Emmaus Road Worshipers

Very rarely do the best baseball players turn into the best managers.  Sparky Anderson’s lifetime batting average was .218; Tony LaRussa’s, .199.  Mediocre numbers on the field didn’t stop either from becoming the only two managers to win a World Series title in each league.

I feel the same way, in some respects, about this post.  Todd Rundgren had one ginormous hit, 1972’s “Hello, It’s Me,” a delicious confection of pure pop sensibility, with intriguing chords and progressions and a lyric that serves as Exhibit A for introspective singer-songwriters.  Though no one refers to Rundgren as a one-hit wonder (to the contrary, his followers are known to opine that “Todd is God”), chances remain that if late Boomers and Gen Xers don’t know “Hello, It’s Me,” they (let alone Gen Yers and Screeners) don’t know him at all. (To his credit, Rundgren branched out into all kinds of styles across the spectrum–giving solo concerts accompanied only by his own voice and a computer adding bgv’s–witness “Honest Work”–or recording albums live to tape with no overdubs, to recapture the old-school appeal of musicians sitting around making music together–e.g., “The Waiting Game.”)

Nevertheless, Rundgren’s offerings in Paul Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting are as insightful as any other’s.  To wit:

On trying to write a hit:

I think, ideally, music is not self-limiting.  That’s the problem with [trying to write] a so-called hit record[:] you are trying to read other people’s minds and you’re not necessarily writing toward an ideal.  

On his particular songwriting process, one that, I think, would help broaden the landscape for writers of contemporary praise and worship music if they would give it a try.  He’s speaking in 1989, but his use of the adjective disposable could be deemed appropriate in 2020:

I’m looking for . . . a musical form in the underlying structure as [much as] I am in the melody and words that go over the top of it.  And once I have something and I’m satisfied with the infrastructure, that suggests to me a whole other range of things that I can do.  It also helps to constrain me in a certain way, to refine parts of the song. . . .

I think nowadays I’m spending a lot of time on that almost as a reaction to disposable music[, which] is what prevails generally in the industry.  But there are a lot of times when I just take an experimental approach and do things that I’m not absolutely sure are working but which help me to break out of crystallized thought processes about the way the music should be written.

On the industry (he’s speaking of pop music, but the few friends I have in the Christian music biz might be tempted to agree–at least in more cases than an idealist might expect.  If it walks like a duck. . . .):

My personal feeling is that a record company can break any record they want.  The record business is basically corrupt.  And they can make the public conscious of anybody they want if they spend the money to do it.  And it’s just who they choose.  Most of the people working in the record industry have no imagination or integrity.  And that’s why things are the way they are.  They’re looking for repeats of previous formulas. . . .

The point of being a musician is to go out there and create music and communicate it to people.  And it’s an illusion that the only way you can successfully do that is with the record companies.

So [becoming a success by industry standards] is one of two things: it’s either luck or prostitution.  You’ve got to decide, “If I’m going to be a songwriter, I’m going to have to devote myself to that craft . . . and not try to depend on making a living on it.”  Because if you depend on making a living on it, you have to do one of two things: You have to go out, find a connection, schmooze them, and try to get in that way, or you have to consciously prostitute yourself and write whatever is the currently acceptable style of music.

Guitar or piano for songwriting?:

Mostly I write on piano and occasionally . . . guitar.  I usually know which because of the kind of song I’m writing.  I’ll very rarely write ballads on the guitar.  Or those kind of harmonically complex songs; you can only get six notes out of the guitar.  It really depends on what you can do with your fingers and the tuning of the instrument.  The piano is much more flexible in that sense.  You have more options.

Favorite key?:

If I have a melody in my head, I’ll find the key that goes with it.  I have a tendency to go for keys that are easier to play for make, like C or F.  But if the songs demand that I start playing all over the black keys, that’s what happens.

I hope the musings of the past few months, though some are a little provocative, have spurred some ideas for contemporary worship music songwriters.  We’re in a hard season, and often great art comes out of coronavirus-type trials.  The Lord be with you as you write!

At this point, it might behoove me to bring anyone who’s joined the discussion recently up to speed.  The primary motivation for this lengthy series is my conviction that contemporary worship music (cwm) has more to offer than what often is currently on display.  I’m 56, so I certainly qualify for curmudgeon status by age alone.  But I also have a doctorate in worship studies from an institution, the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies (Jacksonville, Fla.), that opened my eyes to the riches to be mined from pursuing a broader range of expressions in worship, and my thesis was based on a massive, weeklong project that foisted upon college students in a Spiritual Enrichment Week chapel series at Judson (then) College congregational singing from genres to which most were unaccustomed: Catholic psalm singing, Taizé chant, Jesus People-era contemporary Christian music, Negro spirituals (yes, I’ve recently been told by African-American scholars that “Negro” is the correct adjective), and Reformation-era hymnody.  (The results were enlightening.)  So I know I bring considerable energy to any discussion of cwm related to congregational singing.

I laid out the arguments for looking at pop songwriters for suggestions for cwm in the first part of the series, and I’ve been quoting from Paul Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting for a couple of months now.  We’ve covered the likes of Bob Dylan, Carole King, and Lamont Dozier, and we have phenomenal songwriters coming up, including Jackson Browne, Suzanne Vega, and Bruce Hornsby.  This post looking at Leonard Cohen is the third two-parter in a row.  It’s fair to ask why the last three composers (the others were Jimmy Webb and Frank Zappa) received two parts and great songsmiths like Paul Simon were covered in one.  Simply put, and in the spirit of limiting the research, I’m using only Zollo’s book, and some of his interviews run longer than others.  Were I to consider others’ opinions of, say, Dylan, I’d be writing about him for the rest of my life, such is the volume of great commentary generated by his work.  Suffice to say staying with Zollo’s interviews elicits enough gems to justify the time spent but keeps this blog from becoming an all-consuming distraction.  Now, on to more Leonard Cohen:

One of the hallmarks of Cohen’s work (and, I would argue, that of the best songwriters) is his attention to detail.  When Zollo quotes Jennifer Warnes, who says Cohen once told her “the most particular answer is the most universal one,” Cohen confirms and then elaborates:

We seem to be able to relate to detail.  We seem to have an appetite for it.  It seems that our days are made of details, and if you can’t get a sense of another person’s day of details, your own day of details is summoned in your mind in some way rather than just a general line like “the days went by.”  It’s better to say, “[W]atching Captain Kangaroo.”  Not “watching TV.”  Sitting in my room “with that hopeless little screen.”  Not just TV, but the hopeless, little screen. . . .

I love to hear the details.  I was working on a line this morning for a song called “I Was Never Any Good at Loving You.”  And the line was–I don’t think I’ve nailed it yet–“I was running from the law, I thought you knew, forgiveness was the way it felt with you” or “forgiven was the way I felt with you.”  Then I got a metaphorical line, about the old law and the new law, the Old Testament and the New Testament: “I was running from the law, the old and the new, forgiven was the way I felt with you.”  No, I thought, it’s too intellectual.  Then I thought I got it: “I was running from the cops and the robbers too, forgiven was the way I felt with you.”  You got cops and robbers, it dignifies the line by making it available, by making it commonplace.

Cohen speaks here to the process of revision, of not settling for decent when very good is within grasp, with just a bit more effort:

Zollo: You mentioned how much you discard of what you write.  Is your critical voice at play while writing, or do you try to write something first and then bring in the critic?

Cohen: I bring all the people in to the team, the work force, the legion.  There’s a lot of voices that these things run through.

Zollo: Do they ever get in the way?

Cohen: Get in the way hardly begins to describe it.  It’s mayhem.  It’s mayhem and people are walking over each other’s hands.  It’s panic.  It’s fire in the theater.  People are being trampled and they’re bullies and cowards.  All the versions of yourself that you can summon are there.  And some you didn’t even know were around.

Cohen jests, of course, and I’m not advocating that level of scrutiny for cwm necessarily, but it would be nice to get a sense periodically that an inner critic was at work a bit more often in cwm, a genre that, unfortunately, begs this kind of satire: “How to Write a Worship Song in 5 Minutes” and “A Worship Song Written in 5 Minutes.”

The Lord be with you!

As was the case with Bob Dylan, I came late to the Leonard Cohen party, and I’ve been catching up ever since. Non-aficionados will at least recognize “Hallelujah,” his best-known song, one covered by a slew of artists over the years. (This clip comes from his latter-day tours, which featured one of the smoothest bands you’ll ever want to hear; witness the organ solo at the three-minute mark.) Another classic is “Bird on a Wire,” shown here in 1979, before Cohen’s voice dropped about an octave due to years of smoking and old age. Like Dylan, Cohen, raised Jewish, appropriated Christian imagery in his lyrics throughout his career. The title cut from his final album (not counting a posthumous release), You Want It Darker, is one such example, featuring the sprechstimme (hybrid speech-singing) he often employed for his final albums.

Cohen spoke frequently about the labors of songwriting, which manifested themselves in frequent creative spurts followed by long dry spells.  His own worst critic, Cohen no doubt left some great stuff on the cutting room floor, so to speak.  Here he describes the process by which he winnowed his work in the interview Paul Zollo did with him in Songwriters on Songwriting:

I find that easy versions of the song arrive first.  Although they might be able to stand as songs, they can’t stand as songs that I can sing.

Let’s just stop right there and ask ourselves how often we hear decent songs (or sing decent songs in church) that might, with just a little more care, have become excellent.  Cohen continues:

So to find a song that I can sing, to engage my interest, to penetrate my boredom with myself and my [lack of interest] in my own opinions, to penetrate those barriers, the song has to speak to me with a certain urgency. 

To be able to find that song that I can be interested in takes many versions and it takes a lot of uncovering.

“To penetrate my boredom with myself and my [lack of interest] in my own opinions”: These are phrases we’re unlikely to hear too often in our fractured times, unfortunately, when all of us, across all political and theological spectrums, seem so self-righteously assured of our own infallible wisdom.  Indeed, part of Cohen’s appeal, this near-disconcerting self-effacement, comes through frequently in the interview.  Here’s his humble take on the the creative muse:

If I knew where good songs come from, I’d go there more often.  It’s a mysterious condition.  It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun.  You’re married to a mystery.

Cohen had strong opinions, but they were infused with grace, most likely due to the whiplashed nature of the critical consensus of his work throughout his career, sometimes the darling of the intelligentsia and sometimes the butt of their scorn.  Fame is fickle, and so he refuses to take the bait, when Zollo suggests Cohen’s line “[t]he maestro says it’s Mozart, but it sounds like bubble-gum” means Cohen finds a lot of fault with current songwriting:

Some stuff is being promoted as junk and it is great art.  Remember the way that a lot of rock and roll was greeted by the authorities and the musicologists and even the hip people.  And when people were putting me down as being one thing or another, it wasn’t the guy in the subway.  He didn’t know about me.  It was the hip people, writing the columns in the hip newspapers, college papers, music papers.

So it’s very difficult to see what the verdict is going to be about a piece of work.  And the thing that really makes it an interesting game is that each generation revises the game, and decides what is poetry and song for itself, often rejecting the very carefully considered verdicts of the previous generations.  I mean, did the hippies ever think that they would be the objects of ridicule by a generation?  Self-righteous and prideful for the really bold and courageous steps they had taken to find themselves imbued in the face of an unmovable society; the risks, the chances, the dope they smoked, the acid they dropped?  Did they ever think they would be held up as figures of derision, like cartoon characters?  No.

And so it is, with every generation.  There’s that remark: “He who marries the spirit of his own generation is a widower in the next.”

I wonder how many popular contemporary worship music songwriters might find themselves metaphorical widowers in the years to come?  

More from Cohen, Lord willing, next week.  In the meantime, consider giving him a listen on your favorite streaming source.  The aforementioned You Want It Darker is part of a late-in-life trilogy (of sorts) that also includes Old Ideas and Popular Problems, both of which address mortality and loss in wonderfully poetic ways.  If you’d like to wallow in one of the smoothest touring ensembles ever to back a singer-songwriter, you can’t go wrong with any of his live albums, particularly Live in London and Live in Dublin.  

The Lord be with you!

We feature more this week from the always mercurial, occasionally obnoxious, often puerile, never boring mind of Frank Zappa, courtesy of the interview conducted by Paul Zollo in his Songwriters on Songwriting. As noted earlier, though Zappa died in 1993, and though his thoughts concern the pop-music industry, we can easily apply much of his content to the worship-music industry in 2020. I am not going to bother to change all the male-dominant language here. Please apply his words across the genders:

Zollo: So what would be your advice to the young songwriter when he sits down to write a song–should he concern himself with writing a good hook or should he simply try to write a great song?

Zappa: It depends on what he wants to do.  If he just wants to make money, he should copy everybody else’s stuff, which is what everybody else is doing.

Zollo: But you can only do that for so long.

Zappa: It depends on how good a copier you are.

Zollo: How about if you want a career in songwriting?

Zappa: Basically, it’s a career in being a fraud.  It’s just like when someone says, ‘What is your advice to a young composer?’  I always say, ‘Get a Real Estate license.’  You can’t earn a living being a composer in the United States.  But as far as being a songwriter goes, you can make a lot of money if you will listen to what everybody else has done that has been successful and tweak it around to the point where you can convince an accountant at a record company that you’re fresh, new, and original.  This is usually accomplished by changing your hairdo periodically and having a good wardrobe.  That’s basically the business you’re entering.  The idea of writing a nice tune is the farthest thing from the minds of the people you’ll be doing business with, and that is the reality of the business.

Harsh?  Zappa is just getting warmed up.  Here’s his response to the assertion made by other songwriters Zollo referenced that there hadn’t been a good melody written since the early 60’s:

I’d say that’s probably true because the basic thrust of today’s music is dance music, especially for Americans, who have an incredibly limited concept of what rhythm is.  If you look at the typical dance rhythms that motivate an American dancer, you’re very close to march music.  It’s boom-bap-boom-bap, and if there’s anything more than that, an American’s feet get tangled up.

So you start with a basic sort of fascist marching beat, and then you add a few parallel fifths to it (if you want to be heavy metal) and make sure that your melodies don’t have anything shorter than an eighth note.  Make sure that there is an incredible amount of repetition in the composition because you’re presuming that when people are out there semi-marching and pumping their buttocks up and down that they couldn’t really comprehend any more than a five-note melody.

If you were to do a statistical analysis of some of the most popular, big-selling tunes that have been on the market in recent days, you’d see not too many notes, the chords don’t give you too many surprises, and the beat is boom-bap.  So if you want to do that and make a lot of money, it’s not too hard to learn.  But if you want to write the great American tune, I would say to get a Real Estate license.

As previously noted, we run the risk of apples-to-oranges comparisons in this series when we employ secular artists in our attempts to improve the songwriting for the contemporary Church.  That acknowledged, let’s analyze Zappa’s concluding paragraph above where contemporary worship music (cwm) is concerned.  

1. “[There are] not too many notes.”  Current CCLI #1 song: four notes in the verse phrases, each repeated three times; five notes in the bridge phrases, each repeated over and over.  What Zappa doesn’t mention re: melody but what is true for much of cwm is the melodies tend to be conjunct (stepwise, with very few leaps).  That’s true for this song, which features one-step melody lines throughout the examples above, save for two separate two-step leaps (i.e., just shy of drones).
2. “[T]he chords don’t give you too many surprises.”  Of the top 10 CCLI songs, eight utilize only the holy quartet of cwm chords: I, IV, V, and vi.  The other two use those four, but one adds a ii, and the other adds a iii. 
3. “[T]he beat is boom-bap.”  The cwm equivalent of the dynamic Zappa decried in the early 90’s is the power ballad.  Of the top 10 CCLI songs, nine can be considered power ballads–the only one that would qualify as an up-tempo tune completely distinct from power balladry would be “This Is Amazing Grace”–and of that nine, eight of them have recommended tempo markings between 56-82, with the average in the mid 60’s.

Is any of this evil or heretical?  Of course not.  But does it, perhaps, point to the cwm industry as regularly bereft of creativity, frequently beholden to what has “worked” recently, and often stuck in a rut dug deep by four-chord, mid-tempo power ballads?  I encourage you to examine the evidence yourself.

The Lord be with you!