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Stargate and Songwriting? Do we laugh or do we cry?
Written by Jimmy
Three years ago we were search for a COO for Abubilla Music. We interviewed one woman that described her current job as working in a song factory. This is verbatim her description: “Our customers are the TV and Movie companies that want music in the background of their shows/movies but don’t want to pay for it. So our job is to reverse engineer today’s hits. On one floor, we have a team that takes all the current number one’s and dissects them. They outline song structure, tempo and chord sequence and make notes on song theme, song genre and style of lead vocalist. They then replicate all this from scratch to give a basic foundation for a song. This demo then goes to the next floor, where we add new melodies that match genre and theme, but we stay away from exact melodies. This floor is supposed not to know what the original hit was. It then comes to my floor and I write lyrics. The floor above me brings in vocalists to sing final song. It is soul destroying and I want to leave.” That was it. One of the most depressing phone interviews, not because the candidate wasn’t good (she was fantastic) but because her current job was miserable.
So it was amazing to read this article from the New Yorker on song craft (click here). I’ll do a terrible job summarising, but basically it shows that the original songs were ‘engineered’ in a very similar way they were ‘reversed engineered later.’ One team comes up with fantastic structure, beats, tempo style. And the next team then brings in hooks and melodies to match the song and cope up with the ‘smash.’ These are then sent to various artists to write the final song on top. Amusingly some times they same foundation is sent to more than one artist and we end up with two songs with same foundation. Here’s an example of Halo (Beyonce) and Already Gone (Kelly Clarkson).
While the article is amazing and the artists involved are extraordinary, the ultimate concept, of ‘music engineering’ is pretty depressing. Equally, it is unbellievable successful due to the fact that none of us are willing to spend time listening to a song unless ‘hooked’ within the first 7 seconds (data from article). So… shame on us.
Jimmy