The balance between originality and convention

[bostjan]

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, but especially since my 5th solo album came out on Friday.

For me, songwriting is about saying something, and saying something, to me, has always been about conveying an idea to someone else who hasn't heard that idea before, so I put a lot of stress on doing something new with my songs.

But, as I've tried now to break into commercial music, I've come to know, quite intimately, that audiences need something to which to relate your music in order to enjoy it.

A song is a nice concert of two or more ideas: rhythm, melody, chords, and lyrics.  Maybe a song has only a rhythm and a melody, and it's still a song, but I think that people need to relate to these things in a very specific way.

Composing music for films and cartoons, usually the producer or director will approach me right off the bat saying "I want music that sounds like _____ theme song."  It feels kind of cheap in some ways, for me, to approach music like I'm trying to write a parody of the theme from Halloween for someone's horror film, or whatever, so I usually play around with different unique ideas and then try to see how well they translate into that sort of idiom, rather than start with someone else's work and try to bend the rhythm, melody, chords, or whatever until it sounds different enough.

On the total opposite end of the spectrum, when I release a new album of my own stuff, and beg people to listen to it, the first line of feedback I almost always get is "this sounds sort of like _____ (other band)."  I take no offense at that, on the contrary, I love it when people listen to me, but I still find it interesting, that we, as listeners, almost always tend to approach new music by comparing it to something else with which we are more familiar. 

A few of the most scathing reviews started out with what I thought to be a wonderful comment along the lines of "I never heard anything at all like this before," which was kind of my point, but then those reviews go on to rip me apart.

And just listen to any new pop music on the radio.  Odds are the chords are G D A C in 4 / 4 with a "boots cats" beat and lyrics that sound like a Mad Libs of another popular song, with gobs of "whoah-oh whoah-oh"s.  Obviously this isn't bad music, as my knee jerk reaction might be, because so many people love it, but rather it's the perfect combination of old ideas placed into some new context somehow.

It seemed to me like the 80's and 90's were all about new stuff.  All of the MTv bands took the world by storm by being different.  When Devo crashed into our living rooms, no one thought for a second that they were rehashing the same old records from the 70's.  When Van Halen was shredding away, no one stopped him and said "hey, Eddie, this song sounds too much like Led Zeppelin."  When grunge music took over the radio waves, it was because it was so different from the music of the older generation, and the new generation wanted to identify with something to set themselves as far apart as possible from them (even though a lot of Nirvana's riffs were paraphrases of 80's bands riffs, they obviously sounded a lot different with how they were played).

So now we're deep into the 21st century, and a lot has changed in music.  The rock heroes of the past era are dying off, and there are few replacements coming out.  My favourite music stations from the 90's and early 2000's are playing the same music now that they were playing in the 90's and early 2000's.  Local DJs in clubs are doing remixes of Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda," and calling it a new song, when the song itself is a remix of Sir Mixalot's "I Like Big Butts," which itself is a remix of a techno song called "Techocolor," which was an original song that started out as a parody of the James Bond theme - and the story behind that song is typical of a lot of popular songs- a rehash of a rehash...

When I play live, sometimes I find myself awkwardly in front of the wrong audience for what I do.  It's certainly not the audience's fault, but then again, I do wonder why a promoter would book me to play along side shuffle/skiffle bands...  But a lot of folks will say "it's too...different."  It's dissonant to me, because I think of the meaning as a compliment, but honestly, it's meant as the opposite most of the time.

Then, sometimes, I'll write a song that is like 12-bar blues in Am or a four chord box pattern in G or whatever and then try to do something creative with the lyrics or otherwise, and sometimes people will say "I liked the music, but the lyrics, I don't know."  It can be really discouraging.

I start thinking that I'm a horrible musician, then I join a cover band, and play Bon Jovi for a bunch of housewives on their girl's night out at a bar, and I get compliments enough to want to try doing my own thing again, so it establishes a hot and cold cycle, like a carnot engine pumping away year after year.

What's your experience with trying to be unique?  What are your thoughts about sticking to conventions?  Where do you place the most value in balancing the two with your own original music?

Me, if I'm going to release my own music, I want it to be as weird as I am.  When I play the blues, I want 11-bar blues, or blues in 7/8 time, or blues that can't make up it's mind which key or tempo it's in, and I want it to be microtonal and I want the lyrics to be different, but obviously all planned out ahead of time.  When someone wants me to do work on their project, I want to make them happy, of course, but I don't mind trying to slip in a couple of my own little personality quirks, just to see if anything sticks (spoiler alert: it never does).  Being yourself is important on so many levels, yet if you appear to people as a wackjob, they'll marginalize you instantly.

[T.C. Elliott]

I think my biggest (never admitted out loud) fear is that nothing I do is inventive in any way. I feel that I seldom (if ever) break new ground. But as long as I enjoy my music does it really matter?

I would say that we are all the sum of our influences, it's how we put them together that determines how "original" we are. And I believe that restrictions are the best form of inspiration. If I'm stuck then I force myself to start with a bass line or somehow use a palindrome in the song (structure or lyric or something) or I'll pick an odd time signature or only use two instruments besides voice etc.,  Writing creatively while being "in the vein of" another song or artist can be incredibly challenging. It's easy to see it as a copy of the original, but if you can somehow make it your own then you have succeeded, I think.

Interesting observation, thanks for sharing.

[bostjan]

Being inventive, though, works on so many levels.

You have a musician like Stevie Ray Vaughn, who is super-highly respected as a musician, right?  He had such a distinctive guitar tone and such a special flair in his performances.  But listen to the words he's singing or the notes he's using and it's not that different from Buddy Guy.  No way is anyone going to confuse the two of them though, so it's still distinct as can be, but it's one level of inventiveness.

Then take John Cage, also very well respected, but I'd have a very difficult time recommending a similar composer to him.  Yet still he sits at a piano like so many other composers did, so it's not completely out of a vacuum that he was made.

I think the genre labels that started out as Pop, Rock, Jazz, Blues, etc. have just been broken down to the point of absurdity, and that poses a problem.  If I get labelled as "Post-sweater-core" then there are people out there who will expect me to sound exactly a certain way.

[Mike_S]

Hmmm,

Yes i guess the dilemma of being original or not enters all of our minds who make music. I used to try very hard to be original... but that was the problem when I look back. Yes I did do bits and pieces that I suppose were original but a lot ended up quite poor as pieces of music. I tried too hard.

First and foremost music needs to be something that people want to listen too - original or otherwise. Originality is a noble artistic aspiration, but I think musicians and artists have to know where their strengths lie. Not everyone's strength is real originality, but can lie in other areas... tone of voice... knack of a pretty tune (while not breaking any new ground), or great talent on a guitar. Each have their own merit and can give great pleasure to the listener.

So the way I see it these days, I am leaving originality to those who really can do it and just getting on with having fun making little tunes that keep me happy. If anyone else thinks its worth listening too that's good too.

But I do doff my hat to those who strive to be original and can pull it off... it really is a gift.

Mike

[Oldrottenhead]

I have been listening all day to Mark E Smith's band the fall. In particular the album slates, back in the day I had the ep/mini album on vinyl. If that was released today it would still sound completely original. I try to be original but miss by a country mile as I have absorbed so many different influences. My next song will probably end up sounding like the fall. But not anywhere's nearly as good as them tho I might add.

[bostjan]

I know a local guy who is a pretty decent guitarist and singer, but I'm not sure what to make of his songwriting.  A better known local songwriter writes a song with a fairly simple progression of four fairly complex chords, with a distinctive vocal melody and lyrics pertaining to a certain topic.  Two months later, this guy in question will release a song with the same title, but with one or two words misspelled, simplified chords, and many of the same lyrical lines.  It seems obvious enough that it's an homage or something, but then I picked up this guy's album and noticed that more than half of the songs on there were extremely similar to other local artists I follow. ...

Years ago, I was in a band that released an album, and we decided to have an album release party with our favourite local bands each playing a set.  I had the thought of putting together a 3-4 minute long medley of other local band's songs to play toward the end of our set, and the other guys in the band looked at me like I had grown three extra heads, like you don't cover other local band's songs - you just don't... so, I said "ok" and we moved on, no big deal.  I was fine with it because I always saw our own original sound as our greatest source of pride.  When we played covers anyway, they were reworked into our own sort of sound.

On the other hand, I know that the ideas I hear from other local bands have always worked their way into my mind, and that influences, in turn, how I express myself through my own music.  I just think that there is a variety of ways to do that.  You could take high level ideas from different sources and meld them together, or you could do parodies and quotes, or whatever.  Everyone's vocabulary is different, and everyone's vocabulary is comprised of shared ideas from the collective vocabulary.  Sometimes people push the boundaries of that collective vocabulary, but usually not.