Songwriting Made Thoughtful

Cliff Goldmacher, pictured here, is a songwriter, producer, engineer, author and owner of recording studios in Nashville, Tennessee and Sonoma, California. He may also be one of an evolved species of hairless human, which you see a lot of these days, though that observation may be influenced by this reporter's viewing of endless reruns of "Unsealed: Alien Files". Did you know that there are 160 alien species visiting planet Earth? A significant number of them play instruments - the talented Mr. Goldmacher plays numerous - and perform in rock bands playing some version of metal. That is not really Mr. Goldmacher's thing, but he has worked with multi-platinum selling artists Chris Barron (Lead singer of the Spin Doctors), Mickey Hart (Grateful Dead drummer), Lisa Loeb, and Ke$ha.

Mr. Goldmacher’s songs have been cut by major label artists in genres ranging from country, pop, and jazz to classical crossover. His music has also been used on NPR’s “This American Life” and in national advertising campaigns. His song “Till You Come To Me” spent 27 weeks in the top ten on Billboard Magazine’s jazz chart and finished as the Mediabase #1 and Billboard #2 jazz song of the year.

As an educator, he teaches workshops for BMI, ASCAP, The Stanford Jazz Workshop, The Songwriter’s Guild of America, the Nashville Songwriter’s Association International, Taxi, and The Durango
Songwriter’s Expo. What brought him to the attention of the CCJ was an eBook that he has published, and made available for free, that provides insights on the songwriting process.

In collaboration with Source, by Nationwide Disc, Goldmacher's The Songwriter's Handbook explores the songwriting process from the following perspectives:

• Finding Motivation To Write Your Music
• Four Approaches To Songwriting
• Why Being Original Is Important
• Getting Out Of Your Songwriting Comfort Zone
• Finishing Those Not-Quite-Right Songs
• Tips For Co-Writing
• Tips For Writing An Effective Song Intro
• Critiquing Your Lyrics and Melody
• Four Quick Fixes For Your Songs

Here are thumbnail sketches of what Goldmacher discusses in each of these sections:

Finding Motivation to Write Your Music

• Set up a place at home to write

• Set up a time of day to write

• Find a co-writer

• Give yourself an assignment

• Tell yourself you will only write for five minutes

Four Approaches To Songwriting

• Writing based on a title idea or lyrical hook

• Writing based on a general idea or lyrical concept

• Writing from a melodic idea

• Writing from a chord progression or groove

Why Being Original is Important

• Discover your own voice

• Find a unique angle on a common topic

• Don't follow trends

• Keep your demos true to the song

Getting Out of Your Songwriter Comfort Zone

        Whys

• You’ll keep yourself—and the people who listen to your songs—from getting bored

• You’ll demonstrate your versatility to music industry decision makers

• You’ll broaden your opportunities for collaboration

        Hows

• However you normally begin a song, start with the opposite approach

• Vary your rhyming approach

• Write with new collaborators

Finishing Those Not Quite Right Songs

• Make a rough recording of your song

• Play it for your songwriting group

• Submit your rough recording to a critiquing service

• Bring in a co-writer

• Put it away (...maybe forever)

Tips for Co-Writing

        Dos

• Decide in advance if you’re going to bring ideas or start “cold”

• Show up on time and ready to work

• Make a plan on how you’ll both promote the song

• Discuss Percentages for Each Co-Writer

        Don'ts

• Don’t ever criticize a co-writer’s suggestion

• Don’t insist on one of your ideas if your co-writer doesn’t seem interested in it

• Don’t edit too harshly early on in the session

• Don’t push too hard to collaborate with a more established/successful songwriter

Tips for Writing an Effective Song Intro

• Keep your intro short and to the point

• Use a catchy instrumental

• Use dynamics

Critiquing Your Lyrics and Melody

        Lyric

• Do you have a strong opening line?

• Are you using concrete imagery?

• Are your lyrics singable?

• How effective is your hook?

• Does your chorus have a strong last line?

• Does the overall idea of your song work?

        Melody

• Is your verse melody interesting?

• Does your chorus melody differ from your verse melody?

• Does your melody flow naturally throughout the song?

Four Quick Fixes for Your Songs

• Cut Your Intro In Half

• Put More Concrete Details Into Your Verses

• Your Chorus Should Be What Your Song Is About

• Make Sure Similar Sections Have Similar Structures

Use this link to go to xxxx to download Cliff Goldmacher's The Songwriter's Handbook.

Review:

The Songwriter's Handbook

By RAR

I tend to trust Cliff Goldmacher because he seems personally into Jazz, which says to me that he doesn't place a high value on making money through that chosen medium. Jazz, America's great music art form, died 50 years ago and anyone still left around who is still committed to the form is likely committed to some fused version thereof, which bares little resemblance to the standard Jazz fakebook that we all grew up with. Still, I like a person who is pursuing excellence in a field in which the achievement of excellence is likely the only reward.

Also, writing as a person who develops a lot of instructional design documentation, I really like Cliff Goldmacher's writing style and his way of organizing information.

All that said, I am always highly suspicious of instruction designed to guide creative processes toward ephemeral goals and objectives. There is no real tangible target at the end of a songwriter instructional materials because there is no agreed upon example of what songwriters are supposed to be producing.

Or is there?

We live in what feels to me like an age of disconnect between what we respond to in music as listeners, and what all of our musical business apparatus is designed to produce.

But it is even more complicated than that. We also live in an age of musical emotional manipulation, which is nowhere more in evidence than in Electronic Dance Music (EDM), which has become entirely about "the drop" (i.e., that moment when the music goes completely silent for a few hushed moments before it explodes again with great force and reestablishes the dance groove). Club kids love this bit of trickery, and there is for sure compositional excellence at work when the emotional impact of its execution is just right. That's all well and good but the dynamics of EDM have almost nothing to do with traditional songwriting. In fact, watch Calvin Harris, the singing DJ, and you will notice that sandwiched around his EDM cliché drops are actual songs that are quite ordinary, entirely forgettable, R&B-based baloney. I don't believe they would stand on their own sans the surrounding disco-infused rushes of rhythm, which tend to mask the compositional shortcomings of the embedded material.

These types of emotional manipulations, even away from EDM, have become the central theme of contemporary songwriting, particularly as it emanates out of Nashville, which has positioned itself as the locus of professional songcraft methodology.

The best case in point that I can think of is Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats", which has much in common with another of her big hits, "Jesus Take the Wheel". The first pegs its emotional connection to revenge, the second on a kind of superficial faith in a higher power that looks out for troubled people at crucial moments in their lives.

While I personally find both of those songs annoying as hell, they both seem to me to be exceptionally well crafted in the ways that Cliff Goldmacher discusses in his book.

They are well designed products for a contemporary market, though as songs they strike me as cotton candy, with very much of either leaving one feeling a little nauseous. Unfortunately, this to me is what Nashville songwriting has become, with songwriters in every other corner of the songwriting world taking cues from this cookie cutter process for "creating art".

Teaching Genius

Recently I have been driving quite a lot while doing my consultant work, and I have been listening to a great deal more "radio" than I typically do (I typically work from my home office). This has primarily consisted of sampling Sirius radio channels, including "Deep Tracks", "Underground Garage", and "Classic Vinyl", as well as some of my daughter's horrible Hip-hop channels. I also listen to Sirius channels featuring music from the 1940s and 1950s.

The first thing that hits me is that pop music has always sucked, though possibly not as bad as it does today. This, of course, is the opinion of an old dude who has had decades of exposure to this material. Almost all of the music that was popular when I was a kid is really pretty lame compositionally. This is why The Beatles have remained such an enormous force in music even today, because they were sophisticated musically, lyrically, and in their social-psychological awareness. They seemed to completely understand, at some innate level, the music that had come before them, so they "got" what was happening with the forms developing in their time and they used them artfully.

The organic genius of the songwriting Beatles is completely different from the practiced, plotted out, and manipulated songwriting that creates hits in today's markets. I sense that everyone knows that, and yet there is all of this commercial evidence that genius is not required to create popular songs for today's market. One simply needs to think more like a design engineer thinks about product architecture and function. This exercise in conscious thought gives you "Jesus Take the Wheel" rather than "Strawberry Fields" or "Come Together".

So can you teach someone with ordinary musical abilities to craft commercially successful songs? It sure sounds like you can, if you listen to commercial radio. Song after song has not only similar elements, but often very similar sounding singers.

This is the result of songwriting that is created per the types of templates that are supported by "the music industry" these days.

Mr. Goldmacher, whose credentials are fairly unimpeachable, offers such advice as "be original" and "don't follow trends", and yet he also works with the utterly impeachable Taxi "artist & repertoire" service, which sells advice similar to what Goldmacher gives away for free in his book.

Taxi's entire push is to solicit songs designed and executed to meet specific criteria. This is where Goldmacher and Taxi hold hands, but Taxi is definitely not interested in any material that is not trend-centered and in any way original. They want equivalents of the EDM drop, the recognized clichés of the current soundscape.

Taxi also does not want song demos, and Goldmacher has a section in his book on producing demos, though I think people have largely accepted that the days of the demo are long dead. Production companies don't have any money to put an artist in a studio to expand on a song demo. Every listing I ever responded to on Taxi was calling for master recordings of the finished song. A couple years ago, I signed up for a year with Taxi and submitted my material to investigate the service for a series on the experience presented on this site. My final feeling was that Taxi is an expensive fraud that exploits the naïveté of minimally talented people who dream of having a career as a songwriter or performer, with greater emphasis on the latter. Taxi's listings are virtually all for performers who are booking regularly and actively promoting their careers. It is hard for a songwriter to actually meet that criteria, so what exactly is Taxi? In my experience, it is a service that accepts fees in return for boilerplate advice not at all different from what you get in Mr. Goldmacher's book for free.

Writing Hits

The surest path toward songwriting success, which is really a mythical abstract in itself, is probably to use the types of advice you get in The Songwriter's Handbook to craft songs for a specific commercial entity, like a Carrie Underwood. This is where the snake swallows its own tail, because this is precisely was the Taxi service claims to do. They purport to provide the bridge that allows songwriters to get their material before an established recording star, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Represented by managers and agents who are networked with other industry professionals, top stars like Underwood do not troll amateur songwriter training grounds like Taxi.

Goldmacher suggests that a solution to that is to be found in professional networking: connecting with a songwriter's group through which you may be able to develop your craft and even team with other writers. This is a big thing in Nashville these days, with the folk-country unit The Civil Wars being a prime example of success with this approach. The last time I heard from them they were singing a truly horrible and self-indulgent version of Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean" and vowing to never, ever work with each other again. Did they leave the world with great songs? And if they did, what were they?

The alchemy of a hit is really a nearly impossible thing to analyze and reproduce. So many of the hit songs that have stayed with us over decades have fallen short in nearly every area of today's songwriting criteria.

A case in point might be Elton John and Bernie Taupin's "Tiny Dancer". Remember Goldmacher's advice to use concrete imagery in your songs? With that in mind, what on earth does this following lyric mean?

Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band
Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you'll marry a music man
Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand
And now she's in me, always with me, tiny dancer in my hand

How did this lyric go from observation to abstraction, in that last line, without losing the listener?  She's in me, tiny dancer in my hand? So is this mysteriously shrunken seamstress/ballerina actually inside of Elton, or is he just holding her in his pudgy little hand? Either way it's weird, though apparently it makes no difference at all, because I still hear this song on classic rock stations. People respond to things on spiritual, rather than a logical levels, so what is the real value in crafting lyrically concrete stuff?

In fact, some of music's greatest lyrical statements have been anything but concrete, to wit (from "Come Together"):

He wear no shoeshine, he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger, he shoot coca-cola
He say "I know you, you know me"
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together right now over me

Just for the record, Lennon's cooly MacLuhanesque lyric gets studied in college communications classes (or at least it was in mine at the University of Kansas way back when). Taupin's is just placeholder.

Musically, on the other hand, Elton John's composition of "Tiny Dancer" is sophisticated in the way it is constructed, even though it is around the (C) major scale, more or less like everything written ever at any time anywhere between 1950 and now, this because it does a clever middle section that modulates to an Ab before returning to C major for the chorus.

What I was hoping to see in Goldmacher's book was conversation around the potential use of the wide variety of musical scales as a means of composing music that will sound original and fresh. One suspects that most of the people living today who call themselves songwriters really know precious little about musical alternatives, and are still stuck with the same major progression, with slight variations thereof.

In truth, it has been left to the metal rockers over the last three decades to explore the exotic scales, such as the Phrygian Dominant, Lydian, Hungarian Minor, and Diminished Scales. It is from such variants that the great American songbook was born, but that sadly seems to have been lost with the end of the Jazz era and the advent of pop music (blues and rock). (The Beatles, on the other hand, were often subject to academic analysis and praise for their use of classical elements, including Aeolian cadences (e.g., "Not A Second Time".) Modern music, beginning in the 1950s, largely became simplified for the ready consumption of very young listening audiences, and in the process made modern music sound a little dumb, or at least a little too much the same.

But then there is the snake with its tail in its mouth again. Songwriters today are encouraged to repeat regular patterns while somehow sounding fresh and original doing it.

We are still waiting for the book that gets us around that.