

Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard Deconstructs the Science of Songwriting - sarahf
https://medium.com/cuepoint/death-cab-for-cutie-s-ben-gibbard-deconstructs-the-science-of-songwriting-bbd085a06a2a

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mturmon
Besides the OP, and Suzanne Vega's recent series of posts for the _NYT_ ,
here's another, almost completely opposite, guide to songwriting, extracted
from a (very) long article by David Samuels from _n+1_ cheekily called "Justin
Timberlake Has a Cold" \--

While [Mike] Caren’s rules are not comprehensive or exclusive, it is easy to
measure their value by a glance at the dozens of gold and platinum records
hanging in his office. He is happy to run down his rules for me.

“First, it starts with an expression of ‘Hey,’ ‘Oops,’ ‘Excuse me,’” he
begins. “Second is a personal statement: ‘I’m a hustler, baby,’ ‘I wanna love
you,’ ‘I need you tonight.’ Third is telling you what to do: ‘Put your hands
up,’ ‘Give me all your love,’ ‘Jump.’ Fourth is asking a question: ‘Will you
love me tomorrow,’ ‘Where have you been all my life,’ ‘Will the real Slim
Shady please stand up.’”

He takes a deep breath, and rattles off another four rules. “Five is logic,”
he says, “which could be counting, or could be spelling or phonetics:
‘1-2-3-4, let the bodies hit the floor,’ or ‘Ca-li-fornia is comp-li-cated,’
those kind of things. Six would be catchphrases that roll off the tip of your
tongue because you know them: ‘Never say never,’ ‘Rain on my parade.’ Seven
would be what we call stutter, like, ‘D-d-don’t stop the beat,’ but it could
also be repetition: ‘Will the real Slim Shady please stand up, please stand
up, please stand up.’ Eight is going back to logic again, like hot or cold,
heaven or hell, head to toe, all those kind of things.” The ninth rule of hit
songwriting is silence.

[...]

His favorite example of a song that uses the most rules in the fewest words is
a hit by the rapper Ludacris, “What’s Your Fantasy,” which starts off with the
lyric “I wanna li-li-li-lick you from your head to your toes.” Caren loves
that song. “In the first line: a personal statement, ‘I want to,’ a stutter,
repetition, ‘li-lick you,’ logic, ‘from your head to your toes, move from the
bed down to the down to the, to the floor,’” he explains. “‘I gotta
know’—another personal statement—and asks a question, ‘What’s your fantasy?’
So he’s got six of them, in the first two lines of the song.”

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uniclaude
I feel like this comment provided more information on the topic than the whole
article. Great writeup.

------
aaronbrethorst

        The Photo Album is my least favorite record we’ve
        ever made because it was a really difficult,
        arduous process to make it. We almost broke up
        during the recording of the record and then the
        tour after that was horrible. I look back on that
        record and I think I didn’t have enough songs —
        I barely had 10 songs and two of the 10 were barely
        complete thoughts.
    

Funny, given that _The Photo Album_ is usually one of the top 2-3 Death Cab
albums[1] of their most dedicated, long-term fans. For what it's worth, I
think the second half of _Kintsugi_ is weak, and I hope that this isn't a
result of Walla's departure.

[1] Mine are probably _Transatlanticism_ , _Plans_ , and _The Photo Album_ ,
although _The Open Door EP_ holds a special place in my heart.

~~~
bpyne
Michael Stipe said in an interview that "Fables of the Reconstruction" was his
least liked record. When they recorded it the band was exhausted from touring,
they were burned out and very negative. The negativity made for a dark record.
He felt the negativity wasn't what they were about. That album is one of my
favorites because of the darkness.

Ben addressed this divide between the artist and fan in the interview. It's so
true that the context in which a song is heard becomes part of the song in a
person's memory.

I'm a recently-become fan of DCfC. I can already tell that I'm going to listen
to their songs many times over and think about every lyric in their albums the
same way I did with REM.

~~~
tptacek
Which is crazy because fully half of REM's whole catalog is inessential, and
Fables is if not their second best album at least their third best, and is the
bridge between the Murmur sound and the musical trajectory they'd start on
with Document. Also: there's a difference between "darkness" and "melancholy",
and also: better "dark" than "sophomorically shrill", which is the tone they
adopted on Pageant, Document, and (especially) Green.

You can do better than Death Cab! I liked some of their earlier albums, but
their lyrics have always been sort of weak and superficial to me (those lyrics
also ruined The Postal Service for me).

~~~
sanderjd
To each their own – I like (a lot of) the lyrics of both Death Cab and The
Postal Service _because_ they're refreshingly simple and straightforward
without being eye-rollingly cheesy. I think they pull off an "I'm just a
normal person telling you about my thoughts and feelings" effect without being
inane.

Edit: And thanks for the interesting run-down of REM albums. I've never
listened to them much, and you've given me a good sense of where to start.

~~~
mturmon
Yet, Thomas coyly omitted his actual #1 and #2 picks!

The place to start with REM would be _Automatic for the People_ , a great
record by any standard; it is quite forthright, lyrically, about where it's
coming from.

Second would be _Murmur_ , which is somewhat the reverse. You get the feeling,
but the words are ornamentation or invitations to projection.

~~~
tptacek
Murmur, Reckoning/Fables, Automatic, Document, Pageant, Green, Out of Time,
and after that can someone just make me a mix tape with the good songs from
the other 7 albums?

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tptacek
Disappointing, given the title.

~~~
aesthetics1
Yeah, it really just touches on the 2 recent plagiarism issues. They then go
on discussing the new album basically. Not much "science" if you ask me.

~~~
hellameta
If you really are interested the following book gives great insight to the
"science" of it all. It's a how to guide but it gives great insight.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1582975779](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1582975779)

~~~
mcgoo
This is about how Stock/Aitken/Waterman thought about it. They wrote/produced
more than 100 British chart hits in the eighties and nineties.
[http://z3.invisionfree.com/Madonna_Dot_Refugees/ar/t12695.ht...](http://z3.invisionfree.com/Madonna_Dot_Refugees/ar/t12695.htm)

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octatoan
What the hell is "the Hindustani Classical Scale"?!

~~~
hrnnnnnn
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_classical_music#Prin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_classical_music#Principles_of_Hindustani_music)

