My 10 All Time Favourite Songs

I know…who cares what my favourite all time songs are? Well, to tell you the truth, I saw somebody else do a similar list so I decided why not me? The interesting thing about going through my lists and lists of songs was in realizing how each one represented a different time in my life, but they also reflect how my tastes changed. As a songwriter, you realize the value of writing something that will stick with your listeners, and I decided to evaluate each one for that special something that made me shiver.

1. The first in my list had to be the very first song I fell in love with, “Dizzy” by Tommy Roe. Go ahead, laugh :-). Dizzy became a huge hit for Tommy in 1969, so that means I was 12 years old when I first heard it. It so happened that I picked up a guitar for the first time at the same age, and I was exposed to this new and crazy thing called radio around about then too! You can listen to the song first, if you like, and then I’ll tell you what that special something was in this song for me:

The chorus modulating in the second line was the little musical bit that was, at that time, magic to my ears. And the idea of being dizzy with infatuation was also pretty appealing. What can I say? I was 12.

2. The next song is probably on a lot of songwriter’s lists simply because it was written by songwriting guru Jimmy Webb. Glen Campbell had a hit with “Witchita Lineman” in 1968, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear it until later than that. Other artists have also covered this song, including one of my favourites, James Taylor. When I saw JT live here in Victoria a couple of years back, I nearly fell off my chair when he performed this song! Here is Glen Campbell’s version:

There are a gazillion things I love about this song. The Glen Campbell version was pretty 60’s-sounding with its string section prominently coming in at the beginning and throughout the recording. And of course, there was Glen’s little guitar riff at the beginning, and his solo half way through mirroring the melody is just magic. His voice was beautiful and plaintive, perfect for the subject of this song. An interesting thing about this song is that it has no chorus, but a repeated phrase or refrain “and the Witchita Lineman is still on the line.” The chord changes are gorgeous and unpredictable, especially in the 3rd line of the verses when, having come from a Gm7 in the previous, it changes to Dm7, Am7 and then comes back to a G major. That’s the part that gives me shivers.

Listening again to James Taylor’s version gives it a whole new feel. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of James, and his voice, again, is just perfect for this song.

And speaking of James…

3. I have to add a James Taylor song, and there are so many obvious ones, so rather than being predictable I’m going to introduce you to a song from his 1997 album called “Hourglass“. James’ brother Alex died in 1993 and this song is really about him. I read an interview with James about this song, and he said that he decided to change the character to a female “Alice” and give his personal connection to it a little distance. Here is “Enough To Be On Your Way“:

Here’s the first verse:

The sun shines on this funeral

The same as on a birth

The way it shines on everything

That happens here on earth

It rolls across the western sky

And back into the sea

And spends the day’s last rays

Upon this fucked up family

So long old gal

The 2nd to last line made me laugh out loud when I first heard it. Don’t we all have f***ed up families? The song itself is a kind of sentimental send off to a real character by the name of Alice.

The last time I saw Alice

She was leaving Santa Fe

With a bunch of round-eyed Buddhists

In a killer Chevrolet

Said they turned her out of Texas

Yeah she burned `em down back home

Now she`s wild with expectation

On the edge of the unknown

Nobody can write like James Taylor, and this whole song gave me shivers, but the chorus does it especially:

Oh it`s enough to be on your way

It`s enough just to cover ground

It`s enough to be moving on

Home, build it behind your eyes

Carry it in your heart

Safe among your own

The kicker is the phrase “so long old gal” . I want this song played at MY funeral!

4. Another band that I was turned on to in the 70’s was Steely Dan. I played in a cover band then that had a brass section and we were always looking for songs with brass parts, so the first Steely Dan song I learned was “Pretzel Logic“. A few years later, Steely Dan had a big hit with “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and that’s what started my love affair with their music.

My all time favourite Steely Dan song is Deacon Blues. All of their songs all have a sophisticated jazz style of music married with irreverent lyrics, but the lyrics in Deacon Blues somehow seem more personal. Maybe I’m wrong…who knows what Donald Fagen was thinking when he wrote it…I’m sure I don’t! For me personally, this is a perfect example of how I stamped my own meaning on a song lyric. Somewhere between the music and lyrics, I found something of myself, even though I know it has nothing at all to do with me. And that is the “shiver” quality that I get from Deacon Blues:

I can throw a CD (or iPod) full of Steely Dan songs in the car and drive for hours.

5. I have to include a Joni Mitchell song and again, there are so many to choose from. “Court and Spark” was the first album of Joni’s that I purchased and I loved every track on it. And what I ended up picking here was a song of hers that was released commercially, “Help Me“. Joni was one of those rare writers who could put poetry to music and make it work wonderfully. There’s a simplicity to these lyrics, however:

Help me

I think I’m falling

In love again

When I get that crazy feeling

I know I’m in trouble again

I’m in trouble

‘Cause you’re a rambler and a gambler

And a sweet talking ladies man

And you love your lovin’

But not like you love your freedom

Of course, Joni’s guitar playing was something else again. Being a guitar player myself, I was fascinated to learn that she hated the “F” chord (I always tell my students that “F” has its name for a reason!), and that’s one reason why she started using open tunings. Opening tunings are more common now, but she made an art of them and at one point she had 50+ different tunings.

“Help Me” was a perfect falling in love song for me…I understood every second of it:

Again, I think I was most attracted to her chord progressions. “Help Me” modulates from one key to another effortlessly and naturally and just kind of floats musically. Once I figure out what tuning she used, I’ll tell you what the keys are :-).

6. “Hello Goodbye” is a Beatles song I’ve always loved. It’s that one line especially where the bass descends…”hello, hello, I don’t know why you say goodbye I say hello” and then it repeats. The lyrics are just a play on opposites but work perfectly with the idea of a difficult or troubled relationship. “You say yes, I say no, you say why and I say I don’t know”. Perfect.

I can’t imagine that any band or musician will ever be as big or as influential as the Beatles, not because there aren’t any other great bands, but because of the timing. The Beatles simply hit the right note at the right time and it’s not possible to do that in the same way again. For those of you who don’t know this song (I can’t imagine you don’t!), here is “Hello, Goodbye”:

7. A songwriter I very much respect is Mary Chapin Carpenter. At a music conference years ago, I heard John Braheny use Mary’s song “This Shirt” as an exemplary example of object songwriting and I couldn’t agree more. However, one of my all time favourite MCC songs is called “Come On, Come On“. If you’ve never heard it, here is a live performance of it:

I truly can’t decide if it’s Mary Chapin Carpenter’s delivery that packs the real punch or the song itself.

Some people remember the first time

Some can’t forget the last

Some just select what they want to from the past

It’s a song that you danced to in high school

It’s a moon you tried to bring down

On a four-in-the-morning drive through the streets of town

Mary came out with this gem smack in the middle of my songwriting frenzy in the 90’s. I couldn’t aspire to anyone more intelligent and insightful. The whole song was moving for me, but so was the idea that somebody could come up with a song so beautiful. I wish I wrote that! She has also collaborated with the next songwriter I’ve got on my list.

8. I discovered Shawn Colvin in the 1990’s after a friend of mine suggested that, vocally, I sounded a lot like Shawn. So I bought her CD “Fat City” out of curiosity and ended up falling in love with her music. Again, her guitar playing and performance was a big sell for me since that’s what I was out there doing a lot of at the time. In 1998 she had a breakthrough hit with “Sunny Came Home“. I love the acoustic guitar and mandolin in this song…in fact,the whole production is fabulous:

The chord progressions are just wonderful in “Sunny”, the bass line on the guitar keeps changing, first down and up and then down again in the verses. Shawn and a few other songwriters started this very percussive way of strumming that I tried to emulate a few times in subsequent songwriting. The melody in the chorus of Sunny Came Home is beautiful and stands out…Shawn has a fabulous voice, much more versatile and controlled than mine ever could be. She has written some great songs on her own, and has also collaborated a lot in her songwriting career, which I’m sure has stretched her beyond her own songwriting boundaries, and which is something I never did enough of.

9. Even though the 70’s were sometimes written off because of disco, I liked a lot of the songs that came out during that time. I was not a KC and the Sunshine Band fan, and there was plenty of music that I thought was fluff, but I did enjoy quite a bit of it, including the next song by the Commodores called “Brick House“. Why, I like it so much that my daughter has it as the ringtone on her cell when I call her :-). What is it about this song?

It’s just sexy. And funky. The odd thing about “Brick House” is that the verses have only one chord. Everything is about the lyrics and the funk, no fancy chord progressions involved. In fact, even the chorus is limited in terms of chords. But it doesn’t get boring, does it? So what does that teach you?

10. Okay, my last choice is a reflection of the love and respect I have found for jazz, especially earlier jazz. I didn’t appreciate it at all until I was an adult, but I can’t for the life of me tell you why. I’m thinking that Woody Allen‘s movies are probably what brought me to jazz. He used to have jazz or dixie music in a lot of his movies. It’s not that I didn’t hear it or know of it before then, it’s just that I was too caught up in acoustic and singer/songwriter and old pop music to hear anything else. I am amazed that my 22-year-old daughter has already developed a taste for it.

When I listen to Louis Armstrong singing “A Kiss To Build A Dream On“, it just makes me swoon. It’s romantic, it’s happy, it’s simple and it’s not simple at all. I picked this song as a kind of representative of what I have learned to appreciate in my middle-aged years.

There is SO MUCH music out there and I know I’m missing about 99% of it these days. I plan to make a concerted effort to LISTEN MORE and hopefully find some gems out there that I never would have heard otherwise.

I’m also realizing that 10 songs is only the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned for the next 10 :-). You can purchase some of the albums here:

IJ

Are You A Good Listener?

We’re going to listen with a critical ear to the production and instruments in a recorded song.  Even if you are not a musician, or not familiar with various instruments used in music production, being a good listener and recognizing the role each instrument plays in a song will ALWAYS give you an advantage when you are recording your songs or performing them with other people.

Let’s start with the basics of listening to a recorded song by picking a song by a band or artist that you like.  Try to find a song that has a full band;  quite often the instruments and the players are listed on each cut of a CD.  The more instruments, the better!

One of the most obvious, up front elements of a recorded song is the drum part or percussion.  If the song you’re listening to has drums, it’s important to note that they are what drives the song.  That may seem obvious, but did you know that the drum part is often recorded first?  The reason for this is that the rest of the instruments need to follow the drums, and not the other way around.  So the drums are played at the agreed to tempo and every instrument recorded after has to maintain that same tempo as accurately as possible.

Image via Wikipedia

So let’s discuss the parts of a drum kit first.  The kick or bass drum (4) is the deep, heavy beat;  the big drum that the drummer hits with a foot pedal.  It is often hit less frequently than the other parts.  The snare (5) has a higher pitch and is hit with a drum stick, as are the rest of the drum parts when they are played.  The toms (3) are sonically somewhere between the snare sound and the kick or bass drum.  They are usually played as part of a “fill”, when the drummer comes away from the snare to roll on the toms at the end of phrases or song parts.  Then there are the cymbals.  Crash cymbals (1) are also used for emphasis, sometimes at the beginning or end of a phrase, or emphasizing the chorus.  They often referred to as the “ride” when they keep time during a chorus, for instance, and the hi-hats (6) are similarly used.

When you’re listening to the song you’ve chosen, try to focus only on the drums for the entire track.  Listen to what they do and when they do it.  Do they start at the beginning, or come in a little later in the intro?  What’s the difference in the way they are played in the verses and then the chorus?  If there is a bridge in the song, do they do something different?  Pay attention to when they come in and when they pause and all of the flourishes throughout the song.  When do you hear the toms, if at all?  When do you hear the cymbals?  Listen through a couple of times and make sure you are listening to ONLY the drums.

Now let’s focus on the bass.  The bass guitar is closely associated with the drums and often recorded at the same time or just after the drums are.  The drummer and bassist have a very close relationship and you’ll notice if you’ve ever seen a band play live, the bass player is often looking for signals or exchanging glances with the drummer as they move through the chord changes and fills.  The bass is often the hardest instrument to hear because of its low pitch.  Sometimes it plays very simple lines with long notes, and other times it might be almost rhythmic.  Listen to the song you’ve chosen again, but only to the bass this time.   Sometimes when I’m teaching my guitar students how to play by ear, I put on a song and get them to listen for the bass part, because that often determines what chord is being played by the guitar.  So I know how difficult it is to identify.  Occasionally you might confuse the sound of the bass with the low string of a guitar, but when you can zero in on the bass, listen through the whole song and pay attention to what it does.  It will certainly change notes as the chords change, but does it change patterns at different times?  Can you hear how it matches up sometimes with the rhythm of the kick on the drum kit?  Listen through enough times that you are completely focused in on only the bass.

The recording you are listening to might have piano, or “keys’ as they are often referred to.  They tend to stand out from the stringed instruments, even though they also have “strings”, but quite often they are electric pianos or keyboards with different sounds.  The keyboard might be playing chords, or it might also have little melody parts or fills throughout the song.  Listen to what the keyboard is doing and how it interacts with the rest of the instruments.

Guitars can be a challenge to listen to as well.  There may be acoustic guitar and/or electric, and often there are both and maybe even more than one of each!  Being able to distinguish how many guitars you hear is important and probably the greatest challenge.  Often if there are two or more guitars, they are doing different things, but because they sound similar, it is hard for the ear to separate them at first.  The electric guitar often does a solo or lead part somewhere in the song.  This gives it some distinction because it’s playing notes and melodies, and not chords.

So focus in now on what the guitars (if there are any) are doing in the song.  Is there just one guitar playing chords?  Can you hear the difference between the electric guitar and the acoustic, assuming there are both?  How do they interact with each other?  Note that it is very rare, even if there are two acoustic guitars, for them to be playing the same thing.  If you are a guitar player and you are jamming with others, quite often you’ll all be playing the same chords and progressions, but that rarely happens in recorded music because what would be the point of doing the same thing twice?  So what the guitar players might choose to do is to play in one key on one guitar, and use a capo or barre chords to play somewhere else on the neck with the second guitar.  Paul Simon used to have one guitar tuned normally, and another with the strings tuned an octave higher, so he had a very full acoustic guitar sound in his recordings.

There may be other instruments in the song you’re listening to.  What are they?  Extra percussion?  Strings, like violins, or maybe there are electronic drums or beats, or sounds that you can’t identify right away.  Quite often, recordings will have layers and layers of sounds, and others might be considered quite “sparse” in their instrumentation.

Learning to listen to other instruments and how they work together will be an important tool for you when you are thinking about what you might include in a recording of your own song.  Sometimes when you’re thinking about your song, you might “hear” something that you’d like and being able to identify and articulate what that is will be a big help when you finally get in the studio.

IJ

Songwriting Without An Instrument

Recently someone commented on one of my blogs that they would like to know how to write a song without an instrument.  You would think that because there is music involved, it would be next to impossible to write a song without any musical “ability”. If you are overwhelmed with the idea of learning an instrument, the fact is that many of us assume that we are supposed to become some kind of virtuoso on it which, as a guitar teacher, I can tell you is not true! Most guitar teachers can tell you that.

Image via Wikipedia

Even if we are not singers, we can all hum.  And if you’ve been around music all of your life, as most of us have, you’ve probably found yourself humming along or singing along with your favourite songs.  If you already have some lyrics written, free yourself from your musical inhibitions by “singing” them in some sort of way that gives you a feel for the meter (rhythm) of them.  Don’t worry whether or not it is GOOD, just do it!  See if you can’t find some kind of melody that matches the meter and then just keep experimenting.  You might find that you “hear” certain melodies with certain lines and not with others.  That could mean that you just haven’t found it yet, or it could mean that the lines with no melodies just aren’t working.  So keep working at it, change the lines or mess around with another melody…just keep trying.  The more you liberate yourself from feeling like you CAN’T do it, the less inhibited you will become.

If you are overwhelmed with the idea of learning an instrument, the fact is that many of us assume that we are supposed to become some kind of virtuoso on it which, as a guitar teacher, I can tell you is not true!  Most people learn an adequate number of chords within a few weeks or months, for instance, to be able to play a good selection of songs that they like.  The fact is that many songs are rather simple in their chord progressions (a chord progression is a series of chords), and so they can be learned fairly easily.  So you can probably learn enough chords in a couple of months to start trying to match them to your lyrics. 

As a songwriter, you don’t have to be a master of an instrument to adequately come up with some chords to your song.  So what I am advocating first is that you could pick up a guitar or sit at a piano and fool around with it by ear so that you can familiarize yourself with finding little melodies on it.  It doesn’t have to be a massive undertaking, just a simple way of getting to know the instrument so that you can feel comfortable with it.  Then if you feel ready, you can find some resources to show you how to play some simple chords, and then take it from there.

Your other option is to find someone who CAN play, and who can help you find chords and melodies.  This might take some doing, but then again, there could be someone in your own backyard or circle of friends who already plays and might be willing to experiment with your lyrics.  You can either give the lyrics entirely up to them, or you can sit with them and try to come up with some ideas together.

A third option would be to invest in some kind of software like Band-In-A-Box which is a clever computer software program that you can create backing tracks (music) to your melodies or lyrics with little effort.  You can play with chords without knowing which chords go together, and you can pick styles and instruments, again, without knowing much about them, and still come up with a decent sounding “band” to sing your songs along with.

I was at a songwriting retreat once where one of the participants in my little group didn’t play an instrument at all.  Somehow she had found someone to come up with chords to her melodies, so when it was her turn to perform one of her songs, she just gave the chords to someone who could play guitar and she sang along with him.  I admired her for her dedication to songwriting even though she had never learned an instrument.  And you don’t have to be limited either!

Now I know that some of you out there reading this blog might have suggestions of your own, so if you do, please add them below!  Comments and replies always welcome :-).

IJ