Part 8 - It's not all about you! (Co-writing)

Welcome back to Trollholm and Rough to Release, our series on taking your half-finished ideas and turning them into finished songs. 

So far we've assumed that your creative process is you, alone, slaving away by the midnight oil in your artists garret. Or in the train on the morning commute, whatever works for you (according to part 2).

But obviously this is not always the case; you might be working as part of a writing group, you might be working with a partner, you might be taking your song ideas to a band to develop into a live show. All of these scenarios bring both advantages and dis-advantages, but there are some consistent points as well.

Let's have a look...

As part of a band

In my (limited) experience, bands tend to be run either as dictatorships or communes. Under the dictator, the band leader tends to bring the songs and sets the rules about how they'll be played. If it's a benevolent dictatorship they will allow the other players control of their parts and areas but control the overall structure, direction and feel of the songs. 

The other end of the scale is where the band creates something from scratch together in the room. Between these extremes is the scenario where a group has a primary songwriter who brings a draft to a band to work together. 

I'm going to ignore the extreme cases for now because if you're the outright dictator you probably don't have a problem finishing songs, and bands who start their songs together in-situ also tend to finish them that way. 

So if you're taking your ideas to a band as a starting point this a rich vein to mine for completion. Your fellow band members will (most likely) have their own creative ideas and the chance to play to their technical strengths. This gives you the opportunity to see not just what they do, but how they do it as well. See what techniques they bring to bear to fill those gaps, add that missing tension and release, or complete that story arc.

Of course it's not always easy sharing new material with a group of people; I always get something similar to stage fright when doing so. What if they don't like it? What if it sounds exactly like something else? What if they suddenly realise that they don't like any of my songs and they leave the band, steal my car and crash the burning wreckage into my house and destroy the whole housing estate?

"What if?" can be a curse as much as a blessing.

Sharing something half-finished can be even more difficult because you're conscious that you're not presenting it in its best light, but the way I have always approached writing for bands is that I am providing a template. Here's what it sounds like as I wrote it, but now it's over to you to embellish, trim, re-order, re-theme, and complete as the collective sees fit. They stop being my songs as soon as the group has accepted them into the repertoire. For me in this scenario, being able to let go of the initial concept is critical to allowing them to be finished by the wider group. 

As a partnership

We're not all in bands though, or sometimes we are but the writing duties are shared by a couple of members. Working with a partner gives you quite a few of the advantages of the group dynamic above, but it also gives you a bit more consistency and predictability as you get to know your co-writer. 

The other big advantage you have is a practical one: it's far easier to organise two people getting together than four or five.

So you still get that extra set of strengths and stimulation to work with but without potentially paying high room-rates for a full band and / or having to wait three weeks until the stars align.

As a working group

The other way that you may find yourself working is as part of a song-writing group. Have a look at the writing credits for most of the songs in the charts and you'll find that many, if not most, will have quite a few people listed as writers. Some of them may be band members, some may be producers, but others will be part of a writing collective or organisation. There's also a good chance that in some genres the recording artist won't be on that list at all.

Working in this way obviously gives you access to many sparks and different spices, and again you have a fantastic opportunity to learn how other people approach the challenges. 

The downside to this approach is that it can sometimes result in a bit of writing-by-numbers, especially where the recording artist isn't there or isn't known, and the output can end up a bit 'safe' as it tries to be all things to all people. But there can be a great deal of satisfaction in passing on the baton of what you've created and seeing how someone else runs with it.

Soft skills

For me there are a few important things that apply to all* of these situations, and they have nothing to do with your song-writing ability.

Cogs in the machine - firstly this is not a place for ego. Everyone who is writing is there to bring their skills, experience and perspective. That needs to be respected and so do they.

You're there for a reason - the corollary to this is that this also isn't the place to hide your light under a bushel. Your ideas and input are equally important and making sure you contribute your best is why you're in the room. 

Set it free - if you're the person bringing the song it can be difficult to let go of the reins. You probably have an idea in your head of how you want the song to sound, and that's a great starting point, but my experience is that you'll get the best final outcome if you're willing to give up control. The moment you open that song up to the other writer(s) then it stops being your song. Take a deep breath and let it fly free.

Let it breathe - similarly to the above, once you've opened the future shape of the song up, you have to do the same for the arrangement and the structure. One of my least successful co-writing experiences was an occasion when I was playing bass and my fellow writer was playing piano. He'd brought the basic idea for the song but we were theoretically building it together. In the end though it was probably a 75/25% split, not because I wasn't invested, but he was playing such a full piano part, throughout the piece, that there was really very little space for me to really add anything with the double bass. So rather than try and over-complicate things I stripped my part right back to where there was still the chance to add something musically.  Arguably I could have pressed harder to make my input heard (see the point above!) but it's equally important to allow space for your contributors to, well, contribute. I mentioned before my rule of thumb about dropping instruments out during production, but taking a similar approach during the writing can be useful as well.

Learning by listening - I don't mean just learning your part, there are a couple of angles to this. Firstly, when someone else is in their creative flow, if you get the chance, really listen to how they're working. Are they deliberately picking notes and chords out of the key? Are they running through slant rhymes and swapping couplets around? What can you 'borrow with pride' to incorporate into your own workflow? The second part of this comes back (again) to my old favourites space and permission - but in a slightly different way. When you're all creating a new song you're taking in huge amounts of information; melody, tempo, feel, groove, lyrics... and you're simultaneously trying to create, adapt and learn your own part. Give yourself permission to drop out occasionally to really listen to what your co-creators are doing. I've come out of band practices, listened back to the recordings and thought, "Wow! That bass part was amazing," but I was completely oblivious at the time because I was concentrating so hard on getting my bit right. Make the space to listen more and you'll probably find that there are opportunities to improve your piece of the pie.

That'll do for now, next time we'll have a bit of a catch up on what we've covered so far and set ourselves up for the second half of this series; where we'll look at how we go about turning a rough into a release, or a song into a single.

* Except perhaps the extreme dictatorship end of the continuum.