[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
publisher.
The advance
The deal you sign with the record company will determine not
only your royalty rate but also your initial advance. The advance
is a lump sum usually administered by your manager to pay for
equipment, recording fees, wages and tax, if you re sensible. All
166 The artist
advances will be recouped against royalties, in other words an
advance is a loan repayable by your earnings from record sales,
so a big advance doesn t necessarily mean you re rich! Many a
band s contract has expired with its members owing the record
company money, and record companies will want this money
back somehow, so beware the lure of the big advance.
WHERE TO NEXT?
A leader (or occasionally a couple of leaders) usually emerge
early on in a band s life, and these roles will often become
crystallized in the studio. The studio will offer an environment
and a way of working for which few will be prepared. Engineers
and producers will warm to the communicative ones in the
band, and the others (often the back line) could become isolated if
all concerned fail to apply some diplomacy and democracy.
There will always be band members who prefer to lead and band
members who prefer to be led; this balance can provide the
perfect working environment as long as all are agreed on their
roles.
Recording an album can be a joyful experience, and usually
will be first time around, especially if you have the right
producer, the A&R people are happy with the material and the
signs are that the record company is going to put its weight
behind the finished product.
Then will come the real work: the promoting, the touring, the
build-up to the second album, the holding of the whole thing
together after having already achieved so much of what you
originally set out to do. If your vision was narrow and you were
only ever looking a year or two ahead to the first big gig or the
first album the next few years work will be tough for you. If
this was a life plan, on the other hand, you re now in the perfect
position to reach for the stars.
17
The songwriter
Few generalizations can be made about the job of the songwriter.
No two songwriters write in the same way; no two songwriters
earn the same amount of money for their work; and songwriters
cannot predict how much they might earn this year or the next,
or can ever guarantee that, as from tomorrow, they will ever earn
a single penny from their craft again. As a songwriter you can
earn vast sums of money, but you can also hit the lowest lows the
music business has to offer.
Songwriting is pretty well the only job in the business in
which you have to start from scratch with every project. A
guitarist can buy a better guitar, take tips from fellow guitarists,
develop an on-stage style and, with practice, will almost always
improve from one day to the next. A manager can mould and
develop an act and learn and develop management skills as the
act grows in stature and in confidence. Publishers and A&R
people will learn from experience how to find, how to nurture
and how to sell their acts and their properties, and producers are
learning new tricks of the trade all the time often aided by new
technology which is racing ahead of every other trend in the
business.
Meanwhile, having finished one song, the songwriter moves
to the next one facing the same blank sheet of paper, facing the
same fears over whether or not the publisher, the manager and
the band will like or even understand this next piece of work,
and facing the frustrating fact that no one, least of all the
songwriter, knows how or when the next song will be complete
167
168 The songwriter
and, when it is complete, whether it will be usable. A songwriter
is only as good as his or her last song. That s the sad fact of the
songwriter s lot.
It s not all bad, however, and there are some lessons that can
be learned by songwriters; there are some tools at the
songwriter s disposal too. So to begin with, we ll consider the
songwriter s craft. Is it one which can be learned?
STARTING OUT
There are certain rules that the songwriter can follow,
particularly if the goal is a hit pop song. The perfect hit pop song,
for example, has a very definite structure to it. It will always
have a verse, a catchy chorus, a middle-eight or a bridge to break
up the song and possibly build to a key change, and a climactic
ending or a fade. It will usually last around 3 minutes and will be
fairly up-beat, or at least will have a regular rhythm.
However, simply to follow this structure is usually not
enough. Many have stuck rigidly to the pop formula but failed
consistently to come up with a memorable or a saleable song.
Moreover, many of the truly memorable and high-earning pop
songs of the last 30 or so years have been those which have
broken all these rules and more. Take The Beatles Eleanor Rigby
for example, or Queen s Bohemian Rhapsody. The former
dispensed with regulation guitar, bass and drums line-up and
opted instead for a string quartet; the latter lasted closer to 9
minutes, its tempo wandered all over the place and much of it
was closer to opera than pop. Yet both are today regarded as
popular music classics. With rules as bendable as this, it can be
hard for the aspiring writer to know where to start. On the other
hand, if all the rules are breakable, or at least bendable, surely
this means that pop songwriters can go wherever their minds
take them?
The truth of the matter is that there never were any rules.
There was a time, before the sixties singer songwriter/pop
group boom, during which songwriters were employed to
churn out songs almost on demand by publishers and record
companies, and in this way certain formulas did develop. But
after The Beatles in the UK and Bob Dylan in the US, any
writer s rule books that might have existed went out of the
window.
The non-pop song 169
Today, particularly in the UK, writers in the pop genre tend to
develop within groups. They may write alone but they usually
know who they re writing for in terms of both their audience
and the people who will be singing and playing the songs. Take
pretty well any big band of the nineties from REM to
Guns n Roses, from The Pet Shop Boys to U2 and you ll find
that the people who write their songs are also prominent band
members. Many of the world s top solo stars in the pop field are
also the writers of their own material from Elton John to Sting,
from Madonna to Michael Jackson and from Van Morrison to
Bruce Springsteen.
So here emerges perhaps one of the most important questions
that today s aspiring songwriters should be asking themselves:
who is going to be performing my work?
PERFORMERS OR SONGS?
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg, the performers or the
songs? In the case of many established bands, the songwriting
came later. Such was the case with The Beatles (even though Paul
McCartney was writing songs from the age of 13) and more
particularly with The Rolling Stones. As pioneer singer
songwriters, these two bands got together at the outset because
of a shared love of a type of music; with The Beatles it was rock
and roll and with The Stones it was the blues. Both bands started
out by playing the music of their idols and only after some
success did they begin seriously to start working on their own
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]