Songwriting and Shamaning

Songwriting is a vocation. It is no different than learning how to fix a car or cook a plate of eggs. There is no magical mystical skill that musicians have that everybody else lacks, and any asshole who claims that writing a song is anything more than that is a super-big asshole. Writing music consists of sitting around with a pencil and paper, or your instrument, and maybe a partner, and trying to find new sounds, ideas, and clever-sounding phrases. Even for people who have been doing it for years, even for people steeped in music theory or classical training, there's still a lot of trial and error, and it still takes time and effort. When somebody tells you they wrote such-and-such a song "in five minutes while I was sitting on the toilet after my tonsillectomy" is both lying and a liar, and possibly trying to get into your pants. Even if you get the principle lyrics written out in a short amount of time, the song isn't finished until it is FINISHED and ready to perform. You wouldn't say a painter painted a painting in five minutes, the time it took them to sketch out a thumbnail, so why say that about music?

Here's a great example of a musician being an asshole like this. It's my arch-nemesis, Jason Mraz (see my last article about this monster 'tard). At about 50 seconds in, he answers a question about women he was inspired by in writing his hit song “I'm Yours”. Here's his answer, verbatim:

There are several. Several many beautiful females. And one we'll start with just our big mother that we're sitting on right now, female Earth. You know? And through that, you know, sprouts many beautiful feminine species...It's not that I saw inspiration, it's just that I think I was inspired through life experience, through life, through waking up to life's infinite opportunities.

Now, here is the opening verse to the song they're talking about:

Well you done done me and you bet I felt it
I tried to be chill but you're so hot that I melted
I fell right through the cracks, now I'm trying to get back

It's pretty catchy when he sings it. The guy definitely knows what he's doing. But Jason, that's all it fucking is – a catchy sugarpop verse. It has about as much meaning as an unopened bottle of hotel shampoo: you use it once to get the come out of your eyebrows and then you throw it the fuck away. You answered a simple question from a 15-year-old interviewer like you just wrote the goddamn Bible.

(Also, is anybody else's gaydar going haywire watching him speak? Could there be an obvious reason his marriage fell apart so quickly? He claims to have a “bisexually open mind” but has never had sex with a man. Hmmmm...)

On the other end of the spectrum from Jason Mraz, there's Ray LaMontagne, a singer-songwriter I can definitely say is not full of shit. He had a full-page spread in Rolling Stone this month to spotlight a review of his third album, Gossip in the Grain. In it, Ray sits in what appears to be a barn at a simple wooden table with a typewriter. A motorcycle sits behind him. It actually would not surprise me if Ray LaMontagne actually writes his music in a barn with a typewriter and a motorcycle. But the image created by this photograph bastardizes and distracts from Ray LaMontagne's process, and in fact I'm surprised he agreed to it. Ray writes music the same way everyone else does, through hours of conscious effort. He doesn't write in a barn because he needs to draw some kind of divine, soulful farmer inspiration that the rest of us can never touch. My guess is he does it because it's the quietest place on his property, away from his kids.

But musicians, and more importantly the industry that makes money off musicians, need that mystical image of the inspired artist. The people who listen to the music, and go to the shows, and read the articles, and watch the interviews, see musicians as some kind of OTHER, not as human beings but as shamans. Never mind the reality of how music is created: through hours of work spent writing, rewriting, and practicing.

That's it. That's all it is and all it will ever be.