Brandon James Seyferth - Writing - Brandon James Seyferth

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Although Brandon is no longer a contributor to Reverb.com, his archived articles continue to attract readers. You can still access the original version of "Songwriting Approaches of the Masters" below.

Author's Note:

If you've read the article on Reverb.com, you'll notice the one below differs. This is the original version. Some changes made by a new editor for the published version felt unnecessary, so I requested my name be removed from the byline, crediting me only as the researcher. Since Reverb was sold, they've been altering my past articles, which were popular and well-regarded as they were..

I hope you enjoy the article.

-Brandon

Songwriting Approaches of the Masters

Many songwriters who have been writing for a while know that turning an observation or an inspiration into a complete song is a bit like the act of striking a match. Sometimes the match lights up in flame, sometimes it just sparks. Sometimes you can’t even find a match, even though the band is standing there waiting for you to light their cigarettes. In these moments, it can help to look to songwriters who have found ways to consistently deliver great songs. In this article, Reverb takes a brief look at the approaches and songwriting observations of three influential songwriters.

Bob Dylan

“Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years. I go back to Stephen Foster,” Dylan says in a 2004 interview with the Los Angeles Times. He goes on to say “There are so many ways you can go at something in a song. One thing is to give life to inanimate objects.” In the same interview, he’s shown a lyric sheet for his song “Just Like a Woman” and adds, “It’s a city song. It’s like looking at something extremely powerful, say the shadow of a church or something like that. I don’t think in lateral terms as a writer. That’s a fault of a lot of the old Broadway writers… They are so lateral. There’s no circular thing, nothing to be learned from the song, nothing to inspire you. I always try to turn a song on its head. Otherwise I figure I’m wasting the listener’s time.”

Although well known for his cagey persona, Dylan has openly talked about his approach to songwriting throughout his life. He made it clear as early as 1962 in an interview with Cynthia Gooding on WBAI (New York), that his approach to songwriting often begins with a melody he’s heard somewhere else. Early in his career, his process was especially steeped in folk songwriting traditions.

The folk songwriting tradition is and was largely an oral one, born in the days before recording when people learned songs and changed them to suit their own emotions and worldview. Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” for instance, is based on an old song called “Who’s Gonna’ Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone.” By the time Dylan got his hands on it, the song had already been redone at least once over, and recorded under the title “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone).” Each writer and performer took the song a little further away from the original to make it his own largely original composition.

When Dylan is composing his songs from scratch, he says “What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate. A lot of people will look at a crack on the wall and meditate, or count sheep or angels or money or something, and it’s a proven fact that it’ll help them relax. I don’t meditate on any of that stuff. I meditate on a song. I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly- while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”

In a 1991 SongTalk interview with Paul Zollo, Dylan delves into his process in more detail. He explains, “Now for me, the environment to write the song is extremely important. The environment has to bring something out in me that wants to be brought out. It’s a contemplative, reflective thing. Feelings really aren’t my thing.”

He goes on to say that songwriting, in his mind, is not about pouring your insides out. It’s about craftsmanship and perspective. It’s about lyrical meter, simple melodies, having something to say, and a “pure-hearted motivation” for writing what you’re writing. He mentions that a songwriter should be able to sort and identify different types of thoughts, which he defines as ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and that it’s important to stay in an unconscious frame of mind while still keeping your wits about you. He says, “So your primary impulse is going to take you so far. But then you might think, well, you know, is this one of these things where it’s all just going to come? And then all of a sudden you start thinking. And when my mind starts thinking, “What’s happening now? Oh, there’s a story here,” and my mind starts to get into it, that’s trouble right away. That’s usually big trouble.”

He does have a solution for when inspiration and execution collide, however. He says “There’s a bunch of ways you can get out of that. You can make yourself get out of it by changing key. That’s one way. Just take the whole thing and change key, keeping the same melody. And see if that brings you any place. More times than not, that will take you down the road.”

So where does Dylan find inspiration? When Zollo asked him to respond to a lyric of his: “I stand here at your yellow railroad/ in the ruins of your balcony…” he responds that it “could have been a blinding day when the sun was bright on a railroad someplace and it stayed in my mind. These aren’t contrived images. These are images which are just in there and have got to come out. You know, if it’s in there it’s got to come out.”

For Dylan, the people who get into a little theory and who learn as many chords as they can, are the ones who are serious about songwriting. He has said that one chord can change the inflection of a whole song.

In his words: “If you see me do it [songwriting], any idiot can do it. It’s just not that difficult of a thing. Everybody writes a song, just like everybody’s got that one great novel in them.”

Tom Waits

“I think what I try to do is write adventure songs and Halloween music” Waits says in a video put together for his induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. He goes on to say “You put yourself into some sort of trance to receive certain songs. You know, it’s like setting a trap for a song. It’s like fishing or anything else. You have to be real quiet to catch the big ones.” Waits said in the same ceremony that “songs are really just interesting things to be doing with the air.” For him, “Songs aren’t verbatim journal entries… they’re made out of smoke.”

In a 2002 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Tom Waits said that a lot of his inspiration comes from mishearing things. That he gets a lot of ideas from turning on two radios at once, or from listening to music from far away. A great experience for Waits, he’s said, is to be in a rehearsal building with thin walls- an opera singer in one room practicing scales and a metal band in another.

Collaboration also looms large in his mind. Since his marriage to Kathleen Brennan, Waits has had a consistent collaborator who he says brings something to his songs that he doesn’t. He says that’s the benefit of a good collaboration. If two people bring the same thing to the table, then one of them is redundant to the process. In the aforementioned interview on NPR, he says, “I'm the other half of what I consider to be a really great songwriting team, which means that we argue a lot about what a song can be, should be, and what it'll be if you do this to it. So we discuss all these facets. She's Amelia Earhart and Jane Goodall and Joan Jett all rolled into one. She's really great to work with and amazing.”

Although an accomplished musician on more than one instrument, Waits doesn’t always write with one. He’s been quoted as saying that he usually writes a cappella, preferring the freedom of it; unbound by the technical aspects of playing an instrument. Composing that way, he says, is more like drawing in the air with your fingers. He says it’s almost like “choreographing the flight of a bee.” Fingers usually just want to do what they’ve already done. It’s hard to train them out of it. There’s a thrill in unfamiliarity. A thrill in discovery.

When he does write with an instrument, he often finds it interesting to write on instruments he doesn’t quite understand how to play. Sometimes this is a Mellotron, or a Chamberlin Music Master 600. Sometimes he’ll also bang around on his “conundrum” drum kit, which is made up of metal objects he’s found in junk yards or on the side of the road. He plays the “conundrum” with a hammer. Many times, he’ll even have the musicians around him play different instruments. Though he says that it’s thrilling to collaborate with musicians who are masters of their instrument, sometimes surprising things happen when everybody switches instruments to something they may not even play.

On his website, Waits is quoted as saying, “Songs are really simple. You hold them in your hand. I can make one right now and finish it. But because they’re so simple, it’s like bird-watching, you know. You gotta know something about birds or you won’t see anything: just you and your binoculars and a stupid look on your face.”

There are a lot of different song forms and structures that already exist, says Waits. There are “Cakewalks, parlor songs… nothing more than Jell-O molds for music. It does pay to listen to a variety of interesting songs from different genres and time periods; each different song form has something to teach.” He says, “When you’re a teenager, music is like a collared shirt or a wristwatch. An accessory. Many people hold on to that mindset long beyond their teenage years. For them, music is like a fashion statement or membership in a tribe. It helps define them. As songwriters, we can benefit from listening as songwriters, not as members of some club, or as aural fashionistas (fashionistae?).”

Using these ‘Jell-O molds’ for structure, Waits says that a songwriter can become different characters within them. From his perspective, one can find that these different characters actually already exist within himself. If he populates them in a setting; by naming towns, naming streets, mentioning the weather, or mentioning something to eat, he feels he can create an enticing world for a listener to enter into.

On recording, Waits has said that “the dumpster in the alley might sound better than your bass drum. When that happens, you put a microphone in the dumpster and you use it.” Beyond that; if you record outside, you have to wait sometimes but you’ll find that the planes, the kids, and the roosters will collaborate with you.

On the songs that don’t make it onto his records, Waits says: “I usually just cut ‘em up and use ‘em for bait to catch other songs.” He’s said: “You know, kids write a hundred of them every day and throw them away. So, you know, we get all precious about it, you know… what’s that about?” In the studio, Waits says it’s important to “Dance like there’s nobody watching you.”

Nick Cave

“I wake, I write, I eat, I write, I watch T.V.” Nick Cave says in the pseudo-documentary 20,000 Days on Earth. Though the documentary is a somewhat fictionalized look at the man, he confirms this process in multiple interviews. In an interview in The Guardian, he says, however, that it really doesn’t matter that he works in an office. The important point is to keep one’s imagination in good shape by doing different things- novels, scripts, scores, all these varied things help Cave keep his imagination fit.

The creative process is in itself an altered state, according to Cave. For him, songwriting is “a deeply personal, deeply private process.” He doesn’t like to do it in the company of other people. In a 2009 interview with New Yorker, he says“For me, songwriting is very, very difficult, and it doesn’t get easier. You have to sit down and think about what you want and find a song. Some people find it really easy, but I don’t.” In other interviews, he mentions that songwriting causes him great anxiety when he’s searching for things to write about. “The artistic process is just hard labor,” he says, “it’s been mythologized into something far greater than it really is.” However, he finds that if he prepares himself and sits down to work every day, ideas generally come. When they do, they feel like epiphany.

In a 2013 interview with WFUV Public Radio, Cave says that a great song is a song that is something a listener can discover. He says that when you listen to a song, you want it to feel like it’s yours. If it feels like you discovered it and can continue to discover things within it, then it’s a great song. This sense of discovery is what he attempts to provide in his songwriting.

“I don’t write in a more abstract way, like rock and roll is generally written, which are these expressions of the heart. You know, “whoah baby I love you” and all that sort of stuff. I find it very difficult to write like that. I need to be able to see what’s going on and… but it has been a problem for me that these songs are narrative in the sense that it becomes a kind of tyranny of the narrative, because the listener always has to follow a story. Every time they listen to a song they have to follow this story. I’ve been for a long time trying to get away from that. So they are narrative songs, but they’re so abstracted I think, that the idea of following the story is kind of futile. They’re much more about entering into a world, and an atmospheric world.”

“Every song I write is ten verses long,” says Cave, “and I have to lose half of it. I used to find it quite painful and the songs were very long as a consequence, but now I incorporate that into the way I write; the editing can change the lyrics. Often, I’ll leave the guts of the narrative out and concentrate on peripheral stuff and this ends up making the songs mysterious and open to interpretation.”

Cave finds it interesting to use opposing images in his work. “It’s really what my writing has increasingly become about, really, is counterpoint, and what one line can do to another line. You write one line and then you put another line against it and you see what happens. And very often a kind of violent juxtaposition between two images that just don’t belong together can create a lot of tension, and be quite pleasing, you know.” He’s said this is like “letting a small child in the same room as… I don’t know… A Mongolian psychopath or something. And just sitting back and seeing what happens. Then you send in a clown, say on a tricycle. And again you wait, and you watch. And if that doesn’t do it… You shoot the clown.”

So how does Cave come up with a song’s melody and chord changes? By experimenting with lyrics at the piano. Most often, he’ll compose chord changes and melody before bringing it to the Bad Seeds for arrangement. For the band, keeping a sense of discovery remains important. Cave says, “The way The Bad Seeds make music… I think most generally the way [for other people to do it] is to learn the song and get it sounding as accomplished as possible. The Bad Seeds have never really been that interested in that, but rather to find something where there's still a spark of discovery within the song.” He and the band will spend days recording arrangements live while Nick refines his melodies and edits his lyrics, and come back later to listen and to find what’s working, never listening to playback while they’re in the process of discovering things.