Thoughts from this year’s SWF2010 Songwriting demo panel, with our very special guest Eddi Reader.

SWF tutor Boo Hewerdine shares some of his thoughts on songwriting processes, and provides a few of his personal Dos and Don’ts. Interview by Rachel from the MA Songwriting group.

Eddi joined our songwriters’ panel, listened to new work written during the week, and performed a special one-off show for us here in Bath. Here’s her recent single ‘Dragonflies’.

Chris will be joining us and contributing to our demo panel and workshops in the daytime, and performing an SWF gig here in Bath – free to all Festival visitors. His current album ‘The Last Temptation of Chris’ was produced by Boo Hewerdine, who will be joining the SWF tutor team all week.

Biography

Double Ivor Novello Award-winning Chris Difford has been writing lyrics for over twenty five years, most notably with Squeeze. After 13 albums and many top 20 hits, 32 American tours, 30 UK tours and various trips around the globe, Chris decided to stop the merry-go-round and test the waters. His first solo album, I Didnít Get Where I AmÖwas released in 2001; a live release, South East Side Story, soon followed before reconvening with songwriting partner Glenn Tilbrook in a Squeeze line-up also featuring early bassist John Bentley for their first UK tour in nine years (ìitís hard to remember when Squeeze were ever quite as good as this first time around,î enthused US trade bible Billboard).
Diffordís second solo album on Stiff records came out earlier this year, co produced and written by Boo Hewerdine: The Last Temptation Of Chris received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and further secured Chrisís position as one of the greatest lyricists of our time. Songs like ìTemptedî, ìUp the Junctionî, ìCool for Catsî and ìBlack Coffee in Bedî still find steady airplay on UK and US radio. Squeeze released The Big Squeeze, a compilation of singles and B sides that went straight into the UK Top 10 album chart , proving the timeless appeal of their music. A live album from their 2007 tour soon followed.

Chris has written with Elton John, Trilok Gurtu, Marti Pellow, Lamont Dozier, Willie Mitchell, Bryan Ferry and many others. He continues to run his own songwriting workshops and pass on the benefit of his weighty experience as a died-in-the-wool song man. Hurst House in Wales is the new venue for his songwriters week, and this year 19 writers came together to create 35 new songs. This is a passion he has been working on for 16 years. Helioscentric, a studio he built in 1995 still runs today; it has attracted such names as The Pet Shop Boys, Paul Weller, Keane, Scouting for Girls, Elvis Costello and many others.
Five years ago Chris scripted the lyrics for the film Still Crazy, this won him his first Ivor Novello Award, a proud moment for the mantelpiece. The film documented the insane life of a rock band in the 70s, something he knew a little about! His second Ivor was presented by Mark Ronson, a life long fan – Chris and Glenn accepted their Lifetime Achievement in June this year. A Nordoff Robins Silver Clef Icon award soon followed , presented by Lily Allen, also a huge fan ñ who compared herself presenting an award to them with an Eastenderís actor presenting an award to Robert DeNiro.

In 1984, Chris, with Glenn Tilbrook, wrote a musical called ëLabelled with Loveí; it ran for three months in London and this remains one of his fondest memories of working with Glenn. Squeeze are resting before summer dates in 2009 and a new album early 2010. In the meantime Chris is working as Creative Director to Hurst House in Wales, a hotel with a rich musical menu, including a live TV show and studio in progress! He is also writing new songs for his next album while teaching songwriting at BIMM in Brighton. A busy creative time. The tour in ë09 will showcase new songs and will be performed alongside a projector and screen, from which will be shown images relating to the songs of the set.

Chris Difford biography on wikipedia

Official website

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To summarise the story for those who don’t, Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida’ bore melodic and harmonic similarities to an instrumental composition called If I Could Fly by Joe Satriani.

Musically, here’s a summary of the context of the case.

Coldplay’s song uses a 4-chord loop that goes

||: Db †| Eb † | Ab † | Fm † |

(IV – V – I – vi in the key of Ab major)

And the ‘Rule the World’ melody line starts on a C natural – the major third of the home key, creating an interesting major-7th sound to the first chord.

Satriani’s piece (the relevant passage can be heard here and starts at 0:50) uses a not dissimilar harmonic loop, and a melody that also starts on that major third (creating an interesting E minor 9th chord):

||: Em † †| A † † | Dmaj7 †| Bm † |

(ii – V – I – vi in the key of D major)

Put them both in the key of C and simplify the chords to make the maths easier, and you get two similar chord loops

Coldplay – ||: F † | G † †| C † †| Am †:||

Satriani – ||: Dm † | G † | C † †| Am †:||

So what, you say? You can’t copyright a chord loop, especially not one that’s been used thousands of times already? Well, the harmonic context is only part of the story. A very quick listen to the tune, starting on that ‘quirky’ major third note (E natural in this transposed version) reveals a marked similarity – an exact match for the first three notes, rhythmically, contextually and melodically.

Coldplay themselves eventually responded publicly on their website, denying it all as a coincidence. Satriani had apparently planned to serve the papers live during last night’s Grammys, but backed off from this for reasons unclear. Disappointingly, some of the more entertaining mashups that YouTube users created have now been taken down; the best ones used some digital pitch and tempo mapping to make the similarities clear. This one is rather well-done, albeit poor quality technically.

Coincidence or plagiarism? To answer this question we need to know – how likely is it that two songwriters could come up with this exact melodic/harmonic combination? Effectively this is a collision between the infinite monkeys theorem and our own knowledge, as songwriters, of what goes on creatively when one devises melodic material over chord loops (I’m willing to bet that this is how both pieces were written – sounds like loop-based writing to me).

I have my own view, but won’t reveal it just yet – I’m interested to see if there is a weight of opinion from songwriters. Over to you – please comment… now!

Midge is patron of the Burnsong organisation, and will be working as a mentor on the Burnsong project (along with SWF’s own Joe Bennett) in November 2009. You can read more about this (and hear some of the songs) in Joe’s Burnsong 2007 blog.

Burnsong have announced entries for their 2009 songwriting competition, which closes on 21st August (the last day of SWF 2009, coincidentally).

Here’s the UK’s Eurovision entry for 2009, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Diane Warren (lyrics). Any comments on the song and the songwriting technique? And yes, Jade does miss that last note by a good half a semitone, but hey – that’s not the songwriters’ fault.

Every year at the Songwriting Festival, Bath Spa songwriting tutor and ex-Nashville songwriter Andy West writes a complete song in front of the SWF audience, and explains his processes and problem-solving techniques throughout. The lyric, as it evolves, is transcribed and projected at the back of the theatre, and the song is then performed at the end of the hour.

When Andy writes he divides the process into two parts – creative and editorial. For the creative part, he often uses dummy lyrics or even cliches, returning to improve the early draft later when he’s in the editing phase.

The main purpose of the lecture is to break up the songwriting process into a series of clear choices; it also demonstrates one of the SWF core principles – that writer’s block doesn’t exist!