The Beatles didn't break up

Post Beatles break-up, John Lennon said that those people clamouring for a Beatles reuninon could just put their own Beatles album together - one track from a Lennon solo album, another from one of Paul's, one from George's and so on...

In this age of iPods this is now an intriguing possibility, and putting together 1970s Beatles albums is surprisingly satisfying. To my ears, for example, the first 1970s Beatles album, possibly called 'Instant Karma', would have had the following tracks on it:

Side 1
1 Instant Karma
2 Every Night
3 Isolation
4 My Sweet Lord
5 Junk
6 Jealous Guy
7 Maybe I'm Amazed

Side 2
1 Too Many People
2 Love
3 Imagine
4 Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey
5 All Things Must Pass
6 The Back Seat of My Car
7 Oh My Love

And I think it would have made a good album too.

This little exercise got me thinking about why Lennon and McCartney's 70s solo albums ended up being inferior to their Beatles ones. Rock critics usually attribute this to the lack of the Lennon-McCartney dynamic and intra-band competition; I think this is partly true, but I also have a slightly different angle on it.

As a proper solo artist (i.e., not seven-writers-on-my-record James Blunt), you have to write 10-14 songs on your own to fill an album. But whilst in the Beatles, John and Paul only had to contribute 5 or 6 tracks to each album (and let George get a couple in). Obviously it's much easier to write 5 good songs a year than 14, and you can devote more time to producing them. When the Beatles broke up, the demands of putting out one solo record a year (or sometimes two) meant that John and Paul had to fill whole albums with material - something that is much more difficult to do and which they weren't used to. Which invariably led to fillers like Lennon's Oh Yoko (which has the same melody as Three Blind Mice), or McCartney songs with titles like Single Pigeon (classic).

But when you take 5 or 6 of their better efforts from their solo albums and put them in the same pot, as I did above, you do end up with a record that shapes up pretty well, and had George Martin been at the wheel, might have sounded damn good. Don't think Single Pigeon would have ended up on a 70s Beatles album somehow though.

Songwriting

Been talking to some mates about songwriting lately, and reading some blogs about it. Several musicians I know have recently done courses on the subject, facilitated by people who are presumably qualified to instruct others in the art of songwriting. It got me wondering whether you can actually teach somebody how to write a song.

The way these songwriting courses seem to work is that there are various workshops where an 'expert' in songwriting imparts words of wisdom on how it's done to an audience of (presumably) aspiring songwriters. Then everybody pairs off and writes songs together, and there's a bit of a love-in where everybody's efforts get discussed en masse at the end of the day.

Thinking back to how I learnt how to write songs, I suppose that in a roundabout way, somebody did show me how to do it: Lennon or McCartney, but (sadly) not in person. From listening to their songs, I worked out how to structure my own, write a Beatle-esque melody, harmonise and so on. As a precocious songwriting teenager, I copied the poor band shamelessly (some would say that I still do -- and that I'm still precocious). I listened to them non-stop and tried to soak up as many of their ideas as I could; and in their day, the Beatles did exactly the same, with Elvis and Chuck Berry. This 'soaking up' forms the building blocks of every songwriter's music (there's no such thing as an original idea after all).

This makes me think that a) songwriting is, initially at least, all about copying stuff and b) other musicians influence songwriting immensely. Which leads to this: how good a songwriter you are will depend in no small way on your ability to copy things (think of it as similar to being a good draughtsman) and on the quality of the musicians you are copying.

In other words, if you're into James Blunt, you're fucked.

Of course, the thing about these songwriting workshops is that it's highly unlikely that the great songwriters are going to turn up at them to do a spot of teaching (you're probably going to get somebody who had a bit of a hit in the 80s or knew a man down the pub who did). And if you were lucky enough to have a great artist show up, would they really be able to teach you anything?

If McCartney decided to give a masterclass in songwriting, I'd love to attend it: he is universally acclaimed as one of the best writers the world has known, and he is a massive inspiration to me. However, I still doubt there is anything he could verbally articulate that that could teach me how to write a song. In fact, and being slightly cruel here, he hasn't written a good one himself in quite a while -- so if he can't teach himself how to do it again, how on earth would he instruct me? I'd say he'd be more interested in suing me for occasional attempts at plagiarism.

The other thing about songwriting which makes me think that it is difficult to teach is the personal dimension. The great songs are all inspired by personal traumas or joys. I could not imagine anybody at a songwriting course being able to supply either of those on tap (well, unless a certain Mr Blunt I referred to earlier was doing the teaching -- there would be plenty of trauma in that instance). The great songwriters do not overtly teach; we listen to their music and absorb their ideas over time.

Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh on the notion of songwriting classes. There are very basic elements which I suppose can be taught: structures (intro/verse/bridge/chorus -- you know it all now), and maybe some history around the topic. But not much more.

However, I'm quite Cartesian at heart, and in the spirit of trying to teach people how to write a song, I'm going to give it a bash. In a mathematical way. Here's an equation which I think will predict how well you will be able to write a song:

Ability to rip an artist off + quality of artist being ripped off + own personal experience/inspiration = Quality of song

Sadly the word 'quality' crops up too many times in my little equation. Quality is an impossibly subjective notion: one man's meat will inevitably be another man's poison. So even if somebody thinks they know how to teach somebody else how to write a fantastic song...somebody else will think that the song that ends up being written is, quite frankly, shit.

My conclusion: songwriting can be learnt, but it sure can't be taught.