Let’s take your typical song that you hear while driving down the road (whether it’s Top-40, rap, gospel, country-western, whatever)… how did that creation come to be?
Are the lyrics created by a handful of people (or maybe just one person) sitting around on the couch one night, and then the music gets “put to the lyrics”, or does a composer bang out four minutes worth of catchy notes on a guitar / piano / drums, and then the lyrics get “put to the music”?
Or are they done simultaneously (a couple of lines of music/lyrics get “finalized” and then move on to the next couple lines)?
Cracked.com is hardly a good reference but they had an article recently you (the OP) might find interesting.
They discuss several huge hit songs that almost never got recorded (for various reasons). In regard to the OP they describe the song creation process in each case.
I think the answer to the OP is “yes” to all of it. Someone might come up with a good riff and then apply lyrics or someone might have written a poem and want to put it to music or whatever.
All that said I am functionally retarded when it comes to music (I can appreciate it but I cannot perform it).
Hopefully someone who has been there and done that will show up.
I’ve heard several songwriters talk about that, and there doesn’t seem to be a fixed way of doing it. It depends on the songwriter, and often on the song.
Songs are written in many different ways. Some writers work better one way, some another. Supposedly, Bernie Taupin wrote lyrics, then Elton John added music without Bernie’s input, but that may be the exception, not the rule.
A professional songwriter once gave me some well-crafted lyrics that I put to music. She didn’t like my music, so that was that. But now I had some good music without words which I gave to another lyricist (without revealing the original lyrics) and he added lyrics that we both could agree on. His band often played the finished product, and even recorded a version of it.
That’s just an anecdote, but there is no hard and fast rule.
Wow - cool story / anecdote, and thank you for sharing (any names that the rest of us might know? :-).
You guys have pretty much answered my question, in that it seems to be 50 / 50 (and that “it just depends”). For some reason, I thought it was 90 / 10 one way or the other (but I just had no idea which was the “90” and which was the “10”).
I’ve heard that when Tox Paxton saw Bob Dylan’s poem “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” he ask him about the music. Dylan said it’s not a song, it’s poem. Paxton told him it should be set to music.
It’s doubtful that any of the names are known outside of the inner circle of musicians and songwriters, and in one case, I’d prefer not to reveal it.
You may not know this, but there are many “professional” songwriters who make a decent living as such, but are hardly known to the general public unless they break out as performers, like Carol King, Larry Weiss (“Rhinestone Cowboy”) or Alan O’Day (“Undercover Angel”) did. And I worked for the latter two once.
I once attended a lecture put on by a husband and wife songwriting team (Mark Selby and Tia Sillers). Their individual and team efforts had produced hits and Grammy winners for Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Dixie Chicks, and Le Ann Womack.
One of the things they talked about was something they used as an exercise process but said it could even be used as a production technique. Mark referred to it as a double-cheat or a double-steal though it really is not a legal transgression.
The technique is to take a hit song and then re-write different lyrics to every stanza of the song. Set the lyrics down for a day or two. Then come back and envision those lyrics as a poem and write a new melody for the song.
He said a lot of good music writing depends on the rhythm of the poem matches with the rhythm of the melody. The double-cheat technique helps the writer “find” the ability to do that.