A TUNE WITH A VIEW
No matter where you are on the planet, a song is probably being written nearby. Ever since the Beatles accidentally persuaded anyone who could play an instrument that they must be able to compose songs on it, songwriting has become the most widely practised creative art. PRS for Music, the official song-licensing body, estimates that it registers 700,000 new musical works every year. That's just in Britain.
There are more songwriters—pro, semi-pro, would-be or simply deluded—than novelists, composers, screenwriters or painters. That must be because songwriting looks easy. Where novels and paintings require stamina, don't great songs simply materialise? Paul McCartney says the tune for "Yesterday" came to him in a dream. Keith Richards woke in the middle of the night and played the riff for "Satisfaction" into a tape recorder by his motel bed. Songwriters know the unease when their subconscious comes up with something good. Where did I pinch that from?
Even if the process clearly involves sweat, there is usually a moment when chords and words magically mesh. "Somewhere in a burst of glory/Sound becomes a song", Paul Simon sang, in one of the intricate compositions which he spends months polishing. Biographers and critics like to think the best songs are inspired by events, which is why they treasure so-called break-up albums. In fact they're usually inspired by nothing more than a chord change that seems worth repeating, a snatch of conversation that might make a title, and a studio booked for Monday.
All songwriters agree that the best ideas seem to alight upon them rather than coming from within. Waiting for the song fairy is the hardest part. Modern songwriters long for the structure of the music publisher's cell, the spur of a deadline. Chris Difford of Squeeze would rather do it for someone else: "I like to write to order. Like a tailor making a suit." Owen Parker, who has worked with Pet Shop Boys, talks yearningly of how the veteran Ervin Drake was told to come up with a song for an artist who was arriving the next day. In his notebook he found "song about ageing as if stages of your life were like wine"; 20 minutes later he had written "It Was a Very Good Year". "The best songs", says Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile, "take exactly as long to write as the song lasts."
Jimmy Webb wrote "Wichita Lineman" when Glen Campbell, who had had a hit with his "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", demanded "another song about a city". Webb dashed off a song about the working man with the soul of a poet and found that Campbell had recorded it before he'd had time to fit it with the standard middle eight. It's widely regarded as the best record either man has been associated with.
