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Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting QUOTES

Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting QUOTES

1 " A critic can call any poem 'doggerel.' That is no more than a slur. 'Doggerel' or 'maudlin' or 'sappy' or 'sentimental' is in the ear of the listener. By the by, 'sentimental' is okay as it is defined as 'marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism.' It is 'sentimentality' that is to be avoided, like the fiddleback spider, being as it is 'the quality or state of being sentimental to excess or in affectation.' Again we are faced with a judgement call and must keep a sharp eye on our outpourings to insure they are not overly gooey.

The intellectual elite probably believe that most of the lyrics songwriters create are 'doggerel' of one kind or another--that is to say 'trivial"......the young songwriter has now been warned about the implacable nature of the enemy. Under a rather large umbrella, preferred twentieth-century taste in art of all kinds has been characterized by a kind of detachment, or sangfroid. It is simply not chic to be carried away in one's emotional reaction to a subject. All serious communication or complaint must be carefully wrapped in a protective coating of irony and/or satire. "

― Jimmy Webb , Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting

2 " Eclectic and unfamiliar, even unpleasant musical genres are vitamins to the musical physique. If nothing else, they help us to immediately affirm a past belief. New music can even function as vaccine—we can aesthetically inoculate ourselves against some unperceived threat to our individual musical development—a process very easily—if simplistically—defined by the way we avoid repeating something that’s already been done—a title, a lyric, a riff, an attitude or any intellectual property that rightfully belongs to someone else. "

― Jimmy Webb , Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting

3 " [The new music is] building off something that wasn’t very good in the first place. Back before the singer/songwriter, a very competent musician did the music, and a very competent lyricist did the words. But everybody does both now, so you’ve got a lot of mediocrity. "

― Jimmy Webb , Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting

4 " There’s a point where one finds one’s own voice and that’s when it really starts to matter. The things that inspire me as a thirty-seven-year-old are very different from what inspired me as a twenty-year-old. "

― Jimmy Webb , Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting