In any art form, the new artist learns by studying the masters. And it's obvious which of these new artists have actually studied the masters and which ones have simply put their hand on a rock and said "I am an artist."(A paraphrase of Mel Brooks in "The 2000 Year-Old-Man" album) But studying other writers can be like going on a snipe hunt if you don't know what you're looking for.
Most writers when they're interviewed cite more than one influence. They may have listened to classical music to study harmonic progression, read 300 years of poetry for the craft of emotional shorthand, and listened to everything from opera to bizarre sounds of traffic to capture that elusive gift called melody. Studying other songwriters will be studying a hybrid, of course, because that songwriter is passing along his influences to you in much the same way that a blue eyed parent passes along a dominant gene of brown eyes. You may be listening to the Beatles for harmony and not know you're getting the Beach Boys, and before them, the Lettermen. Studying Eric Clapton is like getting an intravenous injection of all blues that preceded him. He is a master at digesting the past and then re-creating something eclectic, yet uniquely him.
What I think is interesting though, and something you might want to avoid, is studying someone and getting the wrong lesson from that study. The analogy springs to mind of a story attributed to Marilyn Monroe and Einstein. The former allegedly suggested to the latter that they have children who would have her body and his brains. Einstein reportedly refused on the grounds that they might have his body and her brains. (This story is no doubt apocryphal, because Marilyn Monroe was actually very bright. I can't speak for Einstein's body.) Anyway, to study Harry Chapin for his storytelling would be helpful. To study Lionel Ritchie for his easy melodic sense and to study Tori Amos for the use of lyric visuals would be useful. But to study Harry Chapin for melody, Lionel Ritchie for lyrical depth or Tori Amos for linear logic would be useless if not downright catastrophic. And that's not to the discredit of these writers. Their known strengths simply lie in the other areas.
I continually see songwriters drawing warped conclusions from studying other songwriters. Just because you may not be able to understand the story line in a Bob Dylan, Sting or Tori Amos song does not mean first of all that no one can. And it certainly doesn't mean you should set about writing songs that no one understands. But time after time, I hear writers defend gobbledygook by saying "Well, Sting does it." No, Sting doesn't do it. You may not know the allusions he's using or have read enough to grasp the context, so you may not understand everything he writes. But remember he also wrote "Every Breath You Take." Can you write that? And are you now purposefully choosing a different style as he is? Or are you clinging to an example of something you don't understand in order to defend your own inability to communicate clearly? He is writing in a chosen style, not out of his limitations. And the way Picasso got there, and James Joyce, and all the other greats who have moved into a less representational style, is through representationalism. Picasso could paint your picture to look like a photograph. Can you write a song that everyone understands and which knocks people out consistently? Only then should you allow yourself to move into deeper waters.
The confusion between being profound and simply being obscure is rampant among beginning songwriters. After all, songwriting is a language we learn. If we've spoken it long enough, we become fluent. Then you can speak of deeper subjects in an impressionistic way. But if your vocabulary in this new language consists of "See Jane run," and "The book is on the table," it may not be a good idea to discuss the meaning of life yet. And this goes for melody as well as lyric. If you don't speak the language of melody and harmony fluently, why would you want to burden yourself with melodic, harmonic or rhythmic goals way beyond your ability to hear or feel? For instance, a writer who can't pick out a classic folk or country melody, will sometimes still try to write something extremely challenging simply because he always liked Steely Dan. If you want to build a muscle, you do a few more lifts each session, then you add more weights. You don't start by giving yourself a hernia.
So listening is extremely important. But equally important is listening in the right place for the right thing. And, as my friend in Texas used to say, "You can't get all your raccoons up the same tree." You might want to study a lot of different sources, much the way you took different classes in school. Your Math professor didn't teach you English, but you learned from each of them. Luckily, we have a vast and varied sea of music behind us, all of which can teach us something. And for those of us who live in a city where we spend a chunk of the day driving, we're lucky enough to be able to spend that time learning, also. Just think, if you were learning to be a better accountant, all that drive time would be wasted.
© 1994 Harriet Schock
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