Songwriting expert Robin Frederick interviewed by TAXI’s Michael Laskow
Michael Laskow: What is the number one mistake that songwriters make?
Robin Frederick: Not knowing what you're writing about. That's the number one mistake. Actually what's interesting is they may think they know what they're writing about, but the truth is they don't. What happens is you get—and this happens to all of us—you get this wonderful line of inspiration or two or three or four lines. Yeah. Because that's the way, most of us start our songs. We get an idea, and we go, oh, I love those lines. I'm going to put those down. Maybe that's my verse. I'm into my song here I go and off and running. And at that point, if you don't stop and think about what do those lines mean, and usually we don't, we get these four lines that we love and then we're going to write, a verse, a chorus to go with them. So when you write a chorus that kind of relates to those lines that are in that first section. And you think, okay, there's a chorus, I got a chorus, and now I've got to write verse two. And then you really have to know what you're writing about because you can’t write verse two unless you know how to develop what you said in the first verse. So if you don't stop at the point that your inspiration gives you those opening lines and say, what are these about? What am I really talking about? What's my theme? What's my core idea? What is it? Am I trying to say? If you don't do that, if you just keep going on inspiration, chances are the song that you write will not have any cohesiveness and listeners will drop out at a certain point because they can't follow you either. You know, maybe they'll hear something in it, and maybe they can kind of put it together if they see some pattern there, but you're asking your listeners to work, and that's not our job. You know, listeners are there to enjoy and feel and be taken for a ride somewhere by us.
ML: That a great way to put it.
RF: Yeah. They're not there to work.
ML: It's entertaining. You turn on the TV because you expect that you can kind of be mindlessly entertained.
RF: I think people need that. And, and I think that as songwriters, we sometimes tend to insist that listeners give us their energy and that's not really our business. We can do that. We can ask them to work hard at it. You'll have fewer listeners because most listeners really come for the ride, for the emotional ride to feel something, to experience someone else's life, to experience what happened to you, or feel it themselves and say, this happened to me.
ML: Yep, it’s got to resonate.
RF: Yeah. And make it resonate. And then it's, then it becomes not just entertainment but also insight, but we have to give it to them so that they, cause if we ask them to work too hard, they'll drop out. They, have lives, they have, you know, kids, they have a tough time there. Our job is not to make it tougher.
ML: So many years ago when I first started TAXI and, I was writing all the listings and sending them out. We published a whopping 30 listings a month, and I got an email from a woman that said, I don’t understand what this listing means. And I said, well then maybe you should read it a second time, and it will sink in. And she basically wagged her finger at me and taught me a great life lesson. She said, “Young man, communication is not the responsibility of the listener. It's the responsibility of the person communicating. And if I don't understand what your listing says, that's your fault, not mine.”
RF: Let's thank her.
ML: She changed my life. The woman literally changed my life by telling me that. It improved my communication to TAXI’s members. It improved the quality of the listings. And that is something that you would absolutely say, and you're basically saying it here, you just said it.
RF: It's on us to do it and to give them the experience is not on them to go and make themselves have the experience. We're the ones who were saying, “Listen to our song, let me give you an experience.” And that's on us. So if we make it too hard for them and they drop out, we can't blame them. As the head screener at TAXI, I would get complaints, not a lot, but every once in a while I would get somebody who would say, I don't want to dumb down my songs. I don't want to make it easy for listeners.” Well, that's fine. You can do that. I mean, you can write stuff that's really challenging, but don't complain when you don't have a lot of listeners.
So just be aware that when you start writing your songs, if you don't know what you're writing, your listener probably isn't going to know either and they aren't going to make an effort to find out. So something you can do as a good exercise to do is to find a theme. And then, let's say your theme is I love you, but you don't love me. Okay, That's a theme that's very common in songs, and we all treat it in different ways, and it's a really good thing because listeners can relate to it, but let's say that's your pick, that theme. I love you, but you don't love me. And then practice answering the questions that that theme suggests. Answering them in your own way, which is; What does that mean? How do I feel about that? What's the situation? What's happening? How did I get here? What do I expect to do next? How am I going to get out of this? What do I hope will happen? That's a whole list of questions. You can interview yourself and get yourself to the next level. That way you know what you're writing about. If you don't ask yourself what you're writing that song about, not only will you not know, but you're also not likely to have the insights that you would get if you really looked at it.