Songwriting expert Robin Frederick interviewed by TAXI’s Michael Laskow
Michael Laskow: If you’re writing songs that are young-ish Pop, do you think about who is your audience is? Is it going to be a mostly female audience? How old are they? What are the topics that appeal to them? Does this line resonate with that age group versus A/C might be a different audience or is…
Robin Frederick: Well we’re going to talk about genre later. But one thing I do really strongly recommend is that while you're writing your song, you imagine your listener in the room with you and that listener is a stranger. Let's imagine that you sat down in a restaurant and somebody came along and sat down next to you, and you were sitting there having your coffee or tea or whatever and you felt like talking. And so you started telling this person your life story. How would you keep them interested? And that's what we're doing. We're talking to strangers. They don't know us. They don't care about us. So how do we keep it interesting? Well, one thing we have to do is make sure that our narrative is clear about what we're telling them. If I start telling one story, and then I get off on a tangent, and I'm on another story and then another story and another story, they're going to get bored. And think you're crazy and walk off. So another thing that we do that similar to where we're not thinking about our listener and not thinking about the trail that the pathway that our song needs to go down development pathway, is when we're trying to cram two or three songs or more into one song. I've seen up to five songs crammed into one song.
ML: So is this your number two mistake?
RF: This is the number two mistake I see over and over. And that's because I think because we have so much we want to tell people, which is a good thing. It's great to know you have a lot of songs that you want to write, and you have a lot of things you want to tell people, but you're going to write hundreds of songs. So you don't need to cram anything more than just one song into one song. And the point is, in songwriting more is not better. It's less is better!
ML: That’s also true in the instrumental cue world, the same thing.
RF: Interesting. It's because you want to stay focused on a single idea and take us deeper into it rather than wider. And this is true now of songwriting, and it has changed over the years. Story songs are kind of wider: I met you, and then we got married, and then we had kids, and then we grew old together and then we died. And that's a story song. But we don't, yeah, it's got a nice ending. So what we have is a song that stays on the surface because it's trying to tell too many stories. Take one of those; we met each and went deeply into what did it feel like to meet each other? Who was this person? Why were you attracted to them? What did you notice first about that person? What made you love them, was it the quality of their voice? Was it the way they were dressed? Was it a smile? Was it a touch? Was it the way they related to others that they do something? What was it at that moment? And that's the most important thing is if you're skimming the surface, if you're trying to tell too many stories at once, you're staying on the surface, and you're not going deep, and listeners want to go deep with you.
ML: So you do that by adding detail to go deeper. And the question I have about details, and you'll probably cover this later, so forgive me if I'm asking this prematurely. In the songs for film and TV world, you don't want a great deal of detail in the lyric because it's bound to conflict with what's going on in the script and the story on the screen.
RF: That's the kind of detail you don't want.
ML: And under the Arc de Triomphe on New Year's Eve with the pretty red dress and sparkles all over it is way too much detail form writing a song for film and TV. But that would work to some extent in regular songwriting.
RF: You do hear it for the radio, you don't hear it and film and TV, but you definitely hear it on Country radio in particular. In country songs, the amount of detail is insane. So there's a hit recently by Russell Dickerson, a Country hit called Blue Tacoma about his car, his Tacoma, and it's a wonderful four chord repeated song with a wonderful melody. And then he just digs down into this ride in his car, in the car and it's very detailed. You see that in Country songwriting all the time. Physical detail that adds up to his story. It's brilliant. But yeah, for film and TV we want to go more into the emotional detail, which is, how did that feel? So that's when you drill down into that moment. We can experience it with you if you drill down into it and tell us how it felt emotionally and physically because whatever's going on the screen is what you're trying to enhance. And they'll put your song with a scene that has that emotion in it. And the more you go deeper into the, I fell, I soared. I was cold, I was hot, I was in a hurry. I was all those emotions, all those feelings, those physical feelings, and emotional feelings will add up to a strong song, for Film and television.
ML: Whereas if you would talk about, the smell of the leather in the Tacoma, um, or you know, the…
RF: Right, it's the specifics of that, the physical details of the, of your exterior.
ML: Your surroundings won't work because the surroundings in the movie are already.
RF: Yeah. You really see that in a Country song called, I Drive Your Truck, which paints a picture of the interior of the cabin of this truck. And you know, 89 cents in the ashtray. Your Go Army hat in the back seat. Your can of Gatorade rolling on the floor. Literally, those are the images that opened that song, and then you find out that the truck belongs to his brother who died in the war and when he misses his brother, he drives his truck, and it's just gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. That's how Country songwriting uses details. That's the problem when you go to put a Country song into a film and TV is because it was picturing the interior of the truck, which is not the truck that's in that scene.