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    33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters: A Musycks Guide
    33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters: A Musycks Guide
    33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters: A Musycks Guide
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters: A Musycks Guide

    By Michael J. Roberts

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    About this ebook

    Great songs don't just happen, many ingredients go into their writing and composition and to understand the song you have to understand the inputs. To some people songwriting is one of the mystical 'dark arts', to others it's a simple mathematical puzzle and, as ever, the truth is somewhere in the middle. In the Great Songs series we will show you how and why great songs are created, we'll increase your understanding, appreciation and enhance your listening experience by unpacking the ingredients in an informative and entertaining way.

    The series is structured in such a way that fledgling or aspiring songwriters will benefit from the insights via the technical analysis we present, but the casual music lover will also find much to learn and enjoy. To those already on that musical journey this series will help with the road map, to others it could be the key to the first steps. It's possible that the format will reveal to many non-musicians just how achievable becoming a musician is, as someone wise once said, "All you need is three chords and the truth".
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateApr 2, 2014
    ISBN9781483524986
    33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters: A Musycks Guide

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      Book preview

      33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters - Michael J. Roberts

      Resources

      33 Great Songs

      33 Great Songwriters

      A Musycks Guide

      Michael J Roberts

      © 2014

      Author's Note

      Dear Reader,

      What you'll find within these pages, and in the Great Songwriters series of books as they unfold, is detailed information on great songs from the modern era and stories and context about those songs and their writers. The structure is such that aspiring song writers should find good information to augment their craft and the casual music lover should find enough content to deepen their appreciation of the songs involved.

      Any list-based model stands or falls on the selection criteria. Any reading of those lists will be problematic if those criteria remain a mystery. The bias involved in the Great Songs series is towards songs that deepen the human experience and writing that sheds light on the human condition. Music moves us in ways that are sometimes mysterious, even mystical, but that doesn't mean we can't examine the component pieces or try to gain insight into the process.

      Musycks digs deep into the musical soil to extract glittering gems that are not apparent close to the surface. Musycks roams wide, across nearly six decades of modern song writing, uncovering hidden gold and sometimes just reminding us of the quality to be found that's hiding in plain sight. We will submit songs for your listening pleasure of which many will be familiar, many will not, all will be worthwhile. Please track them down and give them a spin.

      The language of music we've codified as humans gives us a special gift with which to comfort, soothe, entertain and beguile, it's one of the great pleasures in life. Ultimately, of course, we should simply relax and enjoy the fruits of this remarkable language, one that lifts our spirits and gladdens our hearts.

      Happy listening

      Musycks

      Michael J Roberts

      Introduction

      We like lists because we don't want to die.

      - Umberto Eco

      What's with all the lists I hear you ask? The modern world is awash with them, Bucket Lists,  Movies to See Before You Die, Albums To Hear Before You Die, Top Ten of this, Top Ten of That, websites devoted to only..... lists!

      Lists are many things, informative, insipid, imaginative, illogical, inspiring, irritating, indispensable, ridiculous, fantastic and pointless. I could go on; I should make a list...

      Something's going on.

      Actually what's going on is a reflection of one thing, information overload. In an age where an achievable ambition is to have all the knowledge humankind has ever possessed, gathered on one website that is free to everyone, we can see that something has fundamentally changed. In a mass media age of instant communication it's also clear that people need good maps to negotiate their way, especially in the area of entertainment where the choices of consumption have grown exponentially since the digital revolution changed everything.

      The challenge now is to source good, trusted, authoritative information, and that's where Musycks comes in. Musycks is a philosophical way of analysing the mystical and transcendent dimension found in great songwriting, and communicating it with insight and passion.

      Now in equal parts to inform, infuriate and in full admission of the silliness on any definitive list, Musycks brings experience and knowledge to the list party. So with that in mind, if you can't beat them....

      Anchorage

      Written by – Michelle Shocked

      Published by – Polygram Music

      Copyright – 1988

      This is an impossibly gorgeous song, instantly recalling a Dylan classic with its Positively 4th Street sound palette and its masterful level of storytelling. Michelle Shocked (Karen Johnson) was a misfit, activist folk singer 25 years after that sobriquet went out of vogue. Nonetheless a mainstream label came knocking in the late 1980's and she signed up, albeit with creative control. She put into service a picture of her arrest during a protest in San Francisco, using it as the cover of her Short, Sharp, Shocked album and received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album for her troubles (losing to Tracy Chapman).

      Michelle's protesting years included a stoush over corporations that donated money to both sides of politics, an old Howard Hughes trick and in much of her oeuvre you can feel her tacit demand, 'pick a side'. There is however no doubt as to the side she's on, the side of the human beings, as Maude (Ruth Gordon) said in Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude when he asked how come she got on so well with people, They're my species! Michelle is a first class humanist and one of her great reportage pieces is Anchorage, the tale of old friends divided by distance and lifestyle that stay in touch with the infrequent letter, an odd and quaint notion in the age of electronic, instantaneous connection.

      The story starts with a letter from 'Chel' to her friend in Dallas, Texas and she's surprised when the reply comes back from Anchorage in Alaska. The exchange concerns two friends who have taken different paths, "Hey girl I think the last time I saw you was on me and Leroy's wedding day, what was the name of that love song you played"? Chel's married friend sends her a checklist of the banal and domestic, "Leroy got a better job so we moved, Kevin lost a tooth, he's started school. I've got a brand new eight month old baby girl, I sound like a housewife". Chel is in New York City (imagine that) and pursues her music dream, "What's it like to be a skateboard punk rocker"?

      Anchorage also speaks to the existential angst humans can experience when contrasting the vastness of nature to the smallness of Man. It speaks simultaneously to the freedom offered by the ever beckoning horizon and by the 'chains' of the roots we put down as families. This bittersweet duality and the attendant perpetual tension informs the chorus, Hey girl you know it sounds funny but Texas always seemed so big, but you know you're in the largest state of the Union when you're anchored down in Anchorage.

      The music is a simple and mesmerising use of a 4 chord turnaround in G. Michelle employs a 1 to 5 to 4 to 5 (G D/F# C D) pattern that uses a bass third note (F#) on the second chord in the sequence. The middle section introduces a minor second (Am) to break the spell, but the backing is so subtly realised the pattern never outstays its welcome.

      Michelle Shocked produced the superb Arkansas Traveller soon after, a wonderful collection of Americana before the genre ever got its name, an album chock full of folk/country gems. She then fell into dispute with her major label, her activist heart unable to cope with the demands of the commercial world perhaps, but after that experience her output has been regrettably small. Of late she's stirred the pot again, this time in relation to gay marriage and her latter Born-again Christian dogmatic position. One hopes she finds a way back to reminding us all just how good a songwriter she is, until then we'll always have Anchorage. Here's looking at you kid.

      Definitive version – Michelle Shocked

      Album – Short, Sharp, Shocked

      Click here for download or FREE listen

      Behind That Locked Door

      Written by – George Harrison

      Published by – Harrisongs

      Copyright – 1970

      After The Beatles officially broke up in 1970 George Harrison flowered

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