From The Mailbag April '12

 I recently received this email from Joel Patterson (link to his website below), who describes himself as "the enfant terrible of the recording website Gearslutz".  I'll let you read his email and my response is below:

Hi Irene,

Great site! Glad you're so willing to help out the neophytes out here.

I've got a question, it goes like this: every so often I will hear a familiar phrase in a "new" song, I guess the latest was in the Enrico Iglesias "I Like How It Feels." This may be an ancient song… I'm not too exposed to the current scene… anyway, he weaves the phrase "ticket to ride" into his lyric.

Or, whoever wrote the song did, is Enrico a talented guy? A front man for a larger organization? Isn't he descended from Julio Iglesias, some kind of star of a previous era? So many questions, so much I don't know…

"Ticket to ride" is obviously a quotation from the Beatles' tune "Ticket to ride." I am on the fence between thinking this is a heavy-handed, blatantly obvious, cheesy play, and thinking it's cool and hip.

If I were to work the phrase "rolling in the deep" into a new, original song, in a way that worked within the song and had a completely different melody from the Adele hit, I'm just wondering how that would strike you, overall? Cheesy? Hip? What's your take?

Thanks!

Joel Patterson
www.joelpatterson.us

"Hi Joel,

"This is a great question!  First of all, I think timing is everything.  If you encompassed “rolling in the deep” into a song in the very near future, I would consider it tacky because it would APPEAR to be the use of a phrase in order to draw attention to your own song.  You have no idea how many people hit my website using that phrase just because I did a bit of a critique on Adele’s song!  So people out there looking for that song lyric, or a discussion or critique of it, would also potentially find any other song containing that lyrical phrase if it was posted on the web.

Cool Chords

This is geared mostly towards guitar players, but could still apply in some respects to those of you who write with a keyboard.  Are your chord choices and your chord progressions getting boring?  You might find yourself always turning to the same chords when you're sitting down to write...and let's face it, you can probably only sing in certain keys so those chords work for you.

However, they're not very inspiring after awhile, are they?

Maybe you need to introduce yourself to some new sounding chords, chords that have different extensions (more about that in a minute), but still work for your voice.  There are many, many chords out there, but most of the time we stick to the common chords.  It's not that common chords are bad, but they are what we know.  I get an awful lot of visitors to one of my articles entitled "Chord Keys" because people aren't sure what chords sound good together.  In fact, they often use the search terms "what chords sound good together" to find that article!

So if you aren't sure about chord keys, that's a good primer.  However, beyond that, why not teach yourself some less common chords.  Chord "extensions" are simply added harmonic notes that change the sound of a chord.  For instance, a basic G chord changed to a Gadd5, gives it a fuller, more majestic (for lack of a better word) sound.  A Gadd5 is fretted like this:

 Gadd5
 -----------
 | | | | | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|
 | 1 | | | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|
 2 | | | 3 4
 |_|_|_|_|_|

Just adding that third finger to the third fret of the 2nd string gives the G a whole new dimension.  In fact, I know some guitar players who have permanently replaced any G they play with a Gadd5 because they like the sound of it better! But there are many other  G chords with different extensions, so I'm going to give you a bunch of them here just so you can play with them:

  Gadd5            G6              Gadd9              G11
 -----------     -----------     -----------     -----------
 | | | | | |     | | | | | |     | | | | | |     | | | | | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|
 | 1 | | | |     | 1 | | | |     | 1 | 2 | |     | | | 1 | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|
 2 | | | 3 4     2 | | | | |     3 | | | | 4     2 x 3 | | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|

(Note:  the "x" in the G13 chord means that you mute that string

with the back of your second finger)

So you can see that just by changing a couple of notes from a normal G chord, you can find lots of variations.  Sometimes I have found myself fingering some kind of chord without even knowing what to call it!  All I know and care about is the fact that it sounds cool.  Eventually I have found the names by using a website called Gootar.com and typing in the fingerings on their little Java chart.  It gives me a few names to choose from :-). The point is that you should explore how you play your regular chords to get out of your regular chord "rut".

The web is an excellent place to find chord charts if you are looking for new ones to try out. Chordie has a great one that gives all kinds of variations of all of the standard chords, and I'm sure you can find others just by Googling "guitar chord chart".

There is something about the sound of a new chord that can do all sorts of things to your ear when you are trying to write a song.  Sometimes the subtlest change can inspire something entirely new for you.  So find yourself some cool chords and get busy!

IJ

 

Songs I Like - The Chain

Fleetwood Mac's album "Rumours" was actually the 11th studio album by the band, released in 1977 and it sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.  One of the most interesting aspects of it was that there were a great number of personal problems happening within the band during the writing and recording of Rumours that contributed a great deal to the subject matter of the songs.  There are even books out there written all about the album and its creators. "Making Rumours" by Ken Caillat, is the most recent.

There were a number of big hits from Rumours including "Dreams", "Don't Stop" and "Go Your Own Way", all great songs.  But the only song on that album that had every band member credited with its writing was "The Chain".  The reason for that is interesting;  because different parts of the song were, in fact, written by different members.  John McVie, the bass player and Mick Fleetwood, the drummer had come up with the second part where the bass has that distinct, repetitive line.

It doesn't matter if you can't read bass clef, you can hear it in the video of the song below.   Stevie Nicks had written some lyrics that seemed to work with that, and together, she and Christie McVie came up with the melody to put on top of the ending part.  Lindsay Buckingham reworked an older song he had written with Stevie and came up with the first part of the song.  And that's how it all came together.

Lyrically, it's a break up song which is appropriate considering that the couples in the band were all having trouble at the time of the recording, so it more or less epitomizes what was happening to them.  It's rather simplistic, mostly about being lied to and the chain representing what ties them together.

What makes this a great song for me I think is the true emotion of it.  What is it you always hear from songwriting gurus?  It's important to keep a song meaning universal, and what's more universal than a break up song?  But the way it is delivered in the studio is with that element of "real" because for them at the time, it WAS real.  It's dramatic and powerful because it's the truth about their anger towards each other and the pain they were experiencing at the time.

The whole Rumours album is great, and it's worth listening to and reading the story behind.  "The Chain" with it's interesting instrumentation of banjos and bass lines and drums, has a rather timeless feel to it. Have a listen to the song on the video below. Here are the lyrics:

Listen to the wind blow, 
Watch the sunrise

Run in the shadow, 
Damn your love, damn your lies

CHORUS:

And if you don't love me now,

You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying                  

You would never break the chain

And if you don't love me now

You will never love me again

I can still hear you saying

You would never break the chain

Listen to the wind blow

Down comes the night

Run in the shadow

Damn your love, damn your lies

Break the silence

Damn the dark, damn the light

[REPEAT CHORUS]

Chains keep us together

Running in the shadows

[REPEAT AND FADE]

~ IJ