Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-Setting
- 2 Rhetoric and Music: The Influence of a Linguistic Art
- 3 Eminem: Difficult Dialogics
- 4 Artistry, Expediency or Irrelevance? English Choral Translators and their Work
- 5 Pyramids, Symbols, and Butterflies: ‘Nacht’ from Pierrot Lunaire
- 6 Music and Text in Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw
- 7 Rethinking the Relationship Between Words and Music for the Twentieth Century: The Strange Case of Erik Satie
- 8 ‘Breaking up is hard to do’: Issues of Coherence and Fragmentation in post-1950 Vocal Music
- 9 Writing for Your Supper – Creative Work and the Contexts of Popular Songwriting
- Index
9 - Writing for Your Supper – Creative Work and the Contexts of Popular Songwriting
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-Setting
- 2 Rhetoric and Music: The Influence of a Linguistic Art
- 3 Eminem: Difficult Dialogics
- 4 Artistry, Expediency or Irrelevance? English Choral Translators and their Work
- 5 Pyramids, Symbols, and Butterflies: ‘Nacht’ from Pierrot Lunaire
- 6 Music and Text in Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw
- 7 Rethinking the Relationship Between Words and Music for the Twentieth Century: The Strange Case of Erik Satie
- 8 ‘Breaking up is hard to do’: Issues of Coherence and Fragmentation in post-1950 Vocal Music
- 9 Writing for Your Supper – Creative Work and the Contexts of Popular Songwriting
- Index
Summary
In 1988 I wrote a song called ‘Model Son’. This song appeared eventually on an album for RCA Records – Swimming against the Stream by Latin Quarter (a group of which I was a non-playing member) released in the spring of 1989. By that point it was my one hundred and forty-seventh song and would make my fortieth recording. Oddly, no one save myself heard my version of ‘Model Son’. Instead I did with it what I did with all the songs I wrote in the years I spent as a full-time songwriter: I completed it on paper as a lyric where the melody and arrangement existed only in my imagination and in snatches of singing on a cassette recorder. I then posted the lyric (set out, conventionally, as verses, chorus, and ‘bridge’) together with several others, to my then songwriting partner, Steve Skaith (he lived in London, I in Liverpool). His contribution to the songwriting process was to set my words to music.
In recounting this brief outline of songwriting practice, one that identifies me as a lyricist rather than songwriter as such, I am aware of how unusual and far-removed from the conventional portrayal of pop songwriting my experience might seem – at least since the rise of ‘rock’ music and the emergence of the writer-performer. Rather than argue for the contemporary re-emergence of the non-performing songwriter in the now narrower sub-genres of ‘pop’ and ‘R&B’, for the purposes of this discussion I intend to emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between my experience and the writer-performer rock ‘norm’. My reason for so choosing is because the contribution I wish to make to a symposium which reflects on the relationships between words and music is one that emphasizes, and explores the implications of, the work involved in bringing them together.
I use the term ‘work’ advisedly because I mean it in the prosaic sense of paid employment, of effort for reward under prevailing economic conditions. My writing ‘Model Son’ is evidence of my being a worker in the popular music industry.
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- Words and Music , pp. 219 - 250Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2005