“Songwriters on Songwriting” by Paul Zollo: Paul Simon
Today on the book list, we’re going over some highlights from the fantastic Songwriters on Songwriting by Paul Zollo.
An amazing book for songwriters, this volume features over 50 intimate interviews with a who’s who of musical artists from the last century of recorded music.
The interviews are all different, and some are more technical, while some are more conversational.
One of the more interesting discussions of musical influences comes from the interview with Paul Simon. This is one where it gets a little deep into technical songwriting techniques, and I was surprised to see Paul Simon reference such specific influences from Antonio Carlos Jobim and 12-tone music theory.
Using 12-tone theory to mix it up
It’s pretty hard to work 12-tone harmonic techniques into popular music composition in a way that doesn’t sound jarring. The famous Paul Simon song “Still Crazy After All These Years” goes in that direction, but you wouldn’t necessarily notice it as being obvious until after reading an interview like this:
It’s an interesting compositional technique to try if you’re feeling stuck in your songwriting.
To break out of any chord progression that’s starting to feel repetitive to you, all you have to do is work some chromatic motion into your progressions to spice it up a little.
12-tone composition takes that idea to the extreme, where you’re forcing yourself to use all 12 notes of the chromatic scale inside a musical composition. It’s a fun, challenging method to work a little abstraction into your music if you’re getting bored and stuck in a loop.
