Songwriting Techniques

[chaim]

If you take that list and go through Neil Young's discography, you'll notice that Young is a bad writer. And not many people seem to think that he is.
And if you do something that is not a cliche, most experts are going to say it sucks anyway.

[Jonny Come Lately]

Interesting point. I'm now trying to think about Neil Young songs that break these rules.

Rule #1 (Over the top sentimentality) - Some of the softer songs on After The Gold Rush, perhaps fit this - I Believe In You perhaps best fits in this category, maybe Birds as well. A few of the songs from his lighter acoustic country albums, especially Comes A Time and Harvest Moon, break this rule too.
Rule #2 (Trying too hard) - Arguably Piece Of Crap could be seen as trying to hard to fit in with grunge music. It doesn't really fit the dark atmosphere of most of the rest of the Sleeps With Angels album.
Rule #3 (Nostalgia) - Days That Used To Be can be identified as one of these by its title alone, although it isn't really a sentimental song so in a way it kind of inverts this one. From Hank To Hendrix, however, does break this rule.
Rule #4 (Cliché phrases) - Neil is actually pretty good at avoiding this one on the whole I think, certainly compared to the rules about nostalgia and sentimentality. Only Love Can Break Your Heart perhaps stands out as one that does break this rule. One or two cliché phrases in a song are fine IMO, it's only a problem when they start dominating the lyrics that they become a problem. T-Bone arguably should go in this category but the repeated lyrics about mashed potatoes and the eponymous steak aren't really clichés so it manages to avert this.
Rule #5 (Too heavy a reliance on non-words) - There's a few Neil songs which are guilty as charged that readily spring to my mind. Even the mighty Down By The River (la, la, la...) falls into this trap, as do Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and I Believe In You.

The funny thing is I really like almost all of these songs and don't generally consider their lyrics to be a weak point in any way...

Then again, I think part of what makes Neil Young great as a songwriter (I certainly do not consider him a bad songwriter. No way! But then again I am a big fan) is how he can break the rules and get away with it. Just listen to the famous Cinnamon Girl guitar solo for proof

[NightMistBlue]

Neil has done entire albums that broke rule #2 about following trends: Trans and Everybody's Rockin'.

[chaim]

I wrote my post as a huge Neil Young fan. IMO Neil Young can take a cliche (musical or lyrical) and make it sound fantastic. So there goes that rule out the window.
Some of his later songs are very sentimental, but they are good songs. So there goes that rule out the window.
Some of his later songs are very nostalgic, but they are good songs. So there goes that rule out the window.

Also, it's dumb to combine this stuff as "rules", because some people might actually prefer to hear stuff that are forbidden in these stupid lists.
Also, in my opinion we live in an age when a lot of people are afraid of showing emotion in pop music. Because showing emotion is corny. If you don't want to be corny, you better avoid anything that might be considered sentimental.

EDIT:

And most of all, in my opinion songwriting should be about self expression - NOT about someone telling you what you should and should not write about.

[Jonny Come Lately]

I'm with you on Neil Young. I think it would be ridiculous to suggest that one of the most awesome NY & Crazy Horse jams (with great lyrics to boot) in Down By The River is a 'bad' song because it uses the non-words 'la la la'. My attitude to these rules of songwriting can be described by a line I'll nick from the first Pirates of Caribbean movie: 'they're more like guidelines than actual rules'.

I think you can write a great song that breaks one of these 'rules', but any song that breaks all of them is likely to end up becoming a game of 'spot the cliché'. With the possible exception of nostalgia which I would say is a common theme but many people have done well (Bruce Springsteen is another obvious name), all of the other themes are IMO legitimate criticisms of a song. A bad song that is overly sentimental can be considered cloying, or a badly written song that tries to 'down with the kids' is probably going to be laughed at.

I've just remembered an article that I read a while ago which is relevant to this discussion. Although the title specifically concerns Coldplay, once you get beyond the first three paragraphs or so the critique does focus on songwriting techniques, which bring to mind some of the rules posted in VA's article.

http://www.postconsumerreports.com/2...reat-band.html

The article is part 2 of a series (Part 1 isn't especially relevant to this topic), but Part 2 has good points. If anything, despite the article's title I'd say the most interesting part has nothing to do with Coldplay, and is in fact the paragraph ('side note rant') about The Beatles and Hey Jude towards the bottom of the page. Just shows that a song which could be seen as breaking more than one of the rules managed to unite an extremely wide audience (I could mention that Paul McCartney seemed to play that same song at nearly every major event that year... but that's just me).

[Freypower]

Hey Jude does speak to humanity. So does Let It Be. That is all I have to say on that. This is not a topic to which I feel I can contribute because I will just start raving about favourite song lyrics.

[NightMistBlue]

This is a combination tribute to Glenn and songwriting lesson, using "Take It Easy" as an example of a multi-verse song:
http://www.secretsofsongwriting.com/...erse-melodies/

[Jonny Come Lately]

Very interesting NMB. I am not a musical expert but the piece gets its points across very well and clearly about multi-verse songs. It's also interesting how this type of song can easily be distinguished from genuinely chorus-free songs (from the Eagles canon, I think of The Last Resort or King Of Hollywood).

There is one thing I do disagree with (non-Eagles or Glenn related, it should be said); but I feel that Like A Rolling Stone does have a true chorus, starting with 'how does it feel?'. There are other Dylan songs which would be better examples of this multi-verse format, I reckon Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts from Blood On The Tracks would perhaps be a better one. I think Telegraph Road by Dire Straits also fits this description - again, there is a clear and memorable motif but not a true chorus in the strictest sense.

[NightMistBlue]

I'm tempted to buy that guy's e-book, he explains things in a lucid way. In another article, he tells how to write a bridge, aka middle eight and it's extremely helpful.

OT: maybe *too* helpful, as the song I'm working on now has two (different) bridges - it's a bit of a mongrel.

[NightMistBlue]

This isn't about technique per se, but general songwriting encouragement.

A co-worker met Barry Gibb at a charity event this past Saturday night, and she was sweet (and brave) enough to ask him for an autograph for me. She told him I'm an aspiring songwriter and asked what advice he would give me. Mr. Gibb said the most important thing is to write all the time and to never give up. He wrote that encouragement on my autograph, which is definitely getting framed!