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Important songs that were written very quickly...


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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?

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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. :lol:

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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,
, the song is their protest of the
and tells the story of a young man who has been
. 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."

The article goes on to add some intersting -- and possibly conflicting background info:

Like many hit Monkees songs of the era ("Cuddly Toy," "
"), the song pairs a fast, chipper melody with darker lyrics.
performs the lead vocals, with Boyce playing acoustic guitar. The song has been compared to
' "
", both in the style of "jangly" guitar and the chord structure. It also resembles the guitar riff in "Blue's Theme", by
and the Arrows, from the
biker movie
.

 

Though the Clarksville in the song's title appears to refer to the city of

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"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

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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.

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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.



 

 

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.

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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.

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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

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"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

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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

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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.

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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" 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.

 

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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,...

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