The guy I’m a fan of now is Ryan Tedder from One Republic, he wrote “Halo,” “Bleeding Love,” and Jordan Sparks’ hit “Battlefield.” “Battlefield” is the Fray ripping off Coldplay ripping off everybody else, but it’s the perfect version of that. Ten years from now, people will remember what the Fray sounds like in the same way that people remember what Nickelback sounds like, but people will remember that fucking song, not because it’s original, but because he does it better than anybody else does.
I’m just in love with it because there is such an intelligence to the construction and the build. It’s not the predictability that’s easy; it’s the hardest part, developing what’s predictable. There’s a bunch of songwriters in the UK that I’m supposed to be meeting with because I want to talk with them. I want to see what they do. At the end of the day, that’s my love, just writing good songs. I just downloaded Rob Thomas’ “Lonely No More.” What the fuck? That song is so good.
Ryan Taggert is opening up for Rob Thomas. This dude wrote the 5 biggest pop songs of the past 18 months, and he’s opening for Rob Thomas.
OK. Rob Thomas is a douchebag. But the people who write for him are fucking geniuses. What I am so sensitive to are hooks and bridges and transitions that work in between. And that’s what I was working for on the record. I wanted to create familiar pop songs that at the same time are produced differently and work at a different angle, but at the end of the day strip it and play it on a fucking Wurlitzer with just vocals and it’s a pop song. People ask “why do you list Randy Newman as your biggest influence?” It has nothing to do with his witty lyrics; it has nothing to do with what he stands for and being able to develop characters. It’s the Newman songwriting. He’s so fucking awesome. Harps and Angels - a guy with that kind of career, releasing an album so late, that is that good, is like unprecedented.
The Donnas started off their career with this punk dude writing songs for them. They said that the one thing they took from him is this one sentence, which is one of my favorite sentences about the truth of pop music: One good song sounds like another good song. That is what Pandora is based off. Sometimes songs sound like a song that is completely odd and weird and not at all in the same genre. And you hear a little bit of a hook. Like in “Battlefield,” a little vocal piece of it that lasts less than three seconds that they ripped off a Paramore song, Paramore’s one hit. It’s the difference between sounding like every other song and giving it this little emotional hit. Out of all the things he could have taken it from, it’s that attention to detail.
The smartest work in literature, music, playwright, any kind of theatre, and film or television: referencing. Referencing, referencing, referencing. Understanding your surroundings, understanding your ancestors and the people who made you you. And being open to that. All those things combined make for such a powerful, new piece of work. And I have no problem saying who I love and who I rip off as songwriters because that’s how you learn. When I’m 50 years old, I’ll be writing completely differently. As a new songwriter I feel like that’s what you are supposed to do. I feel like you are supposed to be super-malleable and all these different artists should be making you into something new. That’s why I listen not to music, but to structure. I listen to hook, hook, hook, hook. If you have a good hook, you have gold in your hands. And I’m not talking about monetarily. It’s just so valuable to your song.
Will you take a song that you like and break it down into parts when you listen to it?
I was never good at math, but the way that my friend who went to MIT explained how he deconstructed an equation is exactly the way I feel I look at music. Essentially, you take the sum of its parts and put it up against the actual equation and see exactly that it’s the end result that matters more than anything else. When you are deconstructing a song, it’s never just about the main parts, it’s not about the beginning, middle and end. It’s about transition. It’s about the adhesive quality of the song. I can have an amazing verse; I can have an amazing chorus. I can’t just lump them together. That’s not going to make a good song. It’s all about what makes it a package. Pop music is packaging. Pop music is presentation. It’s never just a good hook. A good hook is only as good as the parts around it. With pop, you are doing justice to something that is so subtle and fragile. I can write an ambiance piece and I can kind of throw rules to the wind. But when I’m writing pop it’s all about restriction, it’s all about working within a certain set of rules. Like classical music, when you write an aria, when you write any other kind of piece, there are rules. And rules make the music familiar, they make the music palatable. You can make sense of it. So at the end of the day it’s about the most subtle parts, the things that aren’t as obvious, the things that are a little more difficult to digest on their own. You can take a chorus on its own, but you can’t take a transition on its own.
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