Members rasputin1963 Posted August 19, 2009 Members Share Posted August 19, 2009 You know, I've watched and re-watched that video Booshy posted here: "Jesus Is My Friend" by Sonseed. I'll be darned if that song is not catchy.... in spite of any other corniness and dated-ness it miught have. Now I can't get it out of my mind. The song couldn't be TOO trivial: it, and all of its parodies and variants, are all over YouTube. I just read an interview with the lead singer, Sal Polichetti. He says the song was written in ten minutes. How many important songs that you're aware of.... were written in a ridiculously short amount of time? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Tealightcandles Posted August 19, 2009 Members Share Posted August 19, 2009 Half the Beatles catalogue? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members boosh Posted August 19, 2009 Members Share Posted August 19, 2009 "Venus" by : "The Shocking Blue" Written bij Robbie van Leeuwen in 10 minutes when he was taking a dump. He's still making a good year's salary from that song every year for the last 35 years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members russrags Posted August 19, 2009 Members Share Posted August 19, 2009 "Venus" by : "The Shocking Blue" Written bij Robbie van Leeuwen in 10 minutes when he was taking a dump. Man Booshy, I just looked at that album yesterday after I took a dump !!!!Are you the FBI ??? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Jeff da Weasel Posted August 19, 2009 Members Share Posted August 19, 2009 Honestly? Other than great symphonic music, I'd say the grand majority of good songs were written very quickly. There's a saying out there about pop/rock music: the more you think, the more you stink. To me, a great song is such a natural process that the song comes out even quicker than you can write it down. It just flows out naturally. Like taking a crap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Jon Doe Posted August 19, 2009 Members Share Posted August 19, 2009 "American Woman" by Guess Who was written live and impromptu. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted August 19, 2009 Members Share Posted August 19, 2009 I believe I heard long ago in a radio interview that Boyce and Heart wrote the great "Last Train to Clarksville" in 15 minutes. Looking it up just now to double check, I note something I never had before -- it was written as a love song from a soldier going off to Vietnam: According to the song's authors, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, the song is their protest of the Vietnam War and tells the story of a young man who has been drafted. He is waiting for the train that will take him to an army base, and he knows he may die in Vietnam. At the end of the song he states, "I don't know if I'm ever coming home."[1]The article goes on to add some intersting -- and possibly conflicting background info:Like many hit Monkees songs of the era ("Cuddly Toy," "Pleasant Valley Sunday"), the song pairs a fast, chipper melody with darker lyrics. Micky Dolenz performs the lead vocals, with Boyce playing acoustic guitar. The song has been compared to The Beatles' "Paperback Writer", both in the style of "jangly" guitar and the chord structure. It also resembles the guitar riff in "Blue's Theme", by Davie Allan and the Arrows, from the Peter Fonda biker movie The Wild Angels. Though the Clarksville in the song's title appears to refer to the city of Clarksville, Tennessee Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members cooterbrown Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 ZZ Top's "Tush" was made up, on the spot, at a gig. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Bookumdano2 Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 "Venus" by : "The Shocking Blue" Written bij Robbie van Leeuwen in 10 minutes when he was taking a dump. Well .... sure ... the key to that is that you sit there in the bathroom, listening to this song from 7 years earlier on the record player in the next room. Voila ! Out of the bathroom and into the next room to rewrite ... er ... write Venus. 5 minutes flat ! No problem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOVv43DJdrQ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Jeff Leites Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 Neil Young wrote "Ohio" within a few hours of seeing the Life magaizne coverage of the incident. (source: http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=crosby-stills-nash-and-young ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members onelife Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 Victor Wooten in his book "The Music Lesson" states that nobody actually creates music. He says the music exists already and it just comes through us. I recorded a dozen or so songs by a singer who says he does not write songs he finds them. It makes sense that when the channel is open the song gets "written" in the time it takes for it to play itself in the "composers" mind A good example of that is McCarney's "Scrambled Eggs" where he rolled out of bed one day, went to the piano and this song came to him. He shopped it around to his friends because he thought he must have heard it somewhere before. He and his cohorts refined it into "Yesterday" the most covered tune in history. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members kurdy Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 Well .... sure ... the key to that is that you sit there in the bathroom, listening to this song from 7 years earlier on the record player in the next room. Voila ! Out of the bathroom and into the next room to rewrite ... er ... write Venus. 5 minutes flat ! No problem.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOVv43DJdrQ Very good point. And that's the danger of writing a song too quickly--you never know where your brain may have lifted it from. There are only 12 notes, so you gotta be careful. Look what happened to George Harrison with "My Sweet Lord". And that's why I can never write a song too quickly--I just don't trust my brain to be that brilliant. It usually takes a good deal of woodshedding to get it to the point where I'm satisfied that it's "my" song. It has to sound natural and familiar enough, without being a copy of something. That's a delicate balance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members nuclear arsenal Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 dylan wrote a couple songs off "blonde on blonde" in the studio, and those are all like 3 hours long with 50,000 words. ray charles' "what i say" was improvised. i once wrote a song and forgot about it, then one day at practice while the drummer was taking a piss, i rewrote it with a different story but the same hook. it's my most popular song. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Jotown Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 Some songs will come to you all at once in a few minutes, and you will labor over others for weeks. This is what the craft of songwriting is all about. You collect fragments and ideas all of the time and you always work at it. I saw an interview with Joni Mitchell once and she had a couple of yellow legal pads per song on one of her albums. If you study the great songwriters they all say pretty much the same thing about this. I happen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members dantedayjob Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 Paranoid... Black Sabbath was told they were short of material for the album (which was supposed to be titled War Pigs), Geezer wrote the song on the spot and Ozzy was reading the lyrics as he recorded it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members DevilRaysFan Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 "Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones was written in a hotel room, here in Sunny Florida. Supposedly, Keith wrote the hooks while sleeping. Although the wiki doesnt say it, the song was supposedly completed in two days, but actually taking up about 15 minutes - or less - worth of time Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members boosh Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 Well .... sure ... the key to that is that you sit there in the bathroom, listening to this song from 7 years earlier on the record player in the next room. Voila ! Out of the bathroom and into the next room to rewrite ... er ... write Venus. 5 minutes flat ! No problem.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOVv43DJdrQ And which song is that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Magpel Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 AS A RULE...I do not trust writers' accounts of their own writing process, with special suspicion reserved for those works that were supposed to have been written very quickly. The myth goes back at least as far as the beatnik writers and their very public claims of the "sanctity of the first draft." History has shown them all--even Kerouac with his manuscripts on adding machine rolls--to be assiduous revisers. When Peter Buck said: if a song takes more than 20 minutes to write, it probably wasn't worth writing, I said: Hey, that explains about 2/3rds of REM's catalogue! It's not that the best ideas don't come in short bursts of inspiration--of course they do! It's just that it takes work and time to recognize and remove the extraneous, habitual and conditioned {censored} that invariably comes out attached to the inspired stuff. I am serial inspirationalist--have some good ideas, put them away for a while, return later. If you work a lot, you always have old stuff coming ripe and ready for the second phase. You have your savants. Elton John, who couldn't even be bothered to take some time away from cocaine to write his own lyrics, apparently banged out all of his catchiest tunes in about the time it takes to play them. I am aware of this phenomenon, but it is not consistent with my experience. My most honest, direct and simple stuff in both music and writing is almost invariably the stuff I de-cluttered and clarified through hard work and brutally honest self appraisal, mixed with the pure faith that is the fuel of any creative act. Just my .02 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members WRGKMC Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 It all depends on weather you are playing one or all the instruments. In my original band, we write music on the spot all the time. Lyrics can take longer to refine but the basic idea is there in no time. This is why I always record rehursals. Its not to say you dont have something milling around in your head ahed of time weather it be some chords, a groove, or a melody, or some words or something. If you're doing it all from scratch and playing all the parts, it can come just as quickly, but recording those ideas to know how it all sounds together may take longer because the time ittakes to track all the parts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members coyote-1 Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 I agree with this. I've had a few spates of songwriting, where the stuff just flowed out faster than could write it. And I know it ain't 'mine' because I'm a fan of prog & jazz - yet the best of the lot were all COUNTRY tunes. The same could be said to apply to all structural stuff: It's waiting out there for someone to find it, even if it does not yet exist. The Empire State Building was, decorative detail aside, inevitable. As was the Brooklyn Bridge, and the hydrogen bomb, and the aqueduct, and radio... Victor Wooten in his book "The Music Lesson" states that nobody actually creates music. He says the music exists already and it just comes through us. I recorded a dozen or so songs by a singer who says he does not write songs he finds them.It makes sense that when the channel is open the song gets "written" in the time it takes for it to play itself in the "composers" mindA good example of that is McCarney's "Scrambled Eggs" where he rolled out of bed one day, went to the piano and this song came to him. He shopped it around to his friends because he thought he must have heard it somewhere before. He and his cohorts refined it into "Yesterday" the most covered tune in history. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Bookumdano2 Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 And which song is that? The one there on the YouTube link from 1963-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOVv43DJdrQ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members boosh Posted August 20, 2009 Members Share Posted August 20, 2009 Wow,..cool link! I didn't see the youtubelink man I thought it was your sig-line. Lol,..the S.O.B stole the entire song! I wonder how he heared it btw,.. Did YouTube even exsist in '63? The Big 3 wasn't very original either,.. Tim Rose stole the song from Stephen Foster who already wrote it in 1848. Gheezz,.... mama Cass looks GREAT btw,... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted August 21, 2009 Author Members Share Posted August 21, 2009 Lol,..the S.O.B stole the entire song!,... The two songs share an identical chord progression and considerable melodic similarity! I guess 1970 was a time before lawyers grew too avaricious and hairtrigger-litigious? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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