New Solo Discovered on "Here Comes the Sun"

It's not often you get to hear anything new from The Beatles, so this is definitely a treat!
 



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Engineer Geoff Emerick on Lyrics

In Emerick's recent book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles he makes this observation:

"For some reason, I never used to listen to lyrics all that closely. Perhaps it was because of my taste for opera and classical music that the vocal always seemed like just another instrument to me. I was attracted to it solely for the way it fit in with the backing, not for the words that were being sung. Lyrics simply never sold me on a particular song--it was the overall sound that did."

I think it's sometimes easy to get too worked up about what the lyric says that how the message is said gets lost.

Keep writing,

Ben

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Would you or someone you know like to go on a songwriting retreat with industry professionals? Visit SongbirdCamp.com for more details!

Writing Tools - Diamond on the 1

I talked a couple months ago about the recording process and how studio musicians have a way of notating chord and melody changes using the Nashville Number System. I’ve always been fascinated by how quickly they are able to learn and make changes to one song after another in a three-hour session. 

The system has somewhat been passed down from player to player over the years, leaving few textbook explanations outside the studio. To learn the language, you’d most likely have to get to know one of these professionals—until now.

My friend and fellow songwriter Jonathan Riggs has just made it much easier to communicate with session players during the recording process. In his new booklet, Diamond on the 1, Riggs gives a simple yet thorough overview of the Nashville Number System. As a professional, I’ve found my copy to be very helpful, even in the writing process. This is a booklet worth keeping in your gig bag.

A “diamond on the one” would mean that you play a chord on the first beat of the measure, for the entirety of the measure. The intro to The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” would be a diamond on the one (even though the song’s first measure begins with a strange number of beats). There’s plenty more to explain, but I’ll leave that to Riggs and his booklet.

Keep writing (and learning),

Ben

PS - Here is an example from my most recent session:

"A Day in the Life" (Lennon/McCartney)

The last note of this song lasts 53 seconds. How's that for thinking outside the box?

Developing a Voice

This is a large boot.

The fun thing about writing songs for other people is that you can skip genres from day to day. But the dangerous thing is that we can sometimes leave what we do best at the door. Write what you know, not what you think you know.

There was a point in my pursuit of a songwriting deal where, on my own, I began writing mostly country songs. I figured a Nashville publisher would expect nothing else. The problem was not so much the quality of the songs (they were awful) as the fact that I wasn’t being true to my own voice. As a piano player who grew up soaking in The Beatles' White Album, I was trying to operate in a genre where I had no real authority. I didn’t grow up wearing a cowboy hat on a ranch in Texas, but some other writer did. And they will naturally write a song about farm life way better than I ever will.

I would define a voice as "the style of one's message."

There is something that each of us brings to a song that we do better than anyone else in the world. It would boring if we all tried to have the same voice and write the same song (and thankfully, some publishers understand this reality). The last thing creativity should be described as is safe. If we are true to our own voice, we will create something fresh rather than safe.

Keep writing,

Ben

Gordon Kennedy: American Songwriter's Writer of the Week

My friend and mentor Gordon Kennedy has been featured as American Songwriter's Writer of the Week. In it he talks about growing up in a musical home and why it's sometimes OK to put "shock absorbers" in a lyric.

This is a picture of Gordon, Ricky Skaggs and myself in Ricky's studio during the recording of Mosaic:

Merry Christmas from the Fab Four!

Who is Harry Nilsson?

Over the past couple weeks I've been listening to Harry Nilsson's greatest hits. Who is Harry Nilsson, you ask? I wondered the same thing, and really enjoyed the documentary with the same title (watch it on Netflix here). I figured if The Beatles claimed him as their favorite artist, then I should probably check him out.

Listening through his career's work, I feel like I'm hearing a songwriter's catalog rather than that of a boxed-in, formulated artist. What I mean is that he goes from singing "Everybody's Talkin'" to "Coconut" to "One" (which Three Dog Night made famous) without blinking an eye. He also does an amazing version of the standard "As Time Goes By" with Sinatra's orchestrator.

And one of my all-time favorite YouTube videos is from Hungarian Idol where a woman phonetically butchers Nilsson's hit "Without You" (also made famous by Mariah Carey).

Below is Nilsson singing a live version of his song "Without Her." I love how his phrasing sounds so conversational and syncopated, similar to the style of "The Girl From Ipanema."



Keep writing,

Ben