Pop songwriter • multi-instrumentalist
What sort of kid were you?
Oldest of 6, I sorta had to keep it together, but I was painfully shy and a real nature bug, which wrought the genesis for my quasi-pantheism today. Autumn as portent of winter brought me to tears so often that it became an embarrassment. HIGHLY nostalgic and romantic until I burnt that circuit out by overuse by adolescence. Reading and music saved my psychic a**. The golden rule was easily visible in action to me from a young age. In my picture here, I am chasing my now-lost youth.
Do you feel that melody is as important as it once was?
Depends on what avenue you’re looking at. While I deride the ascendency of non-melodic movements in popular music like rap, hip hop and what passes for modern R&B, much good melody is being championed by modern composers over many ethnicities. The entire concept of melody seems to be morphing away from the populist everybody-singing-around-the-parlor-piano to a focus on fixed recordings and specific timbres as key to the song instead of being mere production choices, as once they were. Personally, I feel this can lead to laziness in creating a melody that can stand alone apart from these conceits. I predict that what will continue to stand the test of time is what people themselves can sing or whistle or play themselves on a given instrument, e.g. the melody alone– no lyrics, no particular sound. All that is icing– the core is the mere notes/rhythm.
When you are working on a song, how do you generate melodic ideas? Do you play chords on a piano?
Apart from the very best fertile ground (ideas vouchsafed from a dream or heard in my head while performing other tasks, which can and has included listening to other music radically different from the ideas I then heard), I play chords on whatever is the instrument of choice at the moment — generally piano or guitar. As many others have attested, the sound and feel of the instrument can itself lead to certain note choices. My true test of a harmonic idea is whether or not it can stand alone with just a bass line below it– if the auditor can fill in some of the missing notes of the implied chord him or herself. Every once in a great while I will begin with words, which dictate a certain rhythm and sometimes suggest an architecture of a melody– whether it goes up or down to fit the words best.
Tell me about the track that’s featured.
“I Send Up My Prayer” was a small dream idea that I honed staring out the window on the bus to work in 1986. I had gotten sick of hearing music in my head and not knowing what the chords were, so learned to decipher those over the past few years. When I did sit down to play what I had constructed in my head, the music came quickly (this was absolutely a keyboard song, with dense close voicings) and it can work with just melody and bass, which is how I do the first verse when I perform it. The words are still not quite to my liking despite months of dickering. This version was recorded in 2010 by a Dutch group, the Nick Vernier Band, who asked me to sing the lead vocal.
Listen to the featured song!
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