Welcome to The Songwriters’ Lab

This is a songwriting resource for songwriters of every ilk, genre, style, shoe size and ability! This is a place to come for inspiration, to stimulate your creativity in songwriting. A place where you can feel comfortable to share ideas and knowledge so we can all learn from each other, experiment with techniques and methods to become better songwriters!

So bring your tunes, grab a test tube full of words, some chemicals brother(!), and a Bunsen burner and start cooking! Protective clothing prohibited!

If you’d like to know more about me, visit me on www.myspace.com/geoffreywilliams

Follow my internal exploits as FishtailParker on Twitter

Modulation in moderation!

Today’s class reminded me of how good a modulation for the chorus can be. There’s the one’s that aren’t strictly a modulation but feel like one:

Fool on the Hill – The Beatles (major in the verse moving to minor in the chorus)

Then there’s the one that moves from Amin in the verse to Fmaj7 in the chorus:

It’s Too Late – Carole King

and finally, Life on Mars – David Bowie

Leave few fingerprints!

Today’s session reminded me that the veil between ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ is waffer thin (as Monty Python would say!) & when sharing songwriting ideas, both spheres are straddled.

The ‘students’ helped clarify intuition is the most important aspect of creating – trust in your own process and what comes, whatever comes. And then working with what comes leaving few fingerprints!

My favourite song today was this…

Share your work

I set my VCA ‘students’ a lyric writing task for workshopping this week but many of them found it hard to come up with lyrics at all and those who did were reluctant to share them. I discussed it with them and then put myself in the hot seat and read the lyrics I’d come up with that week.

Boy, it was properly hard man! I found it really difficult to actually share something that wasn’t fully realised yet. And the longer I waited, the harder it became! But it made me realise that the power in sharing was that I got to see first hand how I felt about the words, where the weaknesses were, the strengths without them uttering a word of feedback.

BTW, I generated those lyrics using the Random Paragraph Generator. Highly recommend it!

40 years of fantastic footwork!

I spent most of my life with Michael Jackson’s distinctive & penetrating voice as an important part of the soundtrack. To me, he was where Elvis Presley meets James Brown. I have danced myself into a frenzy, spinning like a Whirling Dervish to tunes like Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough, Rock With You and Billie Jean. I have tried to imitate his moves, his vocal style, his songs in my writing. I stayed up late to watch the video extravaganzas of Thriller, Beat It, etc.

I was even lucky enough to co-write a song (with Gil Cang) that he recorded on his album Invincible called Whatever Happens. It even had Carlos Santana playing guitar on it! My contact with Michael Jackson has been nothing but inspiring.

I cannot comment on the allegations as I don’t know the facts, but it must be hard to live your life under the scrutiny of the world microscope, waiting for you to put a foot wrong. Not that that excuses dangling a baby over a balcony.

I’ll remember Michael for the songs and the music that moved me, his distinctive voice that could lift the heaviest moods and his footwork that defied logic.

Looking Through The Windows,

Rock With You (not the best quality but the vibe is unmistakeable!),

and of course, Michael doing the Moonwalk for the first time on Motown 25th Anniversary, shocking at the time!

Thank you so much Michael. X

Wye writing, why not!

Spending time at Wye River on the Great Ocean Road was great. Not only did we eat, drink and be merry, but we (Fishtail Parker GB and friends) also came up with some great ideas.

I’m still buzzing on the blues song that we wrote together. I’ve never written a blues before and it was really exciting! Let me explain…

Fishtail Parker GB (FPGB) is Lime and myself. Our sound is stripped down soul; two voices, two acoustic guitars, percussion and a Jamman. The premise of our project is to enjoy celebrating the artists and the music that inspired us to become musicians. That music spans early 60s to the late 70s and includes Nick Drake, Bill Withers, Sly and the Family Stone, John Martyn, Curtis Mayfield, etc. We perform interpretations of some of these artists songs and original numbers. You can hear one of our tracks at our MySpace page.

Lime’s style is blues, jazz while mine has defied categorization for most of my career! Lol! I now call it soul. Having a clarity of direction makes things much easier in terms of images, style, sound, etc. I knew we had to write some songs but I also knew I wasn’t ready. I had to do some aural research; listening and performing Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and others, letting it all percolate, physically embodying the essence of what I was hearing. This is on-going process but there are so many new ideas on my Dictaphone, I’m running out of cassettes!

It’s interesting to me how you can give yourself a ‘problem’ or an objective, research what it is you want to do (preparation), let your mind handle it patiently (incubation), then the ideas start to form (inspiration). We’ve gone through the lyric writing process chopping and changing so the words convey the feeling we want (evaluation and elaboration). Time and patience are valuable in letting good things grow. The brain always seems to come up with some amalgam that you hadn’t yet come to. I like that!

This weekend, we’re going to record it! It’s hotly anticipated Saturday!!