American Songwriter, January 2014: Difference between revisions
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That second verse starts with one of those novelty stories that you read in the footnotes; "Woman gets divorced because she will not remove the shirt of Jim Reeves from her husband's pillow at night," which was an actual story I read, and that's just too beautiful an image not to put in a song. Underneath that, I put "and the parents of the kidnapped children start the bidding for their tears." Now, when I wrote that, that kind of hadn’t really happened - the song was a futuristic song - but it sure as hell happens now. You see whole industries of people auctioning their tears. When something really terrible befalls them, the first thing they’re thinking about is the reality show about it. So then it had to have something that rejected that, so I lifted out "Stick our your tongue/Drink down the venom," which had come out of a verse of "National Ransom," which was a different kind of commentary song, utterly different king of music. Some other lines from "National Ransom" seemed to continue the thought, and then we returned back to some adapted lyrics that I hadn't recorded for "Pills And Soap." | That second verse starts with one of those novelty stories that you read in the footnotes; "Woman gets divorced because she will not remove the shirt of Jim Reeves from her husband's pillow at night," which was an actual story I read, and that's just too beautiful an image not to put in a song. Underneath that, I put "and the parents of the kidnapped children start the bidding for their tears." Now, when I wrote that, that kind of hadn’t really happened - the song was a futuristic song - but it sure as hell happens now. You see whole industries of people auctioning their tears. When something really terrible befalls them, the first thing they’re thinking about is the reality show about it. So then it had to have something that rejected that, so I lifted out "Stick our your tongue/Drink down the venom," which had come out of a verse of "National Ransom," which was a different kind of commentary song, utterly different king of music. Some other lines from "National Ransom" seemed to continue the thought, and then we returned back to some adapted lyrics that I hadn't recorded for "Pills And Soap." | ||
Now, that could just be a magic trick, if the music was not carrying you through. Steven and I went into the studio in Vancouver, and I played the simplest sketched parts, the electric piano and the bass, a couple of stabs on the guitar, sent it back to New York with him. Next thing the mix comes back, there’s all this processing on everything, there’s a horn section playing my keyboard part - this is compositional , as well as arranging. By now I’m back in New York, and we’ve cut some things out, dropped some things in other places, distorted things, dropped beats out, things that are very common to dub and to hip-hop, but in rock and roll if you do that, it usually sounds like a mistake. | |||
'''And this direction was all evident from the beginning - it’s not like there was a turning point where it clicked in and you could see what was happening?''' | |||
Another song is probably more instructive of the working method, and why we didn’t have that penny-drop moment. Steven had made a couple of samples based on my sources - one was a two-bar sample from “Radio Silence,” the other was from “''Wise Up Ghost'',” which begins with the string introduction of a ballad of mine called “Would You Be True.” He sent that to me, and I sent back a sketch of a song, recorded on my laptop because we were still on different coasts. He came out and I recorded all of the vocals just to that loop, just strings and piano going round and round. It was very satisfying because it was completely unprecedented - the fact it was from the introduction to a song, never referenced the harmony of the song, none of the music, just the string introduction. I recorded the whole lead vocal and all of the backgrounds, but there were no other instruments. And each mix that came back to me - now there’s a low bass drum, suddenly on the third verse there’s an electric guitar and horns, and it gets to the middle and I can’t even hear the sample anymore, it’s gone. | |||
So all this different methodology, which we began with on that first Fallon show, comes before we got to writing songs that were completely new. The foundation of “Cinco Minutos Con Vos” is that chord of G and F being cycled round and round from a rehearsal jam of “High Fidelity,” the very first thing we did, but does it reference any of “High Fidelity” harmonically or melodically? Absolutely not. And this is where people’s slight suspicion of this as methodology gets in the way of listening to it as music. If I picked up the guitar and played 16 bars of music with an acoustic guitar you wouldn’t have a problem with it. But how would that be different from the 16 bars of drums, bass and wah-wah guitar which we then sample, layer a horn melody, and then start to sing a song which has an utterly different melody from that song which it’s allegedly derived from? | |||
'''As the writer, how did it feel watching these transformations of the material?''' | |||
Well, the methodology is so pulled apart and put back together that the definitions of song-writing, producing, arranging all shift. The compositional element is so different from anything I’m used to that you’ll find most of these songs are co-composed, I think appropriately so. | |||
'''Do you think it’s true in general that there’s a continual blurring of the roles of songwriting and producer?''' | |||
Well, this goes back to when I worked with Geoff Emerick. If ''Sgt. Pepper'' was made today, what would Geoff Emerick’s credit be on it? It wouldn’t be engineer, it would be co-producer. That’s not to in any way take issue with George Martin’s authority on that record, or what he contributed, but by the modern definitions, the things that Geoff did to transform the sound would absolutely be called what producers do today - today the list of producers probably would be nine names long. We just have to be comfortable with, there’s nothing to lose now unless you’re just madly obsessed with status. All that stuff has just gone away now. | |||
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{{Tags}} [[Paul McCartney]] {{-}} [[Spectacle: Elvis Costello with...]] {{-}} [[The Roots]] {{-}} [[Wise Up Ghost]] {{-}} [[Questlove]] {{-}} [[Wise Up: Thought]] {{-}} [[Blue Note]] {{-}} [[Wake Me Up]] {{-}} [[She's Pulling Out The Pin]] {{-}} [[The Imposters]] {{-}} [[Late Night With Jimmy Fallon]] {{-}} [[High Fidelity]] {{-}} [[(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea]] {{-}} [[Stations Of The Cross]] {{-}} [[Black And White World]] {{-}} [[Bruce Springsteen]] {{-}} [[Pills And Soap]] {{-}} [[Bob Dylan]] {{-}} [[The Rolling Stones]] {{-}} [[Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)]] {{-}} [[National Ransom (song)|National Ransom]] {{-}} | {{Tags}} [[Paul McCartney]] {{-}} [[Spectacle: Elvis Costello with...]] {{-}} [[The Roots]] {{-}} [[Wise Up Ghost]] {{-}} [[Questlove]] {{-}} [[Wise Up: Thought]] {{-}} [[Blue Note]] {{-}} [[Wake Me Up]] {{-}} [[She's Pulling Out The Pin]] {{-}} [[The Imposters]] {{-}} [[Late Night With Jimmy Fallon]] {{-}} [[High Fidelity]] {{-}} [[(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea]] {{-}} [[Stations Of The Cross]] {{-}} [[Black And White World]] {{-}} [[Bruce Springsteen]] {{-}} [[Pills And Soap]] {{-}} [[Bob Dylan]] {{-}} [[The Rolling Stones]] {{-}} [[Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)]] {{-}} [[National Ransom (song)|National Ransom]] {{-}} [[Radio Silence]] {{-}} [[Can You Be True?]] {{-}} [[Cinco Minutos Con Vos]] [[Geoff Emerick]] {{-}} [[George Martin]] | ||
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[[Category:Interviews]] | [[Category:Interviews]] | ||
[[Category:2014 interviews]] | [[Category:2014 interviews]] | ||
Revision as of 13:41, 13 October 2019
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