[mplpost] Making the song...

[Dan Kershaw]

At 05:12 PM 06/01/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Part 1: Making the song.
>
>Co-writing:
>Back then, I stand to be corrected but I would suggest that co-writing
>certainly happened in the more commercial areas of the biz (continuing in
>the Tin Pan Alley tradition) but in the roots areas it was a mainly a
>solitary pursuit or band writing. Nowadays though, one hears of many
>arranged "marriages". How do they work for you - both creatively and with
>respects to the split of money/business interests etc.? How does it feel?
>What do you think about the end result vis a vis your own personal creative
>or financial aspirations?

this is a good thread, bill.  pls excuse the long-winded reply.

i liked co-writing, and miss it.  the historical ingredients for me: a good 
pal & high school bandmate, the D.I.Y. ethos of the new wave / punk scene, 
and the naivete to try stuff out that didn't work because we blissfully 
didn't know any better!

said pal dave used to get songbooks out of the library and we'd try to 
learn the chords.  except that the only songbooks they had in our local 
branch library in london ont were piano transcriptions for broadway shows 
we didn't know.  and the little chord diagrams for the guitar (the only 
things we could read) were invariably a multitude of jazzy passing chords 
in insane keys that you had to contort your hand to fret.  but we'd plod 
away, sweating & fretting from one contortion to the next, trying to see if 
it would sound like anything.  needless to say, the tempos were reeeeaally 
slow.  but we set up a pattern where each week he'd come up with his own 
cool progression out of 3 or 4 of these weird chords, and he'd teach it to 
me, then i'd go home and bend it into a verse form with a melody and maybe 
add a bridge, and eventually some words.

that was a long time ago, but my band still plays some of those songs.  i'm 
not at a point where they generate any dough, and may never be, but if, 
world of wonders, there was money in it, it'd be a 50-50 thing for us.  for 
me, i don't think that the process can really be quantified, nor, by the 
same logic, worked into an "arranged marriage".  it didn't feel like i was 
"composing" anything, more like baking a cake together with improvised 
ingredients: lots of times inedible, but sometimes pretty tasty.



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