Songwriting

March 7, 2011

Mike Viola is Lost in the Supermarket

There is a base human need to consume. We gotta eat. We do it with food, we do it with sex, we do it with raising our kids. We do it with movies, music, musicals, paintings, pictures, pictures of musicians in musicals who paint movie posters. The list goes on. What do we love more than lists? Crossing something off our lists. Consuming our lists.

Let’s walk right past the “I wanna be famous” stage of being an artist. Even though you tell yourself and everybody else around you that you “don’t want to be famous, I just want to be heard.” You’re kidding yourself. You’re hungry. I know very famous people at the top of their game. One guy is the only surviving member of his era. He’s the best. Everyone knows he’s the best. And it’s not enough for him. And that hunger has nothing to do with more fame. He’ll die starving, a very rich man.

Tags: art, being an artist, hey song, idea, movie posters, Music, nick drake, pictures of musicians, Song, Supermarket.

Filed under Songwriting by WadeB on Mar 7th, 2011. Comment.

March 5, 2011

Mar 4, Music home based business

Music home based business ideas and solutions. Ideas for setting up a music home based business.
Ultimate Songwriting Blog

Tags: business music, Home, home based business, home based business ideas, Mar, Music, songwriting, Ultimate.

Filed under Songwriting by WadeB on Mar 5th, 2011. Comment.

March 4, 2011

Write new lyrics over the old ones

I don’t know how long this method has been around, but I remember hearing Tom T. Hall talk about it on “Nashville Now” hosted by Ralph Emery back in the late 1980s.

Select a song to use as a model. It’s best to choose one you like and one that was popular and sold well.

Then write a new set of lyrics for the song. They don’t have to be about the same thing as the original. For example, Paul McCartney wrote the tune for “Yesterday” first, using dummy lyrics — “Scrambled eggs, how I love to eat my scrambled eggs.”

As soon as you get a set of lyrics you like, write a new tune for them.

As with the lyrics, the tune doesn’t have to be in the same style as the original model. It can be any style you want — just make sure the lyrics fit into the tune.

My wife once presented me with some lyrics she wrote. She told me she had modeled them on a famous song, but didn’t tell me what it was. I didn’t want to be influenced by the original.

This was some years back when Santana came out with “Smooth” and the song was playing everwhere you went. So I wrote a latin groove and the lyrics fit very well — I only had to add one word.

When I played her the finished song, she was really surprised — she was obviously still thinking of the original song.

She had based it on “Ob La Di, Ob La Da” and I turned it into Santana,

If you want to hear the result — click here.

There are a million ways to write a song, but this is one that can give you a good place to start and a structure to work with … maybe making it easier.

WADE

Tags: finished song, latin groove, million ways, model, ralph emery, Santana, set, Song, tom t hall, tune.

Filed under Songwriting by WadeB on Mar 4th, 2011. Comment.

February 26, 2011

Tin Pan Alley – Home to New York’s Music Publishers

Starting in the late 19th century, the major product sold by the music industry was the piano roll. There were no radios, TV, record players or movies.

But most homes had a piano, and even though a great number of people learned to play the piano in those days, the piano roll gave them the opportunity to hear many styles of music and virtuosos.

As popular music gained strength in the entertainment world — eclipsing classic and religious music — music publishers flourished and cultivated songwriters. The area of New York where most held offices was called Tin Pan Alley.

Here is a brief article about this magical place and its role in popular music — after the jump.

WADE

Tags: aggressive business, Alley, century, half a million, Home, music publishers, piano, piano roll, roll, tin pan alley.

Filed under Songwriting by WadeB on Feb 26th, 2011. Comment.

February 24, 2011

Manilow and Mercer

Love him or hate him, you have to admire the tune Barry Manilow wrote for Johnny Mercer’s “When October Goes.”

Written toward the end of his life when he was fighting a losing struggle against brain cancer, Mercer expressed a fondness for Manilow. The first hit for Barry was “Mandy” — the name of Johnny’s daughter.

After Mercer’s death, his widow gave Manilow some of Johnny’s unfinished lyrics to work with. “October” was published in 1984 and was not only a big hit that year, but is an evergreen that surfaces every year on television, movies and in recordings.

Tags: barry manilow, brain cancer, daughter, fondness, johnny mercer, life, losing, October, struggle, tune.

Filed under Songwriting by WadeB on Feb 24th, 2011. Comment.

February 20, 2011

1957 — The Year In Music

January 5 – Renato Carosone and his band start their American tour in Cuba.

January 6 – Elvis Presley makes final appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

January 16 – The Cavern Club opens in Liverpool, England

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel name themselves Tom and Jerry and begin their recording career, signing with Sid Prosen of Big Records. Their first single, “Hey, Schoolgirl”, backed with “Dancin’ Wild”, hit #49 on the Billboard pop charts. Garfunkel was Tom Graph (so called because he like to write the pop charts out on graph paper) and Simon was Jerry Landis, a pseudonym he used during his early 1960s solo recordings. They toured for eighteen months before retiring to become college students and then reforming in 1963 as Simon and Garfunkel.

February 8 – Bo Diddley records his songs “Hey Bo Diddley” and “Mona” (aka “I Need You Baby”).

March – Chicago’s Cardinal Stritch bans all rock and roll and rhythm and blues music from Catholic-run schools, saying that “its rhythms encourage young people to behave in a hedonistic manner.”

March 19 – Elvis Presley purchases a mansion in Memphis, Tennessee and calls it Graceland.

Read more on 1957 — The Year In Music…

Tags: Baby, billboard pop charts, cardinal stritch, ed sullivan show, Eng, Heart, heitor villa lobos, rhythm and blues music, Willson, Young.