Be Careful What You Read

Linda Perry

Here are a bunch of shocking headlines I grabbed lately from various web 'sources', emphasis is mine:

• • Beyonce's Songwriting Abilities Clowned By Songwriter Linda Perry
  • Linda Perry SLAMS Beyoncé For Taking Credit When She Shouldn't! - Perez Hilton
  • Shots Fired? Linda Perry Takes Aim At Beyonce's Songwriting - Lipstickally.com
  • Beyonce's Songwriting Credits are Questioned by Linda Perry But Do Fans Really Care? - Bustle
  • Beyonce Must Prove Herself As A Songwriter - spyghana.com
  • Linda Perry Calls Out Beyonce's “Songwriting” Skills - D-listed

...and most shocking of all...

• Linda Perry Drags Illiterate Porn Star Beyonce For Her Bullshit - arcadey.net

You can check the sources yourself if you want to, which is why I included them. And how did it all start? Well, songwriter Linda Perry, who has written for Christina Aguilera, Pink, Ariana Grande, Celine Dion, Alicia Keys and others, did a recent Reddit question-and-answer session, and one of the questions posed to her was this:

Linda, how do you feel about Beyonce changing one word on a song and getting writing credit. Does that bother you as a songwriter?

It's a fair question because songwriting credit is certainly a revenue source that artists (and their managers and record labels) have started to take more advantage of in the past few years.  Change a word here or there and ask for writing credits so you can get a bigger piece of the pie.

Let's look at that idea for a minute though.  If you had someone the caliber of Beyonce wanting to record your song and potentially making a lot of moola, what would you do?  I'm thinking a lot of us would day "sure, go ahead, whatever you want!" with great enthusiasm and flashing dollar signs in our eyes.  I'm also thinking that big name artists like Beyonce know very well that if one songwriter won't do it, another will.

From the headlines above, however, you'd think that Linda Perry was a self-righteous, nasty-mouthed, ungrateful be-atch.  This is the inter-web folks (yes, I know it's not called that) and you need to remember that every entertainment-related website is continuously looking for new ways to scream for attention, so I wanted to show you Linda's actual answer (which others did too, but almost as an afterthought, hoping maybe you'd click on an ad or two in the meantime):

“Well hahaha um that's not songwriting but some of these artists believe if it wasn't for them your song would never get out there so they take a cut just because they are who they are. but everyone knows the real truth even Beyonce. She is talented but in a completely different way.”

Utterly blasphemous, no?  No.  Just an honest response to an honest question.  I don't love Beyonce, and neither do I hate her.  Sometimes it's just the web I hate.

IJ

Ringo's Stars

I had the privilege of seeing Ringo Starr and his All Star Band this past Tuesday at the Hard Rock Theatre in Coquitlam BC. Some of you may have already seen one version or another of this tour over the past 20 years or so since Ringo has been doing this.

The idea behind the All Star Band is that Ringo invites other artists/musicians/songwriters to join him and it literally becomes a kind of songwriter/performer-in-the-round event, with each taking turns to do a song they're famous for and the rest of the group being "the band".  Ringo himself didn't have a lot of solo hits compared to his band mates John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, so what he has done instead is brilliant.

The All Star incarnation that I saw the other night consisted of Steve Lukather from Toto on vocals, lead and rhythm guitar, Gregg Rolie from Santana and Journey on vocals, organ, keyboards, Todd Rundgren who was a successful solo artist along with being in other bands, on vocals, lead and rhythm guitar,  and Richard Page  from the 80's band Mr. Mister on vocals and bass guitar.  Warren Ham provided vocals, saxophone, percussion and keyboards, and Gregg Bissonette was on drums, percussion, and added some backing vocals.

Aside from Ringo's hits like Yellow Submarine, Photograph and It Don't Come Easy, there were great songs like Africa, I Saw The Light, Bang The Drum All Day, Rosanna, Evil Ways, Black Magic Woman, Broken Wings and Kyrie, among others.

It was such a great throwback to the 70's!  What it reminded me of was just how much I was influenced by songs, not only artists.  I've mentioned many times the artists that have impacted my own songwriting like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.  But the fact is that individual songs can do that too.  What I appreciated most about my teenage years was the fact that you could hear all kinds of music on the same radio station, not just one genre. You were just as likely to hear, for instance, a gospel song from "Hair" as you were rock or country or pop ballads.  So it seems to me the emphasis in those days was on the songs first, artists second.

In the late 70's (and according to one article I read, because of Peter Frampton's enormously successful album 'Frampton Comes Alive') the focus of record labels started to shift from singles to albums.  At the same time radio began narrowing its playlists to one or two genres and because of this paradigm shift, a lot of songs that would have deserved the radio exposure, didn't get any.  No longer could you buy singles, you had to buy whole albums.  Today because of YouTube and mp3 players, we've come back to that notion of single songs which is really how it should be.  As I've always believed, the song is the thing.

And listening to all of those songs played the other night because of Ringo's clever notion of an All Starr Band, I realized the impact of single songs on my own songwriting.  For instance, Todd Rundgren's song I Saw The Light had that mixture of major 7th and minor 7th chords that I loved to use, and so I did, ad nauseum!  He also wrote simple but powerful melodies, exemplified in his song Love Is The Answer, which I recall the England Dan and John Ford Coley version of more than Rundgren's.

So from now on I'm going to focus on remembering the SONGS that influenced me, not just the artists.  Which songs influenced your songwriting?  Post yours below!

IJ

 

Songs I Like - I Saw The Light

1972 was a memorable year for me, but not in a good way.  In May of that year, my mother died.  I was 14 and devastated, but one of the ways that I found to express my grief was by writing songs.

Whenever I see the song title "I Saw The Light" I'm reminded of the old bluegrass song, but there is actually another song that was a hit for Todd Rundgren in 1972 by the same name.

The other night I was in Vancouver watching Ringo and His All Star Band, and had the pleasure of seeing Rundgren perform his song live along with Ringo and members of Toto, Santana and Mr. Mister. Funny thing was that back in 1972, I didn't know it was Todd Rundgren who wrote it because I didn't pay as much attention to artists as I did to songs back then.  I do remember the song Hello It's Me being attributed to Rundgren, and he performed that one as well the other night.  But I can't say that I knew Bang On The Drum, It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference and Love Is The Answer were Rundgren songs either. They were all on the set list that night.

I Saw The Light and Love Is The Answer, which came later, definitely had an impact on my early songwriting, especially because of the major and minor seventh chords in each of them.  When I discovered those chords and moved between them on my guitar, I was utterly hooked and ended up writing quite a few songs with those chord combinations.  It wasn't until the other night, however, that I made that connection and realized those songs came from the same person.  So thanks, Todd, without question you inspired my songwriting.

The genre of I Saw The Light was called "soft rock", which was how I described my early songwriting.  You don't see references to that very much these days;  it was a 70's genre for sure. There was even a Soft Rock Cafe in Kitsilano, a suburb of Vancouver, where I occasionally performed in the late 70's and early 80's.

Whenever I'm meeting new guitar students, I inevitably ask them what kind of music they like.  It occurs to me that more often than not, the younger ones have more trouble defining a genre or an artist, and simply go by the song.  That's probably the truth of it;  songs by themselves stick with us and early on in our lives we don't pay much attention to anything else.

I Saw The Light is so very 70's :-).  Beyond that, I will just let it speak for itself! 

~ IJ