I have been teaching songwriting for a lot of years as a means to other ends: with my private guitar and production students, with my music tech students, with my music education students, with my music theory students. But this semester at The New School, I get to teach my first actual songwriting class whose only goal is to be a songwriting class. It’s called The Song Factory. I didn’t choose the name, but I like it.
The class is meant to both be a songwriting workshop and a survey of American popular song. My plan is to do six units. For each unit, the class will do some listening, reading and discussion, and then they will write an original song. I am requiring that these songs have lyrics, and the students must sing/rap them in class. I am not particular about how they accompany their vocals. They can play their instruments, record their own backing tracks, or use existing loops, instrumentals, type beats or karaoke tracks. We will talk about composition, arrangement and production a bit, but we will mainly be concerned with the sung/rapped aspect of songwriting.
Getting Started
To get going, we will first need to define what a song is. Does it need to have words? Does it need to be sung by a human voice? Does it need a melody? Does it need a rhythm? We will also examine the difference between pieces, songs, and grooves. And we will begin the fraught conversation about authorship and ownership.
Songwriting Project
Write new lyrics for an existing song. They can be parodic or serious (or both!)
Blues and Roots
We will work toward definitions of “blues,” “country,” “ragtime,” and “old-time” music. We will parse out the racialized nature of genre descriptors and the lingering effects of minstrelry on American popular culture.
Reading and Listening
- The Twelve Bar Blues
- Elizabeth Cotten’s Fingerstyle Ragtime
- Nicholas Stoia – Blues Lyric Formulas in Early Country Music, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll
- Wayne Marshall – Ragtime Country: Rhythmically Recovering Country’s Black Heritage
- Matthew D. Morrison – Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse
Songwriting Project
Write a song in the style of traditional/old-time country, ragtime, or blues.
Standards and Showtunes
Here is where we cover the Great American Songbook: Tin Pan Alley, midcentury musicals, and pre-rock popular song. This is not a class about jazz, but we will find out where many jazz standards originate. We will also ask what makes “classic” Disney songs different from more current ones.
Reading and Listening
- Where do jazz standards come from?
- Richard O. Boyer – The Hot Bach (read at least part one, but also optionally part two and part three)
- Adam Gopnik – The Pleasure and Pain of Being Cole Porter
- Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbook albums – listen to a few songs from each one
Songwriting Project
Write your own entry in the Great American Songbook. If you need an instrumental backing track, I recommend using a Jamey Aebersold jazz play-along. You can get the individual tracks on iTunes. These volumes are particularly useful:
Rock and R&B
Rock and R&B have a common point of origin in the blues, but then evolved in different directions. It is still useful to compare them – from a musicological perspective, many rock songs are simply R&B played fast and straight. We will ask why and how rock transformed from a Black genre into a white one.
Reading and Listening
- Ned Rorem – The Music of the Beatles
- Compare recordings of “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers with the Beatles’ performance of the song on the Ed Sullivan Show
- Compare recordings of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” by the Supremes and by Vanilla Fudge
- Compare recordings of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye and by Creedence Clearwater Revival
Songwriting Project:
Write a rock or (pre-hip-hop) R&B song.
Dance, Funk, and Pop
This unit covers everything from James Brown and P-Funk through disco, electronic dance music, and much of the current top 40. While this encompasses a broad range of styles, the songwriting approaches in these styles are broadly similar. As with rock, we will examine the ways in which disco, techno and house originated in Black communities before spreading into the white mainstream.
Reading and Listening
- Ben Neill – Pleasure Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of Current Electronic Music
- Doctorin’ the Top 40
- Jon Seabrook – The Song Machine
Songwriting Project
Write a dance, funk or top 40 pop song. It should be something you could play in the club.
Rap and Hip-Hop
We will look at the origins of hip-hop music in funk and disco and the rise of the emcee as the central figure in the music. We will listen to examples of rap before hip-hop, and examples of hip-hop without rap. Since I am unqualified to teach people how to flow, we will have a guest appearance from the great Toni Blackman.
Reading and Listening
- Toni Blackman – The Wisdom of the Cypher (or listen to my remix)
- Jesse McCarthy – Notes on Trap
- Chris Thile, Kendrick Lamar, and the Problem of the White Rap Cover (listen to Chris Thile’s cover of “Alright” here)
Songwriting Project
Write a rap verse, or create a piece of original hip-hop music using sampled/scratched vocals.
Going Further
Reading and Listening
Thanks for this, some great reading/listening/watching here!
Very cool
Such a cool way you put culture at the centre. You could teach something like this online, too.
For a good culture shock, compare the Isley Brothers with Lulu’s (!) cover of Shout.
And then of course Pat Boone . . .
Thanks for posting this.
Oh yeah, Pat doing Tutti Fruiti was………..something.