The
following clips are transcriptions of Pat in conversation with Trevor
Reekie in 2006, and Kim Hill in 2007 for Radio New Zealand. To listen
to samples of the interviews, click on any of the five topics below - to
hear more, go to myspace.com/ptpattison.
Reviews of Pat Pattison's Point of View tour 2010
It was fantastic
seeing the 'Point of View' weekend. It's a great topic and a wonderfully
helpful approach.My sincerest
thanks to you Pat, for the tools and the inspiration you supply to those who
want so badly to express themselves through art.
Ben (Sydney)
Pat is just a gem
of a man, how can you just not love him-he’s not only such a wealth of
knowledge, but a genuinely lovely person-a fantastic combination. I have no
doubt what-so-ever, that I will see you at another future event. Jo (Sydney)
Just a quick note
to thank you for bringing Pat out again, and of course giving me the
opportunity to make good on my promise of participating in one of his seminars. Pat is a brilliant
teacher. I've long been a fan of his books and this past weekend has been a
fantastic investment in my growth as a writer and one that I believe would
benefit anyone who truly wants to explore their full songwriting potential. His concepts are clearly
thought out and his wisdom is vast. He's kind of like Yoda, with a better grasp
of syntax! Nate. (Sydney)
After I attended one of Pat’s
talks for the first time last year and purchased his books I felt that I now
had a tool box for song writing. Some of the tools were already familiar
to me and there were others I that I had not come across before so I went about
learning how to use them. I find seminars, such as this, introduce me to
even more new tools and they remind me to look in the box and discover tools I
had forgotten about - the ones lurking in the corners - and to continue to hone
my skills. Each time I have been
to hear Pat I have come away with some new tools. Last week I discovered the
tool of ‘front heavy lines vs back heavy lines’. This weekend I gained
practical experience on working out the best point of view - so the seminar was
successful from that aspect. However, along the way, I discovered some
new little gems that I can use to improve my song writing. One ‘light-bulb’
moment for me was about being specific and sense bound - using the senses from
the beginning to immediately involve the listener - I see that as turning a two
dimensional piece of modern art into a painting (doesn’t have to be a
masterpiece) that engages the viewer - and I think this may be a turning point
in my song writing. Having a focus for a seminar is a good starting
point, but the tangents it can go off on are equally worthwhile. Jennifer (Sydney)
It was a really
fascinating class. I learned a lot, and I enjoyed the pleasure of concentrating
intently to keep absorbing all the information, and to try to become attuned to
Pat's very perspicacious way of looking at songs.
Henry (Sydney)
Pat's seminar has
opened up a whole new world for me with lots of strategies to use in my
songwriting. I've been reading Pat's book and plan to be more disciplined every
day and take writing more seriously. I loved the fact we got a chance to listen
to each other's music and change the points of view of the song. I was able to
do some networking and made new connections and I enjoyed meeting people who
are passionate in what they do.
Voula Samaras
(Melbourne)
First of all let me say
Wow!!!!! This weekend was like real food for me and I feel very grateful to
have been there. Thank you! Thank you! I was blown away with Pats
generosity of spirit, his totally engaging way of teaching, his rich knowledge
of the subject and not to mention his wicked humor which makes learning all
that much easier for us all.It
was a real privilege to be in the presence of such a passionate teacher and it
was tremendous fun as well.I had a ball! I feel like I have come away
from the weekend experience really well nourished and am very inspired to get
stuck into "fearless song writing". As a mum I have found it
pretty challenging to keep sight of my own love of singing and songwriting over
the years but Pats workshop has given me the push and the courage I needed to
put my priorities back in order which is a lovely gift to receive. (Don't
worry,I'll still keep the kids!!!) Rebecca Spalding (Melbourne)
I'm still buzzing
after staying up all night writing...What a fantastic seminar... What an
inspiring experience! Thanks so much for making it happen. Please pass my thanks on to
Pat - I feel alive, inspired and excited. No doubt he's used to unlocking
writers, and the inevitable post-seminar gushing, but please add my compliments
to the pile. I'm sure he secretly enjoys it. Thanks again for a brilliant
experience - it's already impacting my life as a songwriter. Chloe (Melbourne)
You've done it
again! This last weekend was sensational. I never get tired of listening to Pat
and I'm always picking up more and more from each session I go to.
Noel (Melbourne)
Thank you for a
wonderful weekend that has, thank goodness, got me back on the wagon
again!I have had a history of
writing in spurts with many months of nothing either side and Pat's workshop
has made me realise how crazy that is if I want to develop my craft.
Abbie (Melbourne)
Just wanted to
let you know that I LOVED the workshops. I especially found the phrasing
workshop to be helpful and now I go about listening for the back-heavy/front
heavy phrasing of songs on my ipod. I am learning heaps from this and can't
wait to get started on my songwriting again. These are marvellous tools
and I wish I had them years ago. They would have shaved years off my
song-writing journey. Geraldine (Melbourne)
Just thought I'd
like to thank you both for the seminars on the weekend. Great support and
inspiration... not to mention tools. Magda (Melbourne)
Firstly, thank
you so much for organising this workshop. It's changed my life (seriously) as
I'm at a crossroads with my career and I have now decided to pursue songwriting
as my vocation.
Secondly, Pat
Pattison is a genius. The way he took an ordinary song and made it sound good,
and took good songs and made them sound great was amazing to see!I have learnt so much and can't wait to
apply these newly acquired tools.
Allister Bosnic
(Melbourne)
I found Pat's
session very enjoyable and instructive! A masterful teacher, both in his
content and delivery. I am looking forward to delving into his book in detail.
Jane (Melbourne)
I just wanted to
thank you for a wonderful evening tonight with the brilliant, humourous and
passionate man that is Pat Pattison. I first heard of Pat when I
was browsing songwriting books at Borders and picked up the first edition of
Pat's Writing Better Lyrics. That book alone got me thinking differently about
how I approach my songwriting but now having experienced Pat in the flesh it's
a whole other experience. Once again, thank you for
what was a mind opening event.I look forward to many many more :-) Tom (Melbourne)
Just a quick
email to say thanks sooo much for bringing Pat to Brisbane again this
year.The insights, tools
and tips he leaves you are priceless. I've already attacked a whole bunch of
songs and improved them out of sight.
Graham.
(Brisbane)
Thank you for the
opportunity to attend Pat's seminar. It was sensational, and coming from a
drummer, that's probably saying something LOL. I definitely have walked away
from his seminar with more knowledge of melody, placement of harmony, and the
build of anticipation with lyrics...
Scotty (Brisbane)
Interview with Trevor Reekie
TR: I
read somewhere that you maintain that if you become a better writer, you
become a better person. This is more than just a writing class then?
PP: Oh absolutely. To become a better
writer, what you need to do, of course, is open your writer’s eyes. You
can do that with a series of exercises, morning writing for ten minutes.
It’s called Object Writing, which stimulates your writer – your writer
who, by the way, is the laziest person on the planet. You give your
writer a sharp elbow in the ribs the morning, open your writer’s eyes
and then your writer stays with you all day long. So your writer is
looking at the world with you and you’re seeing the world. You look out
and you see a row of windows and you may think of each of the windows
as an entry into a different universe or you may think of the windows as
observers, as eyes. You know, you’ll see them in ways that you, as a
normal person would not see them, but the writer in you is looking for
not only what they are but for what else they are and in doing that, it
deepens your understanding and creates a much more interactive between
you and the world. You see everything for not only what it is but for
what else it could become and that, in my opinion, deepens your life.
TR: Personally I believe that most
creativity is a process, would you endorse that as well?
PP: Not only would I endorse that
creativity is a process, but that’s the only thing that’s even remotely
interesting about creativity. It’s almost never about where you end up
-- and we’re back to a philosophy of life. It’s never about the
destination, it’s always about how you get there, and so, if you’re in
song writing to become a hit songwriter, if you don’t get hits, then
you’ve been a failure, haven’t you? But if the reason that you’re in
song writing is because you adore the process and extract joy from every
second that you write and you don’t get hits, then you’re a success.
TR: You say that students bring their own
talent to the table and then you show them how to use that talent more
efficiently. Is this an exercise in motivation and being in the belief?
PP: Oh, heavens, no. This is where the
rubber meets the road; this is very practical. I certainly have no
responsibility for the level of talent that anybody has, but if you come
to me and want to harness that talent, I will unroll a long leather
pouch full of tools for you to try. It’s the tools, the very practical
tools, which are very specific, that, you know, take the so-called magic
out of it. Some people want to believe that it all just comes sort of
out of the ether and have no control over it and who are just sort of
channelling. But there are very practical tools, with songwriting, with
lyric writing, with melody writing: you just try things. Here try this
hammer, try this chisel, try this awl. You know, they try and it and say
“Oh my god, this makes what I feel and what I perceive able to be
delivered in a much more effective way.”
TR: I read somewhere, that you actually believe we have seven
senses to deal with, I thought there was only five – what are those
seven senses?
PP: Oh,
I’m sure there are even more than seven, but there’s the normal ones of
course. The reason the senses are important is because the most
powerful writing, the stuff that really engages your listener is when
you are engaging their senses. So if I talk about running down the
beach, my bare feet slapping the wet sand, or the smell of fresh cut
grass, your sense memories are immediately engaged and you put your
stuff into my words and so my song becomes yours. Every song that you
have ever loved in your life is one where you say, “Oh my god, you’ve
been reading my diary.”
TR: Is
that universality?
PP: I
sincerely believe that the synonym for universality is “specific and
sense bound.” It is not and it never will be a synonym for “generic and
abstract.” You know, so many people say, “ Well I wanted everybody to
be able to relate to this” and they say something very generic, and the
fact is that nobody relates to it. But when you stimulate your
listeners’ senses, everything works. So there are the normal five
senses that you deal with of course and then there’s the two other
senses that I indicate in Writing Better Lyrics, one of which I call the
organic sense: basically your sense of what’s going on internally,
muscle pains, your heart rate, your lungs expanding and contracting,
your pulse. Tom Waits writes, “Hell Marysville ain’t nothing but a wide
spot in the road/Some nights my heart pounds like thunder/Don’t know
why it don’t explode”
PP: And
then there’s what I call the kinesthetic sense, which is your sense of
motion, your sense of everything going on around you, getting dizzy,
tumbling, all of that stuff. That is your best resource as a writer,
you just have to learn how to access that stuff.
TR: I notice that you encourage your
students to find a title as quickly as they can in the writing process.
That’s something I never actually knew before, and it’s so obvious.
PP: Yeah, well I never knew that before
either. There I was on the road with my band and I was a line writer. I
would start with a line and just sort of keep on going and somewhere
along in the process, I’d wonder what I was writing about. And then I’d
say, “Well it doesn’t really matter, because everybody has their own
interpretation anyway and besides which, if it’s obscure, maybe people
will think it’s profound” and so on. But when I started writing in
Nashville, which I think, is the Brill building now on the planet.
There are more songwriters per square foot in Nashville than any place
else and they are fabulous writers. When I got to Nashville, people
would say, “Hey, you got any ideas?” and they’d pull out a little book
full of titles.
TR: Just
one liners?
PP: Yeah
and they’d use those to centre the song. I actually do a whole workshop
on Writing from a Title, you start with a Title and you’ve already got
the DNA of the song right there. So the ideas are already implicit and
it becomes an acorn and the song grows from that. Not only do you have
the concept that’s implicit from the title, but you also have two other
things. You have rhythm, and you can use that rhythm as a little motive
to develop other rhythms that are integrated with it and therefore form
a unity. This is back to Aristotle, you know Aristotle said 2500 years
ago that every work of art should exhibit a sense of unity.
TR: Did he sell records?
PP: He sold a lot of stuff and you know, a
lot of it is still with us, including his “Categories of Being” – the
foundation for Roget’s International Style Thesaurus. Back to unity: you can get a sense of
rhythmic unity from the rhythm of the title and therefore, you get a
sense of contrast when you go to another section. You also have the
sounds of the title and I encourage people to find the stressed
syllables of their title and take those sounds to your rhyming
dictionary, and do some brainstorming before you start writing. And you
know, I’m not alone in recommending that. Stephen Sondheim does that,
Eminem does that, Cole Porter did that. McCartney…
TR: One of the biggest problems we have in
the New Zealand scene, is that we don’t have really, a publishing
industry. What there is, is pretty much just administrators really.
What advice do you have for our local writers?
PP: Part of that is going to depend on what
it is that you’re after. If you are a songwriter period and you have
no intent, or capability of performing your own music, but you do want
to continue to write songs, it becomes a very difficult thing to do, to
keep yourself motivated to write songs when they don’t have a place to
go. One of the things I recommend for that writer is to take advantage
of some of the better song competitions around. Take advantage of the
USA Song Contest, take advantage of the Billboard Song Contest, take
advantage of the John Lennon Song Contest and certainly there’s a
website called themusesmuse.com which I think is run out of Toronto,
which is a very nice resource in terms of where the competitions are. I
know that when I was isolated and writing songs, it gave me an
incredible boost to have the American Song festival and I would write
songs knowing that there was at least one place that the songs could go
that was kind of like buying a lottery ticket – that’s a thing to do.
Certainly
if you are just a pure writer, you need to hook up with somebody who
can record those. You have to get your butt out the door, you have to
go listen to people out in clubs and when you find somebody that you
resonate with, try to get next to them and find people to perform your
music. For singer-songwriters, it’s a different thing.
Singer-songwriters, you’ve got to get your face out in front of as many
people as often as you can for whatever money or lack of money there
is. And expose yourself because sooner or later, if you have the goods,
the word’s gonna get around. So you just have to get out there and you
have to do it religiously, do it doggedly. And if you can, take a
little journey to Los Angeles or to Nashville or some place like that
for a week or two. I recommend highly that you do that and that the
first time that you go there, you remember that God gave you two ears
and one mouth and that ratio needs to tell you something, that you
listen before you speak. Nobody rang you up and said, “Hey, come on
over” and so you go over there and you see what’s there. For my
students, I have them going to Nashville, because, whether or not you
want to be a country writer, it’s still a fact that there are more great
writers per square foot there than any place else on the planet and so
you just go there and you just treat it like grad school. I live in
North Hampton, New Hampshire and when I walk into any restaurant in
North Hampton, New Hampshire, I know without looking, that I am the best
songwriter in that restaurant. When I walk into Nashville, into a
restaurant, I know without looking that I am absolutely not the best
songwriter in that restaurant and I love that. I love the level being
higher – you know, if I’m the best songwriter in any particular place,
I’m not going to learn anything. I’ve always found that the best writers
are the best students. They’re always looking for something more,
they’re always looking for new information.
Interview with Kim Hill
Pat Pattison has written what some people call the aspiring songwriters
bible, and it’s called “Writing Better Lyrics” and has written others on
a similar theme. Professor Pattison teaches lyric writing and poetry
at Berklee College of Music in Boston, which is the only place you can
get a degree in music with a major in song writing. He is in New
Zealand to present song writing clinics as he does elsewhere around the
world. I asked him who does his courses.
KH - Aspiring Songwriters or
established songwriters?
PP - Both. I’m delighted to say the
information seems to be of use to people who are just starting and also
to people who have been doing it for quite sometime.
KH - I understand that Berklee College
of Music in Boston is the only place where you can get a degree in
music with a major in song writing. Is that still the case?
PP – That is still the case as far as I
know.
KH – Why is it so rare? You’d think
that it would be quite a common thing especially in this day and age
when Song writing is the thing.
PP – Well, many schools have some nod
at song writing with a course or two. Generally, those courses try to
cover everything from writing music, to writing lyrics, to demoing, to
getting your songs out there and it’s a nice overview, but not really a
way to get really specific and give the songwriter a lot of help. We’ve
got a fifteen course major at Berklee that seems to be working. We’ve
got a lot of pretty good folks coming out of there.
KH – Coming out of there are a couple
of people we’re going to be hearing from, Gillian Welch and John Mayer.
Did they go through it and then become huge or were they fairly
successful and then did it to polish up? What stage in their career did
they do the course?
PP – They did the course when they
were just fledglings. John, when he did it, had not yet recorded his
first album. He left Berklee and went down to Atlanta and recorded his
first album down there. He came to study guitar playing and realised
that he could write songs and apparently paid good attention.
KH – It’s a funny thing to teach, if
you’ll excuse me for saying so.
PP – LAUGHS
KH – Do you think? How did you start
teaching it? What’s your background in song writing?
PP – My background is actually in
philosophy and literary criticism. I did a degree in philosophy from
Indiana University and a degree in literary criticism from the Kenyon
School of Letters and that was what I was teaching at Indiana and at
Notre Dame. When I started teaching at Berklee, I came on as an English
teacher and decided I would teach a course in literary criticism. Of
course, I knew nobody would take the course, so I called it “Analysis of
Song Lyrics”.
KH – To sex it up a bit, as it were.
PP – That’s right. We used Paul Simon,
Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell and so on as fodder for literary
criticism. I, of course, never told anyone that it was a course in
literary criticism. So, it seemed to help. Who knew that the tools of
literary criticism would actually reveal something about how songs
worked? But it did.
KH – Are you saying that song lyrics
are literature?
PP – I don’t think so. Certainly some
of them rise to that level and there’s a literature of lyrics, I
suppose. But lyrics are just half of a union. They’re not made to
stand on their own; they are made to be married and there are a lot of
consequences to that. But certainly choice of tone, choice of language,
diction, all of that stuff; things which apply to the composition of
literature apply to the composition of lyrics.
KH – So you were teaching criticism,
and people learnt how to criticise through the albeit temporary medium
of song lyrics. Is that how it works?
PP –Basically, but more than that what
actually happened was that there were a lot of people there who were
songwriters and they testified that the course was really helping them
write songs. I thought, well that’s really nice and so I put together a
second course called Writing Song Lyrics. I’m still really grateful to
the students who took that class, but did not lynch me for my
ineptitude. But I learned as I went and in the meantime, I had a band
and I was writing songs so I had some practical training going on.
KH – You had a band?
PP – Oh yes. Just a small little folk
band.
KH – For which you used to write
songs?
PP – Yes. I wrote a lot of songs for
us.
KH – Let’s have a listen to the song
you’ve chosen by John Mayer called “Belief”. Were you in on the
creation of that?
KH – When John Mayer was doing your
course, did you know he was going to be a star?
PP – No I did not. I didn’t know
Gillian was either. He certainly was an attentive student and I knew
that there was something going on with him that was going to come out
some way. He certainly is a good player too and I’m really impressed to
see him step out more and more as a player.
KH – Do people have to qualify to do
your course?
PP – No, anybody can take it and I
hope that anybody who takes it will come out of there with something
positive. Some people will take it and actually use the tools to create
a career. Other people will have some other career but still dabble in
it and it will always improve your listening skills and therefore your
enjoyment skills.
KH – And given that as you say lyrics
are a half of a union; made to be married to the music, everybody would
also be a musician?
PP – Yes – at Berklee that’s a
requirement, that everybody there is a musician and everybody goes
through the same core musical program.
KH – Apart from lyrics only being half
of the union, they could conceivably be poetry under some
circumstances, but aren’t usually? Would you say that?
PP – Not usually. For example, in
this song, there’s a great deal to be made out of the phrasing that he
uses. When he comes into his first little chorus, he could have set the
lyric in such a way that it was much more aggressive, that the phrases
came right on the downbeat of the bars. But instead, he’s setting the
phrases behind the downbeats of the bars which makes everything sort of
float and takes a little bit away from it. That’s something you can do
musically that you really can’t do visually with a poem. That you
actually reduce the impact of it by where you place it in the bar and
that’s we talk about that sort of stuff a lot.
KH – That verse “Belief is a beautiful
armour/ but makes for the heaviest sword/Like punching under water/You
never can hit what you’re trying for.”
PP – Isn’t that wonderful?
KH – It’s great. Why isn’t it poetry
though?
PP – Poetry contains its own rhythms
and this verse is a fairly regular rhythm, all equal length lines, all
equal rhythm lines; and it is the re-rhythmicising of it musically that
gives it some of its power. Although the language itself, if you want
to talk about poetry in terms of metaphor and simile, there’s some
brilliant, I think, use of metaphor.
KH – But poetry has its own inner
spring, whereas lyrics rely on the music.
PP – Sure. When Keats says, “Thou
foster child of silence and slow time” you can hear time slowing down
there with the two stressed syllables in a row, “slow time.” And so it
contains it’s own groove: da DAH da DAH da DAH da da DAH DAH. If you
were going to put that to music, the only thing the music would be
capable of doing would be orchestrating that rhythm.
KH – Have you got a greatest
songwriter of all time in your head?
PP – No, although, there are some
pretty decent songwriters out there. I think Sondheim is pretty
wonderful. I think Irving Berlin is pretty special. I really like
Eminem. I like Sting. Certainly Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and so on
KH – Gosh I thought Bacharach/David
would be up there.
PP – Ah, yes of course but you said
songwriter not songwriters.
KH – That’s true – they were a fairly
extraordinary partnership and they kept churning out these hits and did
seem to be quite different from what had gone before. I wonder where
they got their internal rhythms from?
PP – I’m not really clear – I think
sometimes they worked music first and sometimes they worked lyric
first. The rhythm typically, in partnerships, comes from the music side
of it.
KH – Is there a type of person that
you groan at when you see them signing up? Someone that wants to make a
lot of money making advertising jingles, for example, do you spurn them
at all?
PP – No, of course not. Everyone has
their own particular dream. The only people that are somewhat of a
bother - Berklee has a motto, “Esse Quam Videre,” which means “To be,
rather than to appear to be,” and people who come hoping to become
famous, who want to be seen as musicians rather than to be musicians
typically aren’t going to last at Berklee, because it’s too hard,
there’s too much work involved. The posers who really don’t want to
work are a problem in every field, but certainly in one of the spotlight
fields like performing and writing, the glamour professions, there are a
lot more posers there than probably in insurance.
KH – And has your poser content
increased as the glamour of instant fame has become it seems more
achievable these days?
PP – I don’t think so, not at Berklee
at any rate. We have an audition process now. Only three out of ten
get in now and they have to audition and they have to interview.
KH – So you can weed out the posers?
PP – Yes.
KH – Your next track is Gillian
Welch’s “One Little Song”. You said you didn’t know that she was going
to be a star and that kind of figures, cause she’s pretty unusual, isn’t
she?
PP – She certainly is. She was an
obsessive student and spent a lot of time in my office bringing in
songs. Then she went to Nashville and while she was in Nashville we
remained in pretty close contact and I had actually something to do with
her getting her publishing deal, therefore her record deal. She has,
since then, really come into her own. She was in Nashville for a couple
of years before she wrote what I think was her turn-key song “Tear my
Stillhouse Down” which became bluegrass song of the year for the
Nashville Bluegrass Band the next year. When she wrote that, I knew
that it was time for her. Now she has gone on to record I think four
albums at this point and has seven Grammy nominations and three Grammys
to her credit,
KH - This song that you want to play
for us could by the anthem or a prayer for a songwriter couldn’t it?
KH – Gillian Welch was in New Zealand
recently and had a huge turn out. People seemed to regard her as the
voice of authenticity.
PP – She certainly is that. When she
came out with her first album, there was some reviewer, in Spin
magazaine, I think, who took her to task for being inauthentic, that is
to say the music sounds really authentic, but actually she’s the
daughter of two hollywood musicos who actually did music for the Carol
Burnett show.
KH – She can hardly be blamed for
that, besides she’s adopted, does that not count?
PP – Yeah, she is adopted and the
funny thing is she found out just a few years ago -- she found out that
her natural mother was in New York were she became pregnant, but her
mother was actually from the hills of West Virginia, so that was pretty
interesting to find out.
KH – Yeah, I spoke to her about that
actually and she said Revelator sounded like she discovered where she
came from over a period of time through her music. She sings “one
little rag that ain’t been wrung out completely yet”. Do you ever think
that in an age or remixes and references and retro remakes, if you’ll
excuse the alliteration, that we do run out of songs that sound new? I
expect you to say no, because you’re not going to get anybody to sign up
if there aren’t any songs to write.
PP – Well, you know, even if every
song has been written, every song hasn’t been written by me and in the
journey of writing a song, one discovers things on a deeper level no
matter whether that idea has been written a thousand times before, and
so songwriting is certainly a process of self discovery. In terms of it
being something that’s never been done before, I really loved Bob Dylan
in his No Direction Home Scorcese DVD saying that “yes there I was in
the sixties doing something that nobody had ever done before” and then
he pauses and says “I think I was wrong about that.”
KH – He has been performing and will
be performing again in New Zealand quite soon. He did a great show in
Wellington and he did Blowing in the Wind, but not the Blowing in the
Wind that everybody recalls, from the old acoustic guitar protest song,
but a kind of a swept up quite slick Blowing in the Wind that detached
itself from its folk roots and I’m wondering whether, I suppose that’s
what you can do when you are Bob Dylan. You can remake songs and make
them sound new, relying on people’s knowledge of the old one at the same
time.
PP – Right. Anything that gets Bob
Dylan out on the road is fine with me.
KH – He doesn’t seem to have any
trouble getting out on the road.
PP – Well I appreciate that he’s still
out there.
KH – He’s extraordinary. If he did
your course, would you say, gosh this is an idiosyncratic eye, I’m going
to have to leave him to his own devices?
PP – Certainly it would be really
challenging because after all, Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan.
KH – What if he wasn’t Bob Dylan, what
if he was Robert Zimmerman and had signed up?
PP – And was still writing these
songs?
KH – Yeah
PP - I would do what I do with all of
the students. He would be there of course for a reason, because he
wanted to get better and it would be my job to find ways to direct him,
to make him better. I hand out tools and the tools that are applicable
for someone who is just starting to write songs are still the same tools
that someone whose been writing songs for years uses, and if I can show
them an interesting way to use a tool or more accurately to actually
articulate what the tools are that they have been using subconsciously
or instinctively, just making it an articulatable tool makes it more
useful.
KH – You teach that there are seven
senses, am I right?
PP – Yeah, there’s the usual five,
but then we can talk about “when I saw you, my breath started coming
faster, my heart pounded, everything was tense” and that’s a sense of
the body and I call it the organic sense – for example, a sense of heart
rate. Tom Waits writes “Hell Marysville ain’t nothing but a wide spot
in the road/Some nights my heart pounds like thunder/Don’t know why it
don’t explode.” And that’s the use of the organic sense. Then there’s
the sense of motion or the kinaesthetic sense for which there are
billion dollar industries called amusement parks that are only there for
stimulating your kinaesthetic sense. Tilting on a roller coaster,
rolling down a hill hen you are a kid to make yourself dizzy, so those
are the other two that I add.
KH – And you can enhance that by use
of the lyrics plus melody?
PP – Sure. The point of using your
sense in the first place is to stimulate your listener, to make them
involved in the song. There’s a difference between saying “Something’s
changed between us’ which is sort of telling and abstract and saying
“You never close your eyes anymore when you kiss my lips.” One tells
and the other one shows, and when you can stimulate your listeners
senses, then they put their stuff into your words and so the song
becomes theirs.
KH – Is there any danger of people
writing to format in order to make money?
PP – I don’t know if it’s a danger,
but it certainly happens all the time.
KH – Presumably it’s a perfectly valid
way to make a living.
PP – Absolutely, but I discourage
formula writing because if you start writing by formula, then you become
less involved yourself in the writing and just on a very personal
level, there is less growth. I tell my students that if they spend the
next twenty years writing songs and try to write for radio and don’t
succeed in getting something on the radio, then they are a failure. If
they write for twenty years and write things that increase their ability
to perceive and make them know themselves better out of a deep level
like John Mayer does in the song “Belief”, then if you don’t get
anything recorded, you’re not a failure because you have grown as a
person. I also think that the only chance that you have of succeeding is
to add that special thing which is who you are to the music and the
more you write to formula, the less involved you are, the less you bring
to the table.
KH – Most people who do your course
will go on to record their own songs do they, or do they write for other
people?
PP – Oh, many of them write for other
people.
KH – That must be quite a strange
thing, to give up your baby to someone else.
PP – I have many students out there
who write for other people and who are doing it very successfully and
they don’t think of it as giving up their babies: they think of it as
feeding their babies. I have one student by the name of Greg Becker who
is writing in Nashville and has been incredibly successful recently
writing for Rascal Flatts and Alan Jackson among others, and he said
that he only became successful when he stopped trying to write for the
market and tried to write the best song that he could that said exactly
what he wanted to say. Suddenly everybody discovered him.
KH – Your next song is a Paul Simon,
who wrote both music and lyrics for Still Crazy After All These Years.
Now he is a great songwriter. What’s this one got for you?
PP – I love the way that it develops
from verse to verse, I love the bridge on it.
KH – What is a bridge?
PP – The Bridge is the vacation
section in songs, which makes you, want to come back home and have
bagels again. It’s the section in this song
Four in the morning, crapped out,
yawning Longing my life away I’ll never worry, why should I?
Now at that point we expect a line
here the rhythm goes
da DAH da da DAH da da DAH,
but he just goes
da DAH da da DAH
and we don’t get what we expected. The
section feels unstable and it supports his meaning: whole concept of
the bridge, that of feeling unstable. I think it’s a brilliant piece of
work.
KH – He makes you want to know what
happens in that song doesn’t he?
PP – He does, and it’s a lovely use of
the title. It’s a pretty neutral title in the sense that it doesn’t
answer who is still crazy after all these years or when they are still
crazy. The title attaches itself to the verses, so the first verse is: I
met my old lover from the past, and she and I are still crazy. In the
second verse, “I’m not the kind of man who tends to socialise, I’m still
crazy after all these years,” “I” in the present tense attaches itself
to the neutral title. In the third verse, in future tense, it is both I
and the jury of my peers who are still crazy after all these years. It’s
a really interesting use of tense and point of view colouring a neutral
title and making it refer to different people and times. I talk about
that in Writing Better Lyrics in the chapter “Stripping your repetition
for re-painting.”
KH – And leaving the title open to
interpretation as it were?
PP – Leaving it open to attach to the
verses so you have more ability to develop the verses from the various
points of view and from various tenses.
KH – Irregularity has got a lot going
for it, not so much in that song, but I imagine that the analysis you
did of “Closing Time” by Leonard Cohen with particular interest. I have a
particular interest in Leonard Cohen, and it’s a genius song, but as
you point out, he doesn’t give you the expected bit and you keep on
expecting and expecting that it’s Closing Time. That’s quite daring
isn’t it?
PP – It is, but Paul Simon does it in
the bridge of “Still Crazy” too, where he shortens the last line. The
music is very adventurous in that song. He was studying harmony in New
York at the time and I don’t know whether this story is apocryphal or
not, but apparently he and Bob Dylan met I the Village and Bob said,
“Hey Paul, do you know any new chords?” and Paul said “Nope”.
KH – Bob was trying to steal his
chords? Shocking!
PP – He was looking for some new
information.
KH – You’ve got an ongoing
relationship with Nashville, you’ve mentioned it a couple of times. Did
you play with your band there? What happened?
PP – I’ve been going to Nashville for
twenty-five years.
KH – Just out of professional
interest?
PP – I write there with folks, but for
the last twenty years, I’ve been taking my students down there over
Spring Break. I take about 150 students down there every year and set
up five days of non stop clinics and presentation and performances, for
them to observe, and it’s really quite an educational experience and
through that I’ve met many different people. The town really is very
generous and turns out in droves; the best producers, the best writers,
the best artists all come and talk to the Berklee kids.
KH – So there’s some kind of critical
mass that took place in Nashville whereupon it took off? I mean, why
Nashville?
PP – Well, for me it was pretty
simple. Nashville is a microcosm of the music industry.
KH – Yeah, but how did that happen?
PP – Well, actually I first went down
to Nashville because the Vice President of SESAC strongarmed me into
playing some of my songs for him and said, “I want you to come down
here, I’m going to set you up with some of our writers.” So I went to
Nashville for the first time having a bunch of writing appointments with
professional writers and loved it, so I started going down on Spring
Break and in the summers to write. One of my students said, “I know you
go down to Nashville to write, tell me where to go cause I want to
visit.” So I said “Come on down for Spring Break with me, I’ll be down
there and I’ll show you round.” He brought five of his friends and so
that was the first Nashville Trip. We kept going from there on.
Nashville was the place that I went on writing junkets myself, for a
while, and still do.
KH – Is there a sound that comes out
of Nashville that is still distinctively Nashville?
PP – Boy, less and less. It’s a
pretty wide variety of stuff that gets recorded there, although it’s one
of the few places where people still play together. Watching a
Nashville recording session, where everybody is in the studio at the
same time, you know, the vocalist is in their booth – they’ll overdub
the real vocal later, but for the most part, you get these great players
in there and they are all sitting in the same room playing. You don’t
get that any place else. The Nashville players are the best players in
the world and they know how to listen. It’s amazing.
KH – You obviously favour, and I
right, country or folk type ballads? Do rappers ever take your course?
PP – Oh they do, and actually I have a
section in my Advanced Lyric Writing class where I force them to write
rap music and very few of them have ever written rap music, but it takes
their writing to a whole new level. I love it. I’ve been listening to
rap ever since Run DMC came out.
KH – And is there any music that you
don’t like?
PP – I don’t think so.
KH – I was reading Jimmy Webb’s
Tunesmith and he was saying that he would force himself to listen to
music that he doesn’t like because it’s like a vitamin tablet and it
mightn’t taste nice, but you’ve got to do it in order to keep your brain
open.
PP – Or you can just have the attitude
that there’s something worthy in everything from rap to opera and
certainly you look at the various genres in terms of what they are
attempting to do and what they have to offer and if you are looking for
example at opera, there’s a place where melody is everything and the
relationship between words and melody is everything, and so if you go
into the opera experience thinking “Oh I hate people screaming”, you’re
going to miss the point. So you’ve just got to find whatever it has to
offer and then you extract tools. I listen to music certainly for
enjoyment and there’s always a part of me that’s thinking, “OK what did
you do? How did you do that? Can I do that? OK this is how it works.
And then I take it to my students.”
KH – This hasn’t destroyed your
appreciation or your enjoyment of music, you know, being aware of the
machinery of it all?
PP – It certainly has opened some of
the music too wide to be appreciated, but it deepens the appreciation
when somebody does it really well, for example, the John Mayer thing
with “Belief.” I’ve listened to that song maybe a hundred times at this
point and I still appreciate it. The playing, the writing is wonderful
and the tools that he is using, tools that we talked about in my course
are just stunningly used, as is stuff with Gillian.
KH – Your final track is “Child
Again”, Beth Nielsen Chapman, again Nashville. I don’t know much about
her.
PP – She came in as a Nashville
writer, but was writing very interesting songs and became a recording
artist. She now has several albums out and has appeared on Oprah, has
appeared with Elton John, she’s written number one songs for Willie
Nelson and other folks, but this is her singing a song that she wrote
and this is one of the songs that got her a record deal.
KH – And this song in particular?
PP – This song is a really nice
example and I use it in class for two things. Number one, how the ideas
develop from section to section and secondly, the relationship between
the chorus and the verse. The verses are quite stable in their
formation and she’s talking about very stable ideas. When she gets to
the chorus and talks about running in the summer wind, everything there
is very dreamy and airy with an odd number of lines, longer lines and
shorter lines and an odd number of bars, and it gives it a sense of
freedom and it’s one of the things, actually if there is anything that I
talk about, passionately, it’s the relationship between words and music
and how everything you do supports emotion. Think about reducing all
emotions to just two categories: stable and unstable, just those two. If
your intent is to create something that feels like it’s dreamy and
floaty or confused, “Ever since you left me baby” or something like
that, then you can try to structure your song to reinforce that
instability.
KH – Which is quite risky isn’t it?
PP – Oh yeah, but quite effective.
KH – This is not a trick question, and
do people ever say this to you, as I am about to, if you’re such a good
songwriter, how come you’re not rich with a swimming pool? You maybe
for all I know.
PP – It was an interesting thing for
me, when I was about thirty-five, trying to figure out what I wanted to
be when I grew up, I realised that if I never wrote another song, I’d be
OK, but if I never taught again, I wouldn’t be, and so the scales fell
from my eyes at that point, and I realised that I was a teacher who
writes and not a writer who teaches, and so that channelled my energy
appropriately. When I do write, and I do write quite a bit, I keep my
eyes open for tools for my students more than anything else.
KH – Is that a long way of telling me
you’ve never had a huge hit?
PP – I’ve never had a huge hit, but
then, my students have lots of Grammys. I’m proud of that.
KH – It was very nice to talk to you,
thank you, Pat Pattison
