I regularly attend a local community event for musicians and songwriters. It is held monthly in the cafe of a community arts project building and its focus is to platform grass-root art movements in the area and work on social outreach.
I enjoy this night immensely and often try out my new songs on the uniquely receptive but small audience it draws. I also enjoy hearing the other musicians in my area a lot. Since graduating university, I have missed being surrounded by musicians and creative people on a daily basis. This event allows me to disappear into that world again, if only once a month.
At the last event, the organisers were excited that they had a local artist coming in to headline. He had started making a name for himself in the local folk music scene and was promoting his album. I admit it, I too was excited to hear him perform and avoided listening to his stuff on Spotify beforehand (So it was fresh when I heard it, for one; but also because I object to Spotfy on ethical grounds as I explain here).
I listened to the first few artists perform, enjoying myself along the way, then I went up and performed 3 or 4 ‘works in progress’. One hit a nerve with a few and I got plenty of compliments on it. The rest bombed hard, but that is fine. Like a stand-up comedian trying out jokes in the clubs to finely tune his set, you got to try new material out on an audience to see what works.
After a few more artists performed, our main event took to the stage. He was a young man in his early twenties who performed three original songs. He had two guitars as one song was in a unique tuning, which is not uncommon for folk singers of this ilk. He was a kind of ‘Ben Howard’ type.
Now before I go on, I want to make something clear. This man was an excellent musician, songwriter and performer. Technically masterful guitar player. Expert finger-style form. Beautiful and soulful singing voice, (a little too ‘whispered’ for my taste. I struggle with whispers and sibilance). He wrote with boundless creativity and innovation, using a partial capo technique for one song and forming chords from above and below the capo on the open strings. This sounds like gobbledygook to non-guitarists out there but trust me, very few people do this because it is a confusing and tricky skill.
His songs were beautiful and excellently performed. It was truly a pleasure to sit and listen to him. But… the problem was he was so BORING!
His songs were technically excellent and well crafted, both musically and lyrically, but they were instantly forgettable. I notice this stuff a lot and always have. It preys on my mind when I am writing and I throw most stuff away before I finish it because I tell myself ‘If you can’t remember it the next day then it is no good’.
I have to be able to recall the top line melody the next day or even after a few days without listening to voice notes and recordings of demo ideas. That’s a heuristic I use in my songwriting. If I forgot it, it wasn’t memorable enough to merit finishing.
It’s not a hard and fast rule that must dogmatically be adhered to though and I have made exceptions to it on occasion. Sometimes I like an idea on a philosophical level and finish a song that I feel has a message worthy of the time and effort needed , like I did with this song I recently released on SubStack, ‘Of Lovers & Fools’. But this song does not meet the ‘sticky enough’ criteria I normally enforce.
The problem I think is melody. Specifically, melody writing. There are so many excellent musicians out there who make technically wonderful music, but which is instantly forgettable. Some bands make music which is incredibly complex, technically expert and objectively impressive, but have very meagre followings and niche audiences, which is of course fine. The problem is that they can be quite elitist about their taste in music and dismissive of ‘popular artists’.
Many of these types bemoan artists like Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift or (when I was growing up and still to this day) Oasis for writing ‘easy’ songs. They often look down on these acts with elitist disdain and superiority from an ideological ivory tower. Like these ‘Popular’ artists have lowered themselves to take the low hanging fruit of writing catchy songs that wide audiences enjoy. I see it all the time and have all my life.
It reminds me of the elitists who bemoan and sneer at what they call ‘Populist’ politicians. It reads to me like an educated elite’s narcissistic dismissal of the working class as illiterate, uneducated savages who they feel are beneath them. Peasants. The great unwashed.
‘Let them eat ‘Shake It Off’! And let them have their ‘Wonderwalls’ and their ‘Shape Of You’s’. Lowlifes! What kind of animal likes ‘Popular things?’
But the thing I notice about many technically excellent bands is no matter how impressed I am at their music whilst listening to it, I forget it immediately after it has finished. After a minute or two, as soon as I used my brain to do something else, I couldn’t hum or whistle a single bit of it. I can’t remember any words in the stuff that had lyrics, how it made me feel or pick out anything else that was stuck in my head. I only remember that I had listened to it. But nothing specific.
The kind of bands I’m talking about are the ones that many established musicians’ adore with an almost religious fealty. I’m talking Dream Theater, Tool and (ooh I’m gonna get SO MUCH hate for saying this)... Snarky Puppy.
Full disclosure, I have total aphantasia, which essentially means I can’t imagine sensory imagery in my Mind’s Eye. This includes audio imagery and therefore means I can’t ‘hear’ music in my head at all, (a process called Audiation). I write more about Aphantasia here in my dissertation, which covers how it affects musicianship. It also effects how I read fiction profoundly, as I explain here.
So I cannot ‘save’ melodies or any other musical elements in my head to replay them at a later date. This means I find it difficult to learn new songs and it takes me ages to internalise a new piece. I basically have to commit the playing of it to muscle memory then I remember how it goes after I start playing it. It slow going.
It also means that if I am going to remember a piece after one listen, it has to be really memorable. This normally means there needs to be an incredibly catchy lyric attached to the melody for me to map it into my psyche. Songs like ‘Havana’ by Camila Cabello, Passenger ‘Let Her Go’ and ‘Heathens’ by Twenty One Pilots are good examples of this happening in recent years.
The words normally have to inform the melody for me. But not always. I could instantly recreate the melody from the Ennio Morricone piece The Mission (‘Gabriel’s Oboe’) instantly after hearing it once and I never forgot it. (Treat yourself and listen to this).
It was the same story with ‘For The Damaged Coda’ by Blonde Redhead which has no lyrics and ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ by Édith Piaf which is in a language I don’t speak or understand. Same with Jesse Y Joy ‘Corre’ and Vasquez Sounds ‘En Mi, No En Ti’, which are both in Spanish.
I think what is happening here is a case of innate talent that very few musicians actually possess, the aforementioned melody writing. They seem to be able to create melodic lines that stick in the minds of a large portion of listeners and capture them. They, strike a chord, so to speak. (Sorry for the cheesy pun, I am a Dad after all).
I have always taken the maxim ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ as a rule of my songwriting. I use songs like ‘Stand By Me’ by Ben E King and ‘Three Little Birds’ by Bob Marley as my justification for this loosely held rule. ‘Three Little Birds’ is the gold standard of simple songs; Only three chords and the most obvious ones to boot (The I, IV and V chords in A Major to be precise), repeated verse and chorus sections and a nursery rhyme-like top line melody that anyone can sing along to. I can’t tell you how many times I have had a roomful of people singing this song along with me. Epic feeling, by the way.
Two time Bafta winning American composer Austin Wintory talks to a lot of other composers on his podcasts. I often hear him describe people like John Williams and Bear McCreary as ‘Melody Guys’.
I stole this term to describe the phenomena I am addressing. John Williams has a seemingly innate ability to write a melody that you can whistle as you leave the theatre. Jaws, ET, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter and about 14 different themes from Star Wars alone. There are many film composers who create wonderfully beautiful scores for the movies and I can never remember any of them after the curtain closes.
Hans Zimmer annoys me endlessly because he has the melody writing ‘gene’ but chooses not to use it. His Gladiator theme is one of the most stunning melodies I have ever heard and has been seared into my mind since I saw the film 24 years ago. ‘Time’, from Inception is chord based but the piece is still epic and memorable. Even the WonderWoman theme grabs your attention and sticks in the mind, and it's just an arpeggiated E minor chord with a flat fifth added and a weird rhythmic structure. Simple, but effective.
But often Zimmer will score a movie with synth pads and ambient music. It is beautiful and manages to emotionally underscore the movies well without being distracting, which is ultimately the goal. It’s the kind of stuff I listen to when I read and write for the exact same reason. But I would never be compelled to watch Hans Zimmer’s music performed by an orchestra like I would John Williams, with my full attention. Zimmer makes background music, Williams is an entertainer.
And that's what I think when I listen to most folk singer/songwriters, which is the genre I most closely align with and associate myself. They play pretty songs that are technically excellent, but ultimately bland, boring and forgettable. But I’m not saying I am any better, I know I’m not.
I have always had the suspicion that I am one of the many who lacks the ‘catchy hook’ writer gene that so many legendary songwriters seem to have. Freddie Mercury, Lennon & MacCartney, Noel Gallagher, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, Dolly Parton, etc, etc. I could go on and on.
I want to write songs like these guys, but I suspect I never will. I can only try to hone my process in that direction. That’s why I have such a strict ‘must be memorable to me’ policy when writing. My mind is deaf due to aphantasia, so if I can remember a melody I write after only one play through a few days later, then there is a good chance those who can actually get songs literally stuck ‘playing in their minds’ will too. At least I hope.
If not, at least I can enjoy the music written by the real ‘Melody Guys’.
Thanks for reading
The Common Centrist.
Totally agree. I believe the song is King / Queen, and I like songs with really strong melodies. I feel like catchy melodies are usually a bit “sing songy”. They usually have some bigger intervals in them - not just going up and down the scale. I agree there is so much talent out there, but most don’t have great songs. Pretty much seems like that’s always what’s missing