Interview in Trib-Review

The article about local songwriters that I was interviewed for was posted on the Tribune-Review's website today. My bit aside, I think Rege and company did a really great job of putting it together and getting a good range of music and opinions. To view the video (mine is at the end if you scroll over), you may need the Flash and/or Shockwave browser plugin.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/living/music/s_605220.html

The text of the article, for those who don't feel like clicking the link:

Great songs stick with a listener
By Rege Behe
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, January 2, 2009

Some songs make young girls cry. Other songs, sung blue, everybody knows. There are songs that make you want to dance, sad songs that say so much, silly love songs.

But what makes a song memorable?

Songs like "Satisfaction" and "Respect," Hey Jude" and "Maybellene," "Born to Run" and "Running on Empty" ring bells of recognition from the opening notes. What gives these songs a certain acknowledged greatness?

"Songs are great for different reasons," says Joe Grushecky, the veteran Pittsburgh musician who is one of the few songwriters to have teamed with Bruce Springsteen. "Some songs have beautiful melodies. Some songs have a great beat. Some songs just capture your imagination because they have beautiful singing, a singer that sells it, puts it across.

"The songs that mean the most to me are the ones where someone is singing something I wanted to say or wish I had said," says Grushecky, who lives in Dormont.

Greg Dutton, a vocalist and guitarist with the Pittsburgh band Lohio who lives in Lawrenceville, defines it this way:

"A good song should be able to stand on its own with just the melody and an acoustic guitar," he says. "When you look at songwriting in that way, it kind of boils down to having a strong melody, the type of melody that gets lodged in your head."

What the best songs seem to have in common is the ability to elicit a response. Whether it's the provocation of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" or Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," the rebelliousness of "My Generation" by The Who or Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," or the naked, unvarnished sentiments of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" or "One" by U2, the best songs seem to have an inherent emotional component.

"It doesn't matter about the structure or the genre, it's whether it makes you feel something," says Steve Morrison of Shadyside, a musician who is in the band the Aviation Blondes and was in the legendary '80s group The Affordable Floors.

What triggers this emotional response, however, is harder to quantify. Bill Payne, the longtime keyboard player in the nationally touring Little Feat -- and also a photographer -- thinks greatness is the residue of "a reservoir of emotional highlights and buttons that are pushed when we look at something, when we hear something, when we are enveloped by that art."

"That it says, hey, this is warm water, this is challenging, this is great, this is cool, this is familiar, but I can't quite put my finger on it," Payne says. "All these things that bring you to a piece of work, be it auditory or otherwise -- poetry, for example -- and you sit there and listen to it or read it and you think, 'this strikes my heart, and my head, in a certain way.' "

A lyrical recipe

The elements that comprise a great song are often as tangible as the ingredients that go into a cake. Instead of eggs, flour and butter, there are vocals, lyrics and melodies. But every songwriter, like every chef, knows a few recipe variations.

Bob Corbin, who with Dave Hanner, arguably comprises the most accomplished songwriting duo from Western Pennsylvania over the last 30 years, says the best songs are built on "the strength of the hook, the strength of the message, which is usually the title of the song."

"In the structure, the hook is repeated," says Corbin, who has written songs covered by Alabama, the Oak Ridge Boys, Mel Tillis and Kenny Rogers. "There's a certain amount of repetition in the lyrics, the chords, the melody."

Hanner -- who lives in Bakerstown, while Corbin is from Wexford -- tries to make sure the focal point of every song he writes is evident.

"To me, everything else in the song serves to make that hook have one focus," he says. "As I soon as I have a hook in place, I'll work on the structure of the song."

Greg Joseph of Hampton, the bass player for The Clarks, agrees that a good hook is essential. But he also says it's necessary to come up with "something creative, something a little different from the standard thing you may have heard before. Just a little twist or turn that you can put into a song and people will say, 'Oh, I never heard that before.'"

Heather Kropf, a solo performer from Highland Park, puts her emphasis on lyrics, and then melodies, when writing songs.

Carol Lee Espy, a songwriter and singer from the North Hills, says lyrics are the most important element, although it's only when it's the "perfect marriage of music, lyrics and feel, then will people love it and listen to it," she says.

The musical nuts and bolts, however, are just that. The employment of the various parts is an ephemeral, incalculable process. It's hard to say why a great song lingers in the consciousness.

"You hear the melody, you hear the lyrics, you hear the basic part of the song," Payne says. "For instance, 'Under My Thumb,' (by The Rolling Stones). That had a certain sound to it that attracted you first, a kind of marimba sound, and the rhythm is kind of snakey, and you go ,'Wow, that's cool.' So why would you dig that and a Gershwin tune? ... I'm not sure of this, but I think there are songs that pull you along enough to explore them, and you either discard them or think, 'My God, I've found a treasure trove.' "

And great songs are written, as Payne indicates, by composers of various stripes and styles.

"I try to be openminded about what I listen to and not close myself off from anything or any categories of music," Morrison says, "because as soon as I decide there's a type of music I don't like, then I'll hear a great song in that genre and have to totally reset all the buttons. I'll say I don't like heavy metal, and then hear a great heavy metal song."

The work ethic

In the 1950s and early '60s, the Brill Building in New York City was home to famed songwriting teams, including Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. They took the concept of craftsmanship and wed it with an assembly line-like process that churned out some of the most memorable songs of that period. "Leader of the Pack," "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?," "One Fine Day" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" came by way of the Brill Building ethic that was fostered by Don Kirshner and Al Nevins, the founders of Aldon Music.

Every day the teams went to work, and every day they wrote songs. Hanner thinks this simple, time-worn approach is still the best way to produce good material.

"I've had the most success when I sit down and write every day," says Hanner. "I've had the best luck with just starting to sing and play and hoping something pops out. If you give yourself the opportunity to do something every day, you're further ahead."

His partner agrees.

"You have to sit down every day and try to write," Corbin says. "I spend about three hours a day trying to write. And I think you have to do that in a zone ... Some songs are up there in the ether somewhere, and if you get your inner radio tuned to the right frequency, you can just pull them down."

Other songwriters need a goal, an endpoint, to stir their creativity. Grushecky admits that he writes best when he's working on projects.

"If' I'm doing a record, that always gets me started," he says. "And I certainly approach it like a person writing a book or a movie. I like for it to have, in my mind, anyway, a beginning, a middle and an end for whatever particular story I'm trying to tell. Once I get a few key elements, I write in spurts. I'm not a guy who writes constantly. When I'm playing a lot with the band, I don't write that much."

Joseph also thinks that deadlines can spur creativity.

"There are times (The Clarks) are putting an album together when I will sit down every day and knock something out," Joseph says. "And I'm real comfortable with that. But years ago, it was strictly an emotional thing. It was only when the emotion hit me, when the theme hit me, that I could sit down and write about it."

For Dutton, the more he works on songwriting, the more likely inspiration is to strike and yield a good song. But Morrison says his best songs often reveal themselves unexpectedly.

"You can write a lot of songs just through sheer work ethic," he says. "I can sit down and write a song today. I know how to write a lyric. I know how to structure it. But most of those songs have no real inspiration and end up getting dropped. The songs you live with in the long run are the ones that are inspired by experience, or you're sitting there with a guitar and lightning bolt goes off and you have a great idea. It doesn't happen very often."

Those lightning bolts, however, often fall to earth and disappear. Espy thinks truly great songs are generated by those who wed inspiration with ability.

"Everyone's creative, everyone has the ability to create," Espy says. "But then you get into the artistry. When you learn how to take creativity and craft it, that's when it becomes art."

Inspiration points

Who are the songwriters that musicians from the Pittsburgh area admire? Here's who some of area's best singers and songwriters tab as their favorites.

Greg Joseph, The Clarks: One of my favorites has always been Elvis Costello. Even in the midst of his rock 'n' roll records, there have always been twists and turns. And through the span of his career, of course, he's often doing country records, all different genres of music. He's No. 1 in my book. Bruce Springsteen sort of has a thing where he challenges himself, although his themes tend to be similar or in the same pattern. He's got a songwriting element that nobody else does. Regardless of the fact that he's a multi-, multi-millionaire, he can still put on a folksy thing.

Joe Grushecky: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen. Those guys, their music is every bit as good and exciting as their words. They touch me in an emotional way, especially the Stones. What I liked about the Stones, when they first started, and the Beatles, is they had so many different influences in their music. You can hear R&B, country and western, and blues and Tin Pan Alley stuff. Within the framework of the bands, there are lot of different types of music, and that always appealed to me. I liked the fact that they turned me on to a lot of great American artists -- Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf. I like the fact they turned the spotlight back on those guys.

Heather Kropf: I really admire Rebecca Martin; she used to be in the duo Once Blue back in the '90s. She's got a great lyric sensibility that's really poetic, but really sort of every day. I don't know how she does it, but she becomes the characters in the songs. I also like Paul Simon, Kate Bush, Meshell Ndegeocello.

Bob Corbin, Corbin-Hanner: I don't know if I have favorite songwriters; I have favorite songs. But there's Kris Kristofferson. (Songwriting) crosses the line of genres for me. There's the Beatles, of course, and Paul Simon.

Dave Hanner, Corbin-Hanner: Of course, the Beatles. That's who we grew up listening to, thinking we could probably be like them. It wasn't quite that easy. As far as older songwriters, I've always admire Irving Berlin, mainly because of his lyrics. Some of his lyrics are so famous, and yet he never sounds like he's trying to impress anyone.

Carol Lee Espy: I really like Bruce Robison. He's kind of an obscure writer out of Austin. His wife is Kelly Willis. He's got that marriage of lyrics, melody and feel, and that great Austin sensibility. And recently, I was revisiting Hal David and Burt Bacharach songs. There's also Paul Simon. I think each person, each songwriter, if you ask them their current favorite, it changes.

Greg Dutton, Lohio: I really like songwriters that write in the pop vein but mess around the common rules and the structure of it. Growing up, two of my favorite songwriters were Neil Young and Damon Albarn, most famously from Blur. Aesthetically, they come at it from very different places, but both tend to be really good at creating very economical songs with amazing choruses. Some artists I listen to with the hopes of learning more about songwriting would be Ray Davies, Jimmy Webb and Carl Newman.

Steve Morrison, Aviation Blondes: My favorite songwriters are the ones who straddle the line between rock and pop without leaning too hard one way or another. They have rocker credibility. The music is definitely rock 'n' roll, but stands out because it has a great hook. They can write a catchy chorus without being over-sugary. People like Ray Davies of the Kinks, Chrissie Hynde, Paul Westerberg -- people like that who are rockers but have a great pop sensibility. I try to emulate them, but I don't know if I'll ever get there.

Rege Behe can be reached at rbehe@tribweb.com or 412-320-7990.