The connection between listening and good songwriting

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Hi there,

I just wanted to start this topic about the possible connection between listening and great songwriting. How much songs (especially new songs) should a developing songwriter be listening to on a daily basis in order to develop the listener's perspective of what's a "good" song and what is not? Also, a songwriter usually has his/her's likes and dislikes in terms of genres and styles, so is it best to expose yourself to your genre of choice or to expand to other genres that you have largely avoided thus far (in order to expand your horizons)?

When I was younger, I would listen to a lot of songs before going to bed (easily an average of at least one hour each night.) During this time, I feel that my songwriting was much more melodic and was well received by the listeners. They would specifically comment positively on the song itself (the composition) instead of just the production or voice or instrumentation, etc. I have noticed this possible pattern that as I have grown older, I no longer listen to songs (especially new songs) as much as I did when I was younger. As a result, I might have been going downhill in terms of my song compositional quality? I find that I get much less positive comments feedback on the song composition itself (and more on the production aspect, guitar parts, instrumentation...by the way, I'm also a guitarist)...

Maybe this link that I'm trying to create here is just a theory and there are possibly plenty of other factors that come into the equation other than listening hours and quality? What do you think? Thanks!
 
Listening critically to other people's material should give you insights into the things that that make songs work, and that should help with your own song-writing.
 
This is just my opinion. There's two ways to create music. One for personal pleasure. The second in hopes of getting noticed.

If you're doing it for yourself, do what you want. Because it doesn't matter. As long as you're happy and proud of what you did, you're not aiming for mass audience appeal. Everyone has a few friends who will enjoy the music. I have very few friends, and we all truly appreciate each other's music. Maybe it's because we were all in bands together that there's a connection to what the other does. Whatever the reason, most people can find a few people to like what they do. If it's posted on-line and pushed hard enough, there could be hundreds of people who will enjoy your music. I've received many e-mails on certain songs. It hasn't made me a dime in years. But, I've never written or played for money.

If you want to aim for a young audience, you need to listen to what's popular at the time and start there. But, if you really don't like what's popular (I can't even listen to radio anymore) chances are you'll fail, because your heart won't be in it. If you fail at making money, you won't even have a song you're willing to listen to yourself.

An important thing to remember, there is only a young audience for unknown artists. I've seen people like Springsteen and the Stones (to name a few) play new songs and that's bathroom break for the older audience members.

I can't hit the right note to save my life, my guitar playing is unique and a little above sub standard. I can program a simple drum pattern, and my strongest instrument is the bass, and I'm only partly competent on that. But, the one thing I do think I'm good at, is songwriting. I don't copy songs, but I do have a template, and the one thing I always strive for is a memorable chorus and riff. While I've never stolen a chord or melody, I have sung hit songs since the 60s. I was also excellent at listening to a album and picking what songs would be the singles. It's fairly easy, and I know a boat load of people who could pick a hit to save their lives.

One of my favorites. I used to see Suzanne Vega in the folk clubs. It was when her first album was released. She threw in a song called Luka, that I fell in love with the first time I heard her play it. I only had shitty live cassette versions I'd recorded. But, I knew it back and forth two years before it was recorded. I always said that would be a hit, and I was right.

This is just one person's opinion. None of it is fact. Because with any art there is no fact, just opinion.
 
Listening critically to other people's material should give you insights into the things that that make songs work, and that should help with your own song-writing.

Thanks gecko zzed ! Yes, listening to other people's work does seem to teach you a lot about useful things like contrast, tension/release dynamics, major vs minor tonality shifts or mood shifts, etc.
 
This is just my opinion. There's two ways to create music. One for personal pleasure. The second in hopes of getting noticed.

If you're doing it for yourself, do what you want. Because it doesn't matter. As long as you're happy and proud of what you did, you're not aiming for mass audience appeal. Everyone has a few friends who will enjoy the music. I have very few friends, and we all truly appreciate each other's music. Maybe it's because we were all in bands together that there's a connection to what the other does. Whatever the reason, most people can find a few people to like what they do. If it's posted on-line and pushed hard enough, there could be hundreds of people who will enjoy your music. I've received many e-mails on certain songs. It hasn't made me a dime in years. But, I've never written or played for money.

If you want to aim for a young audience, you need to listen to what's popular at the time and start there. But, if you really don't like what's popular (I can't even listen to radio anymore) chances are you'll fail, because your heart won't be in it. If you fail at making money, you won't even have a song you're willing to listen to yourself.

An important thing to remember, there is only a young audience for unknown artists. I've seen people like Springsteen and the Stones (to name a few) play new songs and that's bathroom break for the older audience members.

I can't hit the right note to save my life, my guitar playing is unique and a little above sub standard. I can program a simple drum pattern, and my strongest instrument is the bass, and I'm only partly competent on that. But, the one thing I do think I'm good at, is songwriting. I don't copy songs, but I do have a template, and the one thing I always strive for is a memorable chorus and riff. While I've never stolen a chord or melody, I have sung hit songs since the 60s. I was also excellent at listening to a album and picking what songs would be the singles. It's fairly easy, and I know a boat load of people who could pick a hit to save their lives.

One of my favorites. I used to see Suzanne Vega in the folk clubs. It was when her first album was released. She threw in a song called Luka, that I fell in love with the first time I heard her play it. I only had shitty live cassette versions I'd recorded. But, I knew it back and forth two years before it was recorded. I always said that would be a hit, and I was right.

This is just one person's opinion. None of it is fact. Because with any art there is no fact, just opinion.

Thanks Snowman999 for your insights! yes, as you have pointed out, it's important that you enjoy your own song and that it is an integral part of your personality (especially the lyrics and the mood/vibe of the song). I do sometimes compose and produce music simply for the sake of sharing it with just friends also. But, once in a while I do have a desire to create something that might have a commercial appeal (but still staying true to my style, taste and personality).
 
I don't know if there is much of a connection between listening and writing. I've been listening to music since I was born, and playing since I was a wee lad of 11. I played music in high school and college, have hundreds of albums, 45s, and CDs covering everything from surf music to jazz, classical to prog rock.

My songwriting skills are PUNY! I've written a handful of songs in all that time. Two were birthday songs for a good friend, written with lots of little personal tidbits, like her dog's names, and her kids and job. You would think if listening were connected with writing, I would have a portfolio built up after more than 60 years.

Some people seem to be prolific wordsmiths. I have trouble rhyming June with moon!

In the end, that's ok. There are millions of songs out there to pick from, written by better songwriters than me.
 
I don't know if there is much of a connection between listening and writing. I've been listening to music since I was born, and playing since I was a wee lad of 11.

Well yes. I've been listeninng and playing for pretty much the same time. But there are different typesa of listening . . . . there's listening for enjoyment, but there's also listening for analysis. Most of the time I just listen and I don't care about the 'how' it works, but simply enjoy it for the pleasure it gives.

But at other times I wonder what it is about some music that resonates with me and others, and why other music doesn't. So I listen to it to try and understand this, i.e. to figure out what the elements are that make it appealing, and what elements make other music not appealing.
 
I get it Gecko, and while there are times that I listen JUST to lay back and enjoy, quite often, the next step is to grab my guitar and start playing along. I've learned tons of songs that way, but it doesn't help my writing skills. It does, however, help at the jam session when someone throws a bass guitar in my hands and I already know the chord changes, turn arounds etc. I'm not a poet, from which a lot of song originate.

Its like playing jazz to me, I can enjoy it, but my brain just doesn't think that way when it comes to moving the fingers around the fretboard.
 
Its like playing jazz to me, I can enjoy it, but my brain just doesn't think that way when it comes to moving the fingers around the fretboard.

Yes . . . I understand when you frame it that way.

For example, I watch renovation shows, and I see the before and after, and I appreciate what gets done to create vast imrpovements. But even though I see what they have done, when faced with that task, it just does not compute in my head. I see the 'before' and no amopunt of seeing the 'after' helps me get from one to the other. My brain doesn't know where to start.
 
I have found that learning to strum and sing the songs I really like on the acoustic guitar helps me even more with my songwriting (especially with regards to creating my own chord progressions that work and the song structure as well)
 
What do you think?
Where do I start !:eek:



there are possibly plenty of other factors that come into the equation other than listening hours and quality?
Without a shadow of doubt. Listening is obviously the first port of call because before anyone ever gets the notion to write a song, they will have listened to songs. And we all started to write for different reasons and combinations of different reasons. It started almost accidentally for me. I wouldn't even call what I was doing when I was 12, 13 & 14 writing. I had a cello and just made noises with it but one of them was an 'original' noise that I didn't even do anything with until 44 years later when I was an experienced writer. As well as the cello, I had a cassette recorder and the novelty of being able to record and hear a sound was more important than what was actually recorded. I'd just mess about with my younger sister or brother or cousins or friends, sort of singing hits of the day or the odd ditty learned at school. Virtually everything got wiped within a few days. I still recall bits from those mid 70s recordings though.But once I started getting into the Beatles I thought more about instruments and songwriting and once I heard Pink Floyd's first two albums and was into Deep Purple it kind of flowed from there. Naturally, initial songs were derivative although in saying that, the first actual piece of music I consciously came up with, once I bought a bass, even before I'd tuned it properly, let alone learned it, was "The virgin and the whore" and I'd never heard a piece like it. I used to have a version of it that lasted an hour.
I do think lots of different factors come into play, including the music one grew up listening to and the different kinds of music one likes and how much one can transcend or turn one's back on convention........if only for a little part of one's song.



there are different types of listening . . . . there's listening for enjoyment, but there's also listening for analysis. Most of the time I just listen and I don't care about the 'how' it works
Rick Beato does this great little show called "Why this song works" or something like that and while I do really enjoy the way he breaks down certain songs, I cannot actually see the how in why a song works. In some ways, breaking a song down to its individual parts doesn't really tell me anything much.


But at other times I wonder what it is about some music that resonates with me and others, and why other music doesn't. So I listen to it to try and understand this, i.e. to figure out what the elements are that make it appealing, and what elements make other music not appealing
I remember Sting asking the question many moons ago, what is it about a particular sequence of notes that made him react a certain way. Truth is, I don't know. There are songs with the same chordal structure and I may love one and hate the other. Or I may love a song but hate the cover version. Sometimes, it's familiarity ~ I'm in love with the first version I heard. But that doesn't really explain what makes it work. I know what I like in most songs that I like but I don't always know exactly what it is about the song I like, only that I like it. When it comes to writing them, I don't have a template but because I write quite a few different kinds of songs ranging in genre approximation, length and subject matter, I'm always mixing up methods, templates and whatever else one can think of !
 
I have found that learning to strum and sing the songs I really like on the acoustic guitar helps me even more with my songwriting (especially with regards to creating my own chord progressions that work and the song structure as well)
I'm very limited in what I actually play but not in what I can create. I used to only write songs on the bass. Then I learned to play guitar and that helped to expand my range in terms of writing. Then I used to carry a dictaphone with me and I wrote songs and instrument parts in my head. That's my main way of writing now. Some melody or instrument line will just come to me and I'll get it down on the dictaphone and then work it out later. Some things that started off as bass lines become lead guitar breaks, or trumpet riffs or whatever. Songwriting is a few different things to me. Sometimes I've shamelessly nicked something from another song but refashioned it in such a way that even the writer of the song wouldn't know unless I showed them the where and the how.
No instrument is safe from my usage of it !
 
Listening critically to other people's material should give you insights into the things that that make songs work
While there may be things in a particular song that I don't think works or that I don't like, that's kind of rare that I'll ever think in those terms that I'll actually go hunting for what does and doesn't work for me. However, I do find lots of ideas in someone else's music that I'll very consciously lift and stick in one of my own pieces. But it will very often come out in a very idiosyncratic way. For example, I may like a particularly weird jazzy turn in a jazz or avant-garde piece and put the idea {refashioned of course} into a reggae or folky section. Or I might like a dual instrument bit from a soul song and stick it into a hard rock piece. Sometimes writing songs is like cooking ~ chuck in some ingredients that might seem out of place in a classic meal and it just might work. Or you might end up scrapping it all once you've had a taste !
 
While there may be things in a particular song that I don't think works or that I don't like, that's kind of rare that I'll ever think in those terms that I'll actually go hunting for what does and doesn't work for me. However, I do find lots of ideas in someone else's music that I'll very consciously lift and stick in one of my own pieces. But it will very often come out in a very idiosyncratic way. For example, I may like a particularly weird jazzy turn in a jazz or avant-garde piece and put the idea {refashioned of course} into a reggae or folky section. Or I might like a dual instrument bit from a soul song and stick it into a hard rock piece. Sometimes writing songs is like cooking ~ chuck in some ingredients that might seem out of place in a classic meal and it just might work. Or you might end up scrapping it all once you've had a taste !

Hi grimtraveller,

I totally agree with you there. It's amazing how the ideas you have been exposed to in other people's/artist's compositions subtly influence your own compositions. For example, I love listening to a lot of instrumental music and sometimes I find that some of these instrumental melodies on guitars that I have heard subtly influence the vocal melodies of my original compositions (of course they are very different in terms of the full shape and pitch, but still there is an obvious influence)
 
I love listening to a lot of instrumental music and sometimes I find that some of these instrumental melodies on guitars that I have heard subtly influence the vocal melodies of my original compositions
Namaskara !
I too am a lover of instrumental music and there have been times when I've taken a section of an instrumental line and used it either as a line or passage or riff in a song, particularly a bass part or as part of a vocal melody.
In fact, it's a really good way of writing music. From time to time I've thought of doing a "how to write a song" thread, either for those that have writer's block or for those that feel they can't write songs but would like to. And one of the things I'd have said would be something like "take an instrumental part of a song that you like and use it as a bass part and proceed from there or take the riff or melodic passage, play it backwards and slightly alter the tempo and time signature and figure what instrument will play this then just write 2 or 3 short verses of lyric, nothing complex, maybe even the most ridiculous thing you can think of and try to come up with a melody to fit the music you worked out backwards."
Who knows what may flow from that !
One album I love is "Dancehall Sweethearts" by an old Irish band called Horslips. It's from 1974. The band were pioneers and innovators of Celtic folk rock {sometimes, they sang in Gaelic and did concept albums of old Irish myths} and they'd incorporate ancient Irish pieces into their songs. I always loved the sleeve notes on the album that said "Believe it or not, these tracks have traditional airs concealed about their persons" and then goes on to list traditional Irish jigs, airs, dances and polkas that are used in 7 of the songs. Some of them are pretty obvious but some of them, even as someone that knows Irish music quite well, it's impossible for me to work out which bit in the song has been taken from an old piece and re-fashioned.
 
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It's amazing how the ideas you have been exposed to in other people's/artist's compositions subtly influence your own compositions
I remember the first time I listened to Pink Floyd. It was their first 2 albums and at the time, I'd just never heard music like that before. Especially some of their longer pieces. It seems funny now because none of it feels long and each song is easy to identify but back in '79, the songs seemed to go on forever and because I played the albums out of sequence on the tapes I'd borrowed from my friend's big bro, it was hard to tell where one song ended and another began or what any of them were called. At the time I didn't even know that while I thought I was listening to "The piper at the gates of dawn" I was actually listening to "A saucerful of secrets." And when I came to tape them myself, two tracks, "Interstellar overdrive" and "A saucerful of secrets" I cut most of the "song" out because I couldn't relate to pieces weighing in at close to 10 and 12 minutes with no familiarity of repetition to cling to. It's also why I found Cream live hard to get into at first with those 10 and 15+ minute improvisations that weren't very repetitive !

But gradually I grew to love those types of pieces as well as the 2 and 3 minute pop stuff and also, when I was learning to play bass, I'd play for ages. Then when I started jamming with friends, particularly my friend that was a drummer and so, so,so much better on his instrument than I was on mine, I found that keeping going for an hour, 90 minutes, was actually not difficult {once my fingers stopped hurting} and quite a challenge to keep coming up with original musical ideas and at that point, some of those soundscapes and improvisations that I now was really liking flowed easily and naturally into what I was doing and that eventually seeped into my songwriting.
In another thread some of were talking about sound effects in songs and for me, they flow naturally without dominating or even being noticeable in an obvious way. In that regard, songwriting can be like film making or animation. There is so much detail in a shot that unless one is into that kind of thing, most just don't notice. Yet we see it. Every time.
 
Vocabulary is the key

From your childhood, you develop a speaking vocabulary. From attempting to form and use words, by listening to others, you mimic and then create sentences.
Over time, through much more discovery and necessary correction, you develop both a spoken and written vocabulary that is satisfying and interesting to someone besides yourself. In time, the spoken and written word are no longer obstacles, but combined with spelling and punctuation, become tools for the master of his language whether for oration, poetry, or Post-It note.

Music is exactly the same.

You mimic from listening. In time, you form your own.
What is usually missing is the necessary correction you had as a child from parents, teacher, or peers. For most, this is done musically by critique or being ignored. Few have a coach, mentor, or well-schooled professor to assist in correction. So the hard road is the only remaining path.

We won't mistake this for popularity. That would include promotion, hype, and tribal loyalty. None of that makes for good music, but can make for enormous financial reward. The paradox being that we all know deep inside that to equate popularity with 'good' is in error, but for enough cash we could be quite satisfied with substandard output.

Building a musical vocabulary in whatever chosen form is paramount. Knowing a power chord or a major seventh chord doesn't make one a rock or jazz player, respectively. And being a player is still not being a composer any more than a preschool child banging on a piano is creating 'art'. Build the vocabulary of music and the rest will come, at least far better than without.
 
The paradox being that we all know deep inside that to equate popularity with 'good' is in error, but for enough cash we could be quite satisfied with substandard output.
Paradoxically, I both agree and disagree !
The bit I disagree with is the word 'substandard.' Because that's something of an odd word. Substandard to who ? Many song writers write songs that they simply have to get out of their systems because they're writers of songs, but they don't have any real regard for them. Yet even though they think it's a piece of crap, they'll still work hard on them. They'll still tease a song out that they might think is tosh but millions love. And other times we'll look at someone that has put out an album or song in which we inwardly groan and think they've lost it, their artistic touch and flair has gone, deserted them......and then we find out later that they thought the world of that song or set of songs.
Ultimately a songwriter's gig is not to write 'good' songs, but to write complete songs. As ever, subjectivity reigns. I'd happily receive money for a song I'd written that I didn't like or have any feeling for. I've written songs for plays that I had and have absolutely no time for. I would never record them for myself and can barely remember them ~ but they did the job they were supposed to do.
 
Paradoxically, I both agree and disagree !
The bit I disagree with is the word 'substandard.' Because that's something of an odd word. Substandard to who ?

"Baby, baby, baby, baby..." J. Beiber.

Someone made a pile of loot off that song. It was, I'm quite certain, substandard to all involved, and yet it was popular.

But This is a general rule in society. Those of training and discipline routinely produce work of refinement and technique, be they composers or machinists, but are not popular to the masses. The widely desirable or acceptable is very often not the best work of the artist or architect, alike. That's been a key factor in 'popularity' since Day One, I suspect.

Perhaps you're right. "Substandard" may be the wrong term. Because popular acceptance creates a de facto "standard" similar to round steering wheels over levers, or laced shoes over buttons. Perhaps "sub-par" as in 'I've done better'.

That could be. Many is the story of the surprised composer/musician that never expected the popularity his song received and the inverse is equally proverbial.

I remember Sir Mick used to say, "we just put a bunch of sh*t on an album and see what they like." But he had a special way with words.
 
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