Serve The Song

Photo by Mick Murray

Jen de la Osa and Henry Beguiristain have been writing, singing, and playing guitar together since they were young. Today they are the core of Boston-based Aloud. The songs on their sophomore album Fan the Fury are an engaging collection of observations, each expressed with urgency and true emotion. Though currently in the midst of writing their third album, Henry and Jen took a break to discuss their music with me:

AC: Describe your songwriting process.

HENRY: It’s a little different each time, but normally the way it works is Jen and I will have stuff we work out on our own- an idea for a song, something nearly completed, and everything in between- and at least once a week we set aside time to finish the song together until we have something. It works wonders on quality control having an extra set of ears!

JEN: Lately, we’ve been a bit more organic about letting the song lead the way. Before, early on at the writing session we’d work out guitar parts and really end up leaving little space by the time we took it to the band. Now it’s more like strum it and we’ll figure out in the studio what the instrumentation will be. That gives it more time to get its own character.

AC: Your lyrics seem to straddle a line between rebellion and contrition.

HENRY: When Jen and I were writing the songs for that around 2006, 2007, we were reading a hell of a lot of news and trying to be more aware of what was going on in the world. We were definitely reacting to things that were happening.

JEN: Yeah, I just think the whole state of the world was unavoidable. It was everywhere you looked, invading your home, so we wrote about it. “Fan The Fury” was the first track we wrote with that in mind and the second we wrote for the record. I think it encapsulates the whole record.

AC: I noticed a reference to Rita in “Hard Up in The 2000s”. Tell me about what the Beatles mean to you.

JEN: The Beatles and their catalog of tunes… it’s just everything a musician aspires to. The way the songwriting developed over time, how it became more subtle or abrasive or artistic or rocking… it just changed all the time. And the way they attacked the studio, refusing to fail in getting the sound heard in their heads. They made plenty of mistakes, undoubtedly, but the songs and the attitude were brilliant. And most of the clothes weren’t bad either.

HENRY: The Beatles are my youth, they’re the reason I picked up a guitar and plucked away on a piano. More than the mythos, though, the approach to the music and how they wrote it and recorded it is what really gets me going. Hell, even when they were angry at each other or when they were downright lazy, they still managed to get something really interesting out of it all.

AC: What are some of your other musical influences?

JEN: The Clash, especially on this last record. The Arcade Fire, Bob Dylan, Kasabian, Motown was huge for me. As of recent Metric and Feist. Just got into Elvis Costello.

HENRY: The Who’s another big one for us, and Oasis is one of our all-time favorite bands for sure, U2… I could go on forever. I just really love music. Lately, I’ve taken to searching for random stuff on Blip to see if anything interesting pops up. Music is alive and constantly evolving. The last thing we want to do is get stuck harping on one thing all of the time.

Stay tuned for part 2 of my interview with Aloud. In the meantime, check out the Aloud website.

Aaron Cheney is an artMUSICwords-guy living in Seattle, WA.

www.aaroncheney.com

In part 2 of exploring what makes a badly written song, we’ll look a bit deeper into some of the most common faults of a novice songwriter. Forgive the references to mostly old songs but I wanted to be sure that everyone has heard them before.

No Bridge - Another common songwriting mistake is no bridge. In songwriting, a bridge is an interlude that connects two parts of that song, building a harmonic connection between those parts. Normally you should have heard the verse at least twice. The bridge may then replace the 3rd verse or precede it. In the latter case, it delays an expected chorus. The chorus after the bridge is usually the last one and is often repeated in order to stress that it is final. If and when you expect a verse or a chorus and you get something that is musically and lyrically different from both verse and chorus, it is most likely the bridge (Van Halen’s Panama comes to mind).

A bridge is important because it provides something that we talked about before - tension and release. It’s sometimes the peak of the song where its at its loudest and most intense (check out the bridge of the Police’s Every Breath You Take), or it could be its quietest and least intense point (The Who’s Baba O’Riley where Pete Townsend sings “…It’s only teenage wasteland,” or The Doobie Brother’s Black Water).

Almost every great song has a bridge but there are the occasional exceptions. Songs that are based on the straight 12 bar blues frequently don’t have bridges but might use dynamics or arrangement to provide the tension and release. An example would be the ZZ Top classic Tush. There’s no bridge in the song, but the snare fill by itself after the last verse into the outro guitar solo supplies the release. Another would be the Guess Who/Lenny Kravitz song American Women where there’s just four bars of a different guitar rhythm and a stop.

And then there are the songs that can get by without a bridge by virtue of the fact of how they’re arranged or how long each section is. Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams has only two verses and three choruses but listen to how everything builds so that the peak of the song is the last chorus.

Poor Arrangement - Even with great songwriters, this is the most common mistake I hear. Usually this means that the guitar or keyboard will play the same lick, chords or rhythm throughout the entire song. Now this can work perfectly well and might even be a great arrangement choice if another instrument plays a counter-line or rhythm, but usually it just means that the arrangement will be boring. You’ve got to make sure that the song stays interesting, and that means the addition of lines and fills. An example where a structure like this does work is American Women again.

No Intro/Outro Hook - If we’re talking about modern popular music (not jazz or classical), most of the songs have an instrumental line (or hook) that you’ll hear at the beginning of the song, maybe again in the chorus, and any time the intro repeats in the song. A great example would be the opening guitar riff to the Stone’s Satisfaction or the piano in Coldplay’s Clocks. If you want to make your producer happy, develop your hooks before you do your demos or hit the studio.

If you’re mindful of the items mentioned in this and my previous post, your songwriting will come up a notch just about overnight. But there’s still that thing they call talent……….

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A long-time veteran of the music industry, Bobby Owsinski has produced and composed for records, motion pictures and television shows along the way. Currently a principle in the DVD production house Surround Associates and content creator 2B Media, Bobby has also penned hundreds of articles for many popular industry trade publications and has authored many books that are now staples in recording programs in colleges around the world including “The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook”, “The Recording Engineer’s Handbook”, “The Audio Mastering Handbook”, “The Drum Recording Handbook”, and “How To Make Your Band Sound Great”. Upcoming books include “The Studio Musician’s Handbook,” “Music 3.0 - A Survival Guide For Making Music in the Internet Age,” and “The Music Producer’s Handbook.”

A frequent moderator, panelist and program producer of a variety of industry conferences, Bobby has served as the longtime producer of the annual Surround Music Awards, and is one of the executive producers for the “Guitar Universe” and “Favorite Music of the Stars” television programs.

Visit Bobby’s Blog at http://bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com/ and his website at http://bobbyowsinski.com

Photo by And-rey

For artists the battle has always raged between the desire for complete artistic freedom and the need (economic or otherwise) to work within a limiting set of rules. While some insist that creativity and limits are mutually exclusive, I would argue the opposite: people are never more creative than when forced to work within limitations. Limitations generate their own kind of creative freedom.  They force original thinking - the wellspring of creativity.

As musicians and songwriters we face limitations all the time. They fall into two broad categories: those that are thrust upon us, and those that are self-imposed. In both cases musicians and artists have used these limitations as a springboard to new avenues of thought and art.

Limits Thrust Upon Us

Inadequate equipment, musical ignorance, commercial necessity, and popular expectation are examples of limitations that are often beyond the immediate control of an artist. A poor guitarist may only be able to afford a budget instrument.  A musician with a love for jazz may need to perform pop to find an audience. A beginning recordist may only have a single dynamic microphone.  Within each of these challenges lies the opportunity for creative thinking.  Perhaps the guitarist can develop a new technique or sound to exploit his less-than-ideal instrument. Perhaps the musician can find a way to incorporate jazz into his pop songs. Perhaps the recordist can discover new sounds by using his single microphone in ways others have never tried before.

The lesson is simple: if you are faced with limitations that you cannot easily overcome, work around them. Don’t waste time pining for an expensive microphone, the newest VST plug-in, or a better keyboard. Instead look for creative ways to use what you have now. Don’t wait for the people’s musical tastes to change. Instead, find a way to merge your personal musical goals with what an audience wants. Limitless creative freedom is not necessary for you to make good music today. Exploit what you have now, while looking for ways to move towards your end goal.

Limits Self-Imposed

Often you can enhance your creativity with a self-imposed set of rules. A limitless number of choices can sometimes cause an artist to freeze up - a condition sometimes called “option anxiety” or “analysis paralysis”. Limiting your creative options allows you to focus more keenly in a specific creative direction. Sometimes this can be as simple as writing in a specific genre or song form. Other times the limitation itself becomes a creative choice.

Here are two examples of self-imposed creative limitations:

Alphabetic Africa by Walter Abish is a book in which the first chapter consists entirely of words beginning with the letter “A”. Each successive chapter ads words beginning with the subsequent letter of the alphabet, until at last the author is free to use all words. Then the chapters begin a backwards progression, until finally the author is forced to conclude as he began; using words that begin only with “A”.

Three Thieves’ Tale by…well….me, is a poem I wrote using a similar alliterative constraint. With a lot of thought I was able to create an entire poem that made sense, told a cohesive story, and even rhymed (loosely), using only words that began with the letter “T”.

Think Creatively

We’re all artists, right? Artists are supposed to be creative thinkers, right? Let’s embrace our limitations as an opportunity problem-solve creatively. I maintain that looking for creative solutions to “limitations” is where some of man’s greatest art has come from.  I’ve already shown how I used a limitation to come up with something cool. How have you? Bring it.

Aaron Cheney is an artmusicwords guy living in Seattle, WA.

www.aaroncheney.com