A Few Great Songwriting Articles
By Paul • Aug 1st, 2006 • Category: Songwriting AdviceHere are a couple of great articles scoured from throughout the Web.
First up, this article from Mix 99.9 - Success not guaranteed for song hitmakers turned solo artists. This article talks about major Songwriters who have had major success for other artists but are finding out, it’s difficult to make a career out of being an artist on your own.
Next from Yahoo we find out that through it all, Meatloaf and Jim Steinman can still be ‘friends’ - Meat Loaf has dropped his “Bat Out of Hell” lawsuit (and strangely predicts an early death at the end of the article). Seems they were suing each other over the rights to use the phrase “Bat Out Of Hell” which songwriter Steinman trademarked a few years ago despite having been around for 29 years. There’s a lesson there. Everyone knows that copyright protects songwriters and their songs, but I believe as time moves forward you’re going to see more and more songwriters try to trademark their title. As of now, no title can be copywritten, else you’d have a million songwriters suing over the use of “I Love You” in their title. But a trademark when issued to a business, the business being the song itself, has some interesting implications. We’ll see.
And last from Ultimate-Guitar.com, a person named “gogita21″ gives a (hopefully) original lesson in the Anatomy Of Great Lyrics.
Happy Songwriting.
Paul is a songwriter who has written with Grammy winners, Dove Award winners, and several Number One and Top Ten songwriters in the Nashville community. He is also the founder and editor of NashvilleHype, one of the premiere Nashville Blogs.
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I like the Mix 99.9 article. (I haven’t read the other yet.) I think the rap and r&b examples are also a testament to the predictability of those genres right now. In some ways I feel like hip-hop has reached the “hairband” stage rock and roll hit in the late 80’s before it died to “alternative” music - which also ended up becoming predictable too.
I’m not dissing hip-hop either. I hope the current state of hip-hop means some exciting original stuff is around the corner. -dm
I heard or read a great quote one time about Marilyn Manson (someone who I really like). It was right after 9/11 and the person said something to the effect - “You look at 9/11 and the effect it had on music. I mean, Marilyn Manson, after seeing terrorist fly planes into buildings and killing 3,000 people, just isn’t as scary to parents as he once was.” It’s amazing what can change a musical ‘movement’ (as at that time, there were a lot of bands trying to be just as controversial and ’scary’).
“Hairband” (late 80’s rock) is the new country music, minus the hair and slightly sanitized for content. Musically, just about any country hit today could’ve been the hairbands hit ballad of old.
Hip-Hop took over when Rock-n-Roll gave up it’s dependence on Sex, Drugs, Rebellion, and well… rock. In the early 90’s during Grunge it became oppressive to be a rock star - fame and all that. Taken to the extreme we had to live with ‘EMO’ - talk about whining about everything. No confidence, everything’s wrong, fame is horrible, and ‘corporate’ America is ruining music (but sign us and make us huge and the kids will love us!). Thank the Lord that’s about over.
I suspect Rock will supplant Hip-Hop out of necessity to survive - that David Lee Roth attitude of sex, drugs and whatever, still won’t be ’scary’ to parents (a major driving force of Rock sales - rebellion) in the world we live in, but then DLR and Rock wasn’t about being scary - it was about having fun.
In long (rather than short ya see), I agree that Hip-Hop has a long way to go from where it’s stands today, it might not be ‘over’, but it’s not standing out either. Might Justin change all of that? I guess time will tell.