When we are very young it feels as though songs have always been
there. In fact, some of our earliest song memories retain this sense. It seems
odd to us that there is a person out there who sat down to write ‘Wheels on the Bus’
or ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’, just as it seems outrageous that ‘Happy
Birthday’ could be in copyright.
Once we can talk we can make songs of our own. Kids soon start to come up
with tunes. This is true folk music, borrowing lyrics and melodies from
previous works and melding them with something original.
At some point we also start to like
contemporary music. We begin to see films and videos of pop stars. They don’t
seem to be doing much. Making music is easy.
There
is a time, however, when we begin to realise that there is a craft to
songwriting.
When does this occur?
The great American songwriter Jimmy Webb
recently provided a fascinating answer to the question. For him, it was record
company policy that revealed the songwriter’s art:
I was
languishing by the radio listening to songs, and I made a connection. Brenda
Lee would have a big hit with ‘I’m Sorry’, and they’d come up with another
record that sounded a little like ‘I’m Sorry’. Not too much like
I’m Sorry, because that would ruin it. There was an epiphany; I became aware of
the process that was going on behind the scenes. I divined this process on my
own.
This flies in the face of mass cultural theory. If Adorno
is to be believed, the standardization and pseudo-individualization of
popular music will turn people into passive dupes. Yet here they are inspiring
them. It was this industrial process that made Jimmy Webb want to become a
writer himself:
Then, later,
I would find out that in the industry it was called a ‘follow-up’. There was a
name for it. So I was writing songs. I remember writing a song called ‘It’s
Someone Else’, and I thought, ‘That would be a great follow-up for The Everly
Brothers’ ‘Let It Be Me’’. And 25 years later I told Artie Garfunkel the story,
because he loved the Everly Brothers, and he ended up cutting it. I was 13
years old when I wrote my first follow-up.
Moreover, Jimmy Webb was the most idiosyncratic of the
professional songwriters who emerged in the 1960s. This is the man who wrote
‘Wichita Lineman’ and ‘MacArthur Park’. You can love the mechanics and you can
know the mechanics, but this does not make you mechanical.