pop music songwriting, a studied craft?

Pop is way studied. (continuing)

I agree with Mark. Pop is all about convention and creative use of cliche. I mean that in a good way.

well, a neutral way, really.

I write bubblegum pop songs. I have not used any kind of book about musical theory since I was about 14 years old! (which, strangely enough, was just about the time I quit classical training to make pop music instead.) The key to understanding how to write pop songs is to *listen* to pop songs. For example, it's ideal that one should know enough about music theory to know what a keychange is, but you are not going to understand *why* you should go up a semi-tone after a middle eight for the final chorus until you listen to enough pop to actually *experience* feeling the emotional lift that the keychange produces.

It's more like an apprenticed craft rather than a studied craft. You learn it by listening to it and doing it, rather than reading books about how to do it.

As anyone who has ever judged a pop songwriting competition will tell you, everyone can write a song, but get enough people in, and you will find that they will all write the same song. Inspiration can account for 50% of a song, the other 50% is using all the tools of writing a pop song without dropping into cliche. That is the 'study' part.

I don't want to provoke a discussion as to what is and isn't pop music, but do you mean pop music as in verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge type traditional pop music? Or do you mean pop music including stuff that’s a bit more unconventional in its structure and harmony? Say, ‘Pass The Dutch’ or something…

Apostrophe - what you're saying, i think, applies more to the chord progressions than lyrics and melody. You can definitely go very far without knowing music theory (beatles), but if you're listening to lots and lots of songs critically and with your ear open to learning what makes the good songs good, then that is studying too. books on the subject can give you a different view which may or may not be valuable. I guess my question is, is it valuable to you?

TomB - I'm meaning pop music to be everything from the latest britney to more unconventional stuff. Definitely including Magnetic Fields, the clientele, the shins, and other indie pop.

The Beatles didn't 'study' pop as there were no reference materials. They had rock and roll, 'country', and 'show' tunes as 'source'. Plus, basically limited to what their guitars could produce and what happened if you put your mitts 'here' and 'here'. That's a lot of 'perspiration' by anyone's account.

mark, i agree (With what you said in your second post). what tools are people using to study it though?

Mainly the study material is other pop songs.

the high llamas to thread. if it was possible to write like brian wilson just by hard studying, they would be writing like brian wilson. the fact they aint is a big prop to the argument that inspiration is all. see also gainsbourg/momus.

Well, there is a long history of "pop" though. The Beatles would certainly have been aware of Tin Pan Alley and the great songwriters of the 20s and 30s like Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, etc. I know McCartney at least was very into the idea of being a traditional pop songwriter in that vein.

Furthermore, they were into Motown and Brill Bldg stuff, which though current, was very much traditional pop houses.

I agree with the posts about pop being a studied discipline. What makes it tricky is that people usually assume you are talking about the entire history of pop when you say it is "studied", as if today's pop songwriters necessarily are pulling from Gershwin when they write. They might be a little, but pop music changes very quickly. I think it is at least as important to be aware of what is happening right now as it is to be versed in classic popular music. This is a reason why I think people like Elvis Costello and Andy Partridge don't have huge hits - their pop knowledge seems to drop off sharply from about the 1960s.

whuh? I wish it did drop sharply from the 1960s, Costello particularly.

That's kind of it - IMO he's a lot more successful when he's sticking to a classic pop mode, rather than trying a bunch of brass band things or whatever. His attempts at eclecticism seem a lot more forced to me than his straight pop songs.

The question asked specifically about books, and I thought that implied studying as being specifically book-oriented. If studying can mean studying the music itself by listening to it, well, yes. Totally a studied craft. But the question was about books! Which I think are fundamentally useless to the craft of songwriting.

Unless you're Lloyd Cole, of course...

I've never found studying pop song writing to be helpful. I chose to study it last year for A-Level music and had to do a little project on it. All I learnt was that there wasn’t much else to learn for someone who had been playing and listening to pop songs for 10 years. I also learnt that to write a good pop song I had great deal to learn, and this wasn’t something I could learn from studying pop songs, I decided I had to change my approach to listening.

I’m only going by the people I know and have done stuff with in the past, but I think you can roughly divide songwriters into two groups and this depends on how they listen to music.

Group 1 – People who get off on more of the song-y part of music, the arrangement, the lyrics and the development of the song. My friends that are more like this seem to be into bands like the Pixies, have soft spots for either the Beatles or the Stones and are WAY BETTER AT WRITING POP SONGS! (not that I’m bitter or anything).They seem to be much better at coming up with hooks and are way better with lyrics, they are usually less technically skilled musicians, but better songwriters.

Group 2 – People who get off more on the ‘sound’ part of music. They listen to lots more instrumental and electronic music. They seem to be more into the emotional impact the sound gives off, rather than the song. They focus a lot less on the lyrics.

This sort of thing has probably been said a million times before with a lot more thought going into it! I reckon everyone fits somewhere between these two extremes, and the best pop songwriters can draw from both ends of the scale to create music that satisfies both camps.

I started out mostly in Group 1, and listening back to the recordings I made as a 13-14 year old, although simple, would probably do better as a pop song than anything I could do now. At some point, I started listening to sounds, textures, timbres, tones, tiny little nuances in the sound (I blame electronic music!) and now I can’t write good pop songs! I don’t seem to be able to listen to music like I used to, and this seems to have really affected what and how I write. I’m currently trying to work out what I need to do to get a healthy balance and to get my pop sensibilities back!

So, all in all, I reckon good pop song writing comes more from listening than learning or studying.

i would go back and listen to lots of 50s and earlier tin pan alley-type pop. and then the shirelles, and motown, etc etc.

I like your post, Tom B. The annoying thing is, I *love* the Group 2 aspects in the music that I listen to. But I'm much better at the Group 1 aspects of songwriting. Sigh.

I don't think the issue is the extent to which pop songwriting is "inspiration," as opposed to "craft" or "practice." Is "inspiration" the term you wanted? The question is maybe the extent to which elements in pop songwriting come about as a result of chance rather than the application of some studied elements. A lot of songwriters, obviously, go about it just by playing around with chords and melodies until they happen to come up with something that they like.

my advice: listen hard to old songs.

I'm the opposite! I was forced into classical guitar, computers and Cubase pretty damn early on. I think this really warped the way I think about music.

I just worry I'll never be able to write a decent hook or a full song that is actually a wholly good song. I get a lot of "The section just before when the drums come in is sweet man". I can take someone else’s idea and make it *sound* good, can embellish it in just about any way, but it'll never be my idea.

Jim O'Rourke is someone who I respect quite a lot when it comes to this sort of stuff. From what I've read and the little bits of his I've heard, he seems to have a pretty amazing grasp of both songwriting and sound making.

I agree with Tim Ellison above; I also think craft vs "inspiration" is overrated as a dichotomy. Even "inspired" songwriters are going to reflect the structures and styles they like, regardless of whether they've read a book about them or not. Likewise, just because a writer is well-versed in songs and forms hardly disqualifies him from being inspired.

Inspiration should really be a running mega-thread at ILM. There a so many misconceptions about not only songwriting but song *listening* regarding inspiration. I usually read about it like it's a magical, mythical force guiding geniuses to the one true method of knowing and appreciating music. Conversely, I usually read about craft (not necessarily in this thread) as being the enemy of creative music. Yet, I very rarely read that the two are almost inseparable. IMO, the only way you can write songs and somehow not be inspired is to be a compulsive music maker, like having a stress disorder that forces you to write songs. I don't think that happens very often.

Heh, actually, it sounds pretty accurate. I have that stress disorder, yeah.

are books (and college courses that use them) rubbish then? there's no subsitute for actually listening to songs, but i think the point of using a book is to take those songs you're listening to and deliberately isolate the little bits of it that are good and try them out for yourself in songs that you are writing. I can see how this could be non necessary, but I can't see (though I havent tried it) how it could be a worthless effort.

TomB - i'm a group 2 when it comes to writing/playing, but a group 1 when it comes to listening. I wish to god I could write a decent hook! maybe apostrophe and i should start a band.