Sometimes after a show, someone will approach me and say: “I really enjoyed the show. Why isn’t your band bigger than it is?” My response is usually something along the lines of: “I really don’t think my wife wants me getting any bigger.”
I answer with this joke because I am 1) a big person and 2) constantly asking myself the same question.
The truth is: If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t have to be asked the question.
Sometimes it feels as if all of my energies go toward trying to figure out how to navigate the music industry. What’s worse is that the few elite players I’ve made connections with seem just as confused as I am. I’ve yet to meet someone making real money in music that is able to articulate how to replicate their success.
They use words like opportunity, hard work, and marketability in their attempts. But most of what they say is too general to be transformed into a real plan of action, and the sad reality is that there are endless counterexamples of artists who have fulfilled all three, yet failed to make a dent. I can name a thousand bands that work hard, make the most of their opportunities, and deploy excellent marketing strategies that still work part time jobs when they get home from tour. The music business has no middle class. There is the top tier, and then there is the rest of us. And if the big boys and girls at the top know the magic formula for how to get there, they certainly aren’t sharing it with me.
This isn’t an anti-music-industry screed. I’m not here to complain about the business. At the end of the day, I get to do what I love and my band has been very blessed in what we’ve been able to accomplish so far without having found the stepping stone to that next level.
One glaring difference between us and them is that the real heavy hitters have all at one point or another written a hit song. I have not. I’ve managed to write some songs that tens upon tens of people have bought, but nothing that is going to pay my bills for the next 50 years, or even the next 50 days.
That’s the context for the second question I truly love to receive: “You’re a good songwriter. Why don’t you just write a hit song?” Sage advice usually follows this question. I’m told that choosing this path, rather than the path that involves not writing a hit song, is superior for these reasons: increased recognition, greater rotation, bigger tours, more sales, and ultimately more money. Paradigm-shifting stuff every time.
But even though the question is asinine, I honestly get the sentiment. Songwriting is a skill set not many have, and even fewer know how to monetize (myself included). My friends and family who ask that question probably don’t consider that we songwriters don’t really have a tight grasp of how it works either.
When they ask, they assume that writing songs is just like any other form of skilled labor, and that there are set methods and formulas and tricks of the trade that allow us to effortlessly crank out sweet jams that hungry masses are eagerly awaiting to devour. So I try to be considerate when answering questions like this because, if I’m honest, I don’t know how all of it works either. It turns out, neither does the most famous song writer in the world.
Recently, Paul McCartney said in an interview with NPR: “You never get it down. I don’t know how to do this. You’d think I do, but it’s not one of these things you ever really know how to do.”
For the rest of us in music not sitting on a $600 million nest egg, this revelation from Sir Paul can seem a little discouraging. Yesterday, before reading that interview, all my troubles seemed so far away. I mean, if this guy doesn’t have it down then how am I supposed to ever figure it out? I think the answer is that it isn’t really supposed to be figured out.
Everything else in the music industry is quantifiable: social media presence, online sales, merch sales, streaming revenues, syncs deals, gas mileage, set length, contract terms, etc. But these aren’t what make music magical. Merchandise isn’t what bounces around in your mind all day, furnishing you with an aesthetically satisfying soundtrack to enliven your experiences. Do we really want the marvel and wonder of songwriting, of being in a band, to be reduced to a formulaic grind?
We’re familiar with that kind of music, and I think we can do without it. The moment our songwriting is subordinated to, and shaped by, marketing and business concerns, our music becomes cheapened, and stripped of the enchantment that first made us fall in love with it. Our songs become no different than the t-shirts sold at our shows (BTW, our shirts are awesome; buy some).
Don’t get me wrong, I really, really want people to buy my music. It’s the only way I can continue being in a band as an adult. The challenge for me has become not allowing that desire to creep into the actual writing process and infect it. Since I’ve never written a hit song, I’m going to use a softer term from here on out that, despite having the indignity of being from that detestable subset of language known as corporate-speak, is closer to my experience. I’m just going to say “marketable.”
Identifying that we shouldn’t actively aim for marketability during the songwriting process is well and good, but at the same time it’s sort of strange given the fact that what we hope for most of all is that the song becomes marketable.
There are a lot of starting points for writing a song. For me it can be a phrase, a piece of a melody that pops in my head, something I come up with on the guitar, or sometimes when I’m in the middle of a Rocket League game on Xbox Live the whole thing comes at once and I have to abandon my friends to certain defeat in order to write it all down and/or record it.
And you’re never thinking of it as a product when that initial idea comes. In its rawest form, a musical piece is just fun to sing or play and it means something to you when you play it. But there comes a point later on in the process where the temptation sets in to view the song through the lens of how well it could do in certain markets, or how well it could work for radio, or as a single to push a record.
These questions all stem from the pressure of feeling the need to make money, yet they can be a poison. In my most unguarded moments, where the prospect of success outweighs the commitment to musical integrity, I try to catch myself and recalibrate. If that doesn’t work, I put the idea on the shelf and come back to it later.
I was explaining this dynamic to a friend who has a background in physics, and he said that it reminds him of something in quantum mechanics called the observer effect. Basically, the process by which a particle or phenomenon is observed alters that particle in some way, and in some instances destroys the particle. That resonated with me — the more I read on it, the more it seemed to comport with my experience as a songwriter.
The more I try to think and analyze and interfere with a song rather than just allow myself to be in the moment and push the idea out, the more contrived and unremarkable it will end up being. Nine times out of 10 the original form is probably the best that song can be.
So much of songwriting involves trying to preserve that feeling you had the first time the song popped into your head; trying to arrive at the genesis of a sound simultaneously memorable and fleeting, pure and wonderful, yet precarious in its tendency to vanish or turn into something less captivating through artistic interference. Maybe one day, I’ll capture enough of that feeling to land my first hit. I’m trying not to think about it too much.
