"I know Nashville lyricists ave been doing that forever. Take a hit song, and write new lyrics to it, then dont tell your co writer how you did it, and they will likely compose something completely different."

Like many things online, this is sort of correct, but not exactly correct. While some people use as an excercise taking an existing song and re-writing lyrics to it, when you graduate into the professional ranks, publishers, who are already gun shy due to lawsuits, will frown on this process. What does happen is people will bring in existing songs, to use as STARTING PLACE to get ideas kicked off. Playing one or more songs to put someone in the mindset of the TYPE of song is fairly common. Also, when studying a hit artists, current and past catalog, it is something that is done, to attempt to see where they might be going, is fairly common.

Today, with so many songs sounding exactly alike, there are many downfalls to that. Most writers, don't listen to a lot of things they didn't write, because of fearing to pick up something that could endanger their own songs.

Other things that happen is that a publisher might have hit songs in their catalog and want their writers to write something "like that" to use as examples. Since now, the artists are usually involved in the process, getting a feel for a type of song, then adding their personal life experiences, will be done a good bit.

In rock and rap, they often have multiple writers writing independently at the same time, several different songs/ Theyve been given keys ,tempos, etc. and are writing for a specific artist. They will often do radio ready full up demos on these songs. Then producers have been known to cut and paste from multiple songs, and use different pieces of totally unrelated songs. It's how you sometimes get 12-14 writers on a song. They are all doing the same thing at the same time.

But the practice of using ANYTHING that is part of something already existing is fraught with trouble going in. Even if it is only to demonstrate. For a while, back in the early 2000's, a lot of studios, songwriters, etc. were selling CD's of blank tracks, to be used in songwriting excercises. They might have hundreds of older songs laying around that were never heard past the original recording, so they might go onto a CD, with titles like "COUNTRY UP-TEMPO" "COWBOY COUNTRY-,MID TEMPO" "ROCK POWER BALLAD" "HEAVY METAL ROCKER.." ETC. Those kind of things. I never knew about it until I taught a workshop in San Diego, California, where a young girl, about 16, played a track and then sang accapella her lyrics over that track. The track was very good, but the lyrics were only so so. I told her she needed to "get them recorded together. She told me that she had bought the tracks from a music store. I thought it was interesting, but felt like it could really cause problems down the road.
Two days later I was in Salt Lake Utah, teaching another workshop, and one of the women came out with THE SAME TRACKS and her completely different lyrics. That one was not that good either but the tracks sounded good. I felt like as an excercise, it's fine, but if you are going to present anything to anyone, you need to try and find your own way. Any time you include someone else's work without express permission, you are just asking for trouble. You might find yourself doing a song that has 400 other songs to the same tracks. Can be the same with melodies and lyrics too. Personally, I'd just avoid it if possible.

Music by committee. And often, it sounds like it.

MAB

Last edited by Marc Barnette; 04/19/21 02:36 PM.