Midweek Update 44: The Songwriting Edition
Flaming Lips, Jimmy Webb, Natalie Merchant, Labi Siffre... and Back To Black with Amy Winehouse.
I’ve penned many a Wordsmith musical post about artists, their songs, the performances and the recordings. But I haven’t really talked about songwriters and the art of songwriting before, without which there are no songs, performances or recordings, and not much point being an artist either, come to that. So let’s do it, in single – meaning 7” single - sized snippets that are mainly, if not exclusively, on my “new releases” pop culture radar.
I was driven to this Midweek Update topic initially by listening to a new episode of the podcast Song Exploder (“where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made”) featuring The Flaming Lips ‘Do You Realize??’ This beautiful song from 2002 unexpectedly – at least for a group of self-confessed musical weirdos - became one of those universal anthems for the ages, played at both weddings and funerals and known to make grown men and women cry not only on either occasion but also whilst listening at home alone.1 This is an especially enlightening episode of a hit-or-miss show, a delightful and endearingly brief examination of how a classic can come together without any such expectations. In fact, the Lips’ Wayne Coyne and Stephen Drozd make the whole process sound effortless, as if you just follow your artistic muse, trust the process and have faith that at some point your music will connect on a wider level than it has before.
Of course, professional songwriters of yore were relentlessly focused on writing hits as a matter of career necessity and artistic pride, and few of them did it with greater attention to narrative than Jimmy Webb, the guest on the latest episode of Rockonteurs. Interviewed primarily by Guy Pratt, who is later joined by his podcast and band partner Gary Kemp, Webb readily gives up the back story to the great “Wichita Lineman.” He sent it to Glen Campbell under duress for a prospective follow-up to Campbell’s first pop hit, Webb’s “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”), apologizing for it being unfinished given that he was struggling for a middle eight. Campbell, who had earned his own spurs as part of the LA “Wrecking Crew” team of top session musicians, cut it anyway, adding a guitar solo where that bridge (as the Yanks call what the Limeys call the “pre-chorus”) might have been. “Well, it’s finished now,” he told the astonished Webb when they met back up at the studio – and the rest is history.
Soon, Webb had a reputation for writing about cities – “Galveston” came hot on “Wichita Lineman”’s heels - and in an attempt to break somewhat free, he honed in on LA’s more specific “MacArthur Park.” The song was turned down by its intended recipients, The Association, but when Richard Harris – yes, the actor – determined to become a pop star, he heard it for what it was and promised Webb it would be “a hit.” After some drunken escapades in London, which carried over into the recording sessions, Harris’s faith was readily vindicated when “MacArthur Park” promptly went to #2 Stateside and 4# in the UK in the spring of 1968, despite being over seven minute long.2 Some of our generation may know the song better in the hands of Donna Summer, who took it to US number 1 and UK top 5 at the height of disco a decade later, and yet many of us of these last 50 years have surely wondered about the meaning of that line, “Someone left the cake out in the rain.” Webb’s stock reply to this question is one he cribbed from Van Dyke Parks upon being chewed out by his publisher: “Sir, I have no excuse!”
At the other end of the songwriting spectrum from a detached storyteller like Webb is Natalie Merchant, who on Episode 216 of the long-running podcast Songcraft describes a successful song as one that satisfies the following criteria: “Anyone can make people dance, but can you make them cry?” This comment felt especially poignant to me, because I recall vividly how when 10,000 Maniacs first played London, back when I was still running Jamming!, an instantly besotted Jonh Wilde and Russell Young came back from the group’s debut London show convinced that they had seen Natalie shed tears while singing, something that was simply not done in those days. (This was several years before Sinead O’Connor formally broke the mold with the video to ‘Nothing Compares 2 U.’)
But while Merchant is very much about that emotional, visceral connection, she is also a self-confessed activist, and the Songcraft episode is additionally interesting for hearing how she tackles social justice subjects without the inevitable preachiness that is usually part of the inescapable package. (Answer, according to Natalie: be like the New York Times, and home in on an individual story with which we can all resonate rather than the overwhelming existential problem at hand.) Best of all, perhaps, Merchant laughs a lot during this interview, which is always welcome from someone considered a “serious” songwriter.
Thank you for taking the time to read this latest Midweek Update, which alternates with a longer weekend read, the occasional archive from the interview vaults, and the Crossed Channels podcast alongside Dan Epstein of Jagged Time Lapse. If you have not yet subscribed to Wordsmith, please do: free and paid subscriptions are available. The latter get you bonus material, and keep me not just in high spirits, but in writing mode.
In the May issue of the UK’s excellent Shindig! magazine, the 1970s hit singer-songwriter Labi Siffre opens up about his own compositional MO, much of which comes down to this simple statement: “I wrote and write me.” Best known for “It Must Be Love,” covered note-for-note to deliriously poptastic effect by Madness in 1981, Siffre also wrote beautiful songs like "Crying Laughing Loving Lying," “Watch Me,” and others that came out of a life-long gay relationship(s), something that puts him in the same camp as Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley for brilliantly managing to avoid gender reference, thereby protecting his own sexuality at a time that may have been necessary while simultaneously never denying it.
A songwriter at odds with the demands of the music business fame game, Siffre stepped back from the limelight in the late 1970s but returned to the public eye a decade later with the 1987 anti-apartheid hit “(Something Inside) So Strong,” inspired – though one wishes it hadn’t been necessary – by TV footage of a white soldier shooting at black kids. In the 1990s Siffre published three volumes of poetry, and to this day continues to write about whatever fascinates and/or frustrates him in essays, blog posts and on social media. Siffre, then, is the writer who will always “write me” but not necessarily always write it in song.
BACK TO BLACK
To that end, can a songwriter ever do too much “me”? Watching the new Amy Winehouse biopic Back To Black on Monday night, the answer is surely an emphatic yes. How many of us when we first fell in love with her breakout song ‘Rehab’ – which is effectively all of us who did not know Amy Winehouse personally, or inside stories about her from the music business – heard its lyrics as primarily playful, the line, “if my daddy thinks I’m fine” the sort of nod to specifics that Jimmy Webb might use in a song, the references to “Ray” and “Mr. Hathaway” merely an acknowledgment that deep soul artists can teach life lessons better than “70 days” in an institution?
As time has taught us more forcefully, however, this alternative anthem for the drunken masses3 was all too literal, written the very day Amy’s former manager Nick Shymanksy hoped to get her checked in so as to save her from herself. (Besides, Donny Hathaway, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, jumped to his death from the Essex House on NYC’s Central Park South at age 33.) Having convinced Amy’s father Mitch that it was the right move, Shymanski walked into the house to collect his client, to find her sitting on her daddy’s lap, “and he completely backtracked… She manipulated him.”
Winehouse was an unbelievable talent, as a singer, a songwriter, a performer, a style icon… in every sense, the entire package that only comes only once in a generation. Where did it go wrong? Director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s movie suggests that quite likely it did not, that Amy either felt or was genetically born with the need to live the jazz lifestyle as intently as she loved the music it produced, and one comes away from this intensely sad though brilliantly portrayed film sensing there was something truly inevitable about her early demise. An early clue comes with the death from lung cancer of her grandmother, the former chain-smoking former jazz singer Cynthia who is Amy’s “everything icon,” with absolutely no apparent effect on Amy’s own nicotine habit.
Now, if this conclusion seems in contrast to the incredibly powerful documentary Amy from 2015, a movie that did not leave a dry eye in the house when I saw it back upon release in a cinema, then you’re right. In that film, directed by Asif Kapadia, Amy’s father Mitch and boyfriend-husband Blake Fielder-Civil are painted as the villains, suggesting that without the former’s business greed and the latter’s drug habits, Amy could have lived a much longer and more satisfying life, one from which her audience would have hopefully benefited also from more magnificent music.
In Back To Black, however, Mitch is portrayed as a caring, sympathetic, and perpetually fretting father. Blake, meanwhile, is consciously shown as a (coke-sniffing, pint-chugging) dickhead from the moment he walks into Camden Town’s The Good Mixer pub and Amy’s life with it, but it’s the instantly smitten singer, clearly attracted to such bad boys, who sets off in relentless pursuit of a relationship, all the way to an overnight marriage in Miami. In short, female director Taylor-Johnson portrays Winehouse as architect of her own demise, and exonerates the same two men that a previous male director had posited as Amy’s enablers. Make of all that what you will.
To get back to the songwriting, then in light of Amy’s fatally premature demise, we hear the songs on her blockbuster second album Back To Black - most notably the title track, its composition co-credited to producer Mark Ronson as many others are to her original producer Salaam Remi – as confessionals that go beyond the realms of acceptable singer-songwriting honesty and into a degree of emotional nudity that, while they gained Winehouse success on a level even she might never have anticipated, also articulated the very demons that destroyed her. For those remaining unswayed about seeing Back To Black based on what is now a familiar set of lukewarm critics’ reviews let me reassure you as I did about the Bob Marley biopic One Love, that this is a marvelous movie, one rendered all the more so by Marisa Abela not so much enacting Amy’s character as inhabiting it. (The latter performance below from the 2008 Grammy’s is re-enacted in Back To Black almost perfectly.) That said, it certainly won’t endear many viewers to songwriting as confessional.
However, don’t be turned off. Pick up a copy of Wilco main man Jeff Tweedy’s short and sweet manual How To Write One Song instead, and follow the instructions. I’ve written a few songs myself over the years, a couple of which have proven to have legs, but when struggling for lyrical subject matter for an arrangement I was already comfortable with, I decided to boldly take up Tweedy’s challenge not to use the most obvious rhymes in the word. I started off with the line “Don’t rhyme train with rain” and soon ended up with the Dear Boys song, ‘A Word That Doesn’t Rhyme,’ which shamelessly references several other song titles but emphatically means something very serious to me. People dug the song, and few knew that it was a confessional - particularly after my band mate Tony Page made a video that itself shamelessly referenced a well-known classic that itself may or may not mean something. Thanks Jeff. See, it can be done.
Guilty as charged.
In this fascinating deep dive with The Guardian, Webb states that George Martin told him it was the reason that the Beatles figured they could get away with “Hey Jude” as a single, too.
A friend of mine told me in England last month that he figures 30% of Brits are “functioning alcoholics” and I would only quibble the percentage points.
I wonder what category of songwriter Nick Drake would fall into. From what little I’ve read he struggled immensely with depression and disappointment upon pouring himself into his jewel-like songs. Songwriting as therapy or maybe anti-therapy, if that’s a thing? Anyone who listens to his songs can almost taste the melancholy.
I loved that Rockonteurs interview with Jimmy Webb - I could have listened to another hour of it, easily.