tunes with spectacular bridges. Check it out—I cued these up right before the bridge so you can see how great these are:
Steal this #2 (this is the best one)
Bookmark these. The whole album is great. Take take take.
Find a melody you like and reverse it, or split it in the middle and flip it over itself. Listen to something prog-rock, something with lots of different melodies and very little repetition. Snag a bit of it that catches your ear and repeat it a bunch. I've written a bunch of songs this way. There's also sorts of fun nickable moments on Bowie's Station to Station album.
Disguise Your Tracks
Chris Difford and Glenn Tillbrook are the songwriters behind Squeeze, the seminal post-punk pop band. I read somewhere that Difford finds a song he likes, then writes new words to it, then gives just the words to Tillbrook, who then writes the music to the lyrics without knowing the inspired them.
I did some research and this isn't how Squeeze did it. Could be I stole it from someone else or maybe I made it up (doubtful). Whatever. This is a fantastic way to write. Rewrite lyrics from existing songs. Rewrite songs from existing lyrics. Take a few songs, do cut and paste to the lyrics, and then pass them off to someone else to write the music.
Teaching songwriting? Give someone the chord changes of one song and the lyrics of another, and have them slam it together. Or just do this yourse;f and get a song out of it.
Fix It
I got my first gig directing a play and had no idea what I was doing. Lucky for me, there was a production of it running, so I went to see it. I ended up scribbling a ton of notes in the program, and I figured out that what I was doing was fixing all the things that weren't working for me.
This works for song writing, records, poems, web design, you're choosing clothes for a night out. Find something close and fix it.
I wish I could say I came up with this particular idea, but alas, I stole it from America's Cup winning yacht captain Dennis Connor. He wrote a book called No Excuse to Lose. Whenever he was beaten in a sailboat race, he'd walk over to the boat that beat him, figure out how the boat was rigged and set up, and then applied that to his own boat. Eventually, he simply had the best rigged, fastest boat. He did the same things with tactics: he would emulate whatever the guys that beat him did.
I'm out of stolen things to fence to you guys.
Warm regards,
Luke