Comfort Food

I went to see a gig the other night and most of the songs in the set were unfamiliar in style, structure and lyric to me. Then there was one song, a ballad, which dealt with a universal subject (unrequieted love) and had familiar chords and melody and a straightforward structure (verse, chorus, verse, chorus middle 8, chorus) and the whole room took notice.
It was as comforting as home-cooked apple pie.

It seemed that because it was cloaked in familiarity, the song was immediately given a fair hearing by the assembled crowd. This got me thinking. A really common occurrence in songs from my students is a song that breaks boundaries in structure (two bridges and two different choruses!) and lyric (wow a subplot and a song that deals with loneliness and blame). When I ask them what the reasons are behind these radical changes they’ve made they most often reply that ‘I was bored’. I’m all for radical songs, but I would guess that Bohemian Rhapsody wasn’t written in that style because the band was ‘bored’. I imagine they had a concept they had to fulfil. Songwriters should please themselves, but if they want to have commercial success, it’s worth having a thought for the listener.

I was reading a book about the brain and how it perceives songs (Musicophilia). The understanding is that the neural pathways are strengthened by familiarity and (as a generalization) by the time we hit adulthood, our musical ‘tastes’ are hard-wired and hard to break out of. We don’t want to be challenged. We want familiarity and comfort. Of course, if you’ve spent your whole life listening to hardcore techno or Drum And Bass, this is your comfort zone. As soon as we stop challenging ourselves to listen to new types of music, we want to listen to it less. Certain chord sequences appear all the time in hit songs (I, V Vim iV for example) and certain structures crop up time and time again. We enjoy the familiarity.

Tangent

O.K, let’s talk about Gordon Ramsay. I don’t know if you’re a fan of his show ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ but there seem to be some parallels here. In the unsuccessful restaurants a common ingredient (!) for failure is the chef (songwriter) cooking challenging food that excites the chef but puts off the customer with its extreme textures and flavours. Ramsay asks the chef, ‘who are you cooking for?’ and discovers that the chef has disdain for the poor customer with the basic palette, the poor customer who probably wants to go for a meal out to relax and enjoy themselves. Ramsay’s theory is that ‘you cook for the customer’ (groundbreakingly obvious really). Ramsey often rescues the ailing eatery with some simple advice; use simple ingredients, great presentation and often a ‘comforting’ signature dish to draw in the punters. I often wonder if as songwriters, we’re often looking to create ‘chocolate prawn pasta’ when really the public would be really happy with a great Bolognese. I suppose if we write a song that’s the equivalent of ‘veal with cornflake batter with an M&M coulis’ we shouldn’t really complain when our songs don’t fly off the shelves. A lot of people like McDonalds, it makes them happy. It’s comforting. I doubt if a whole load of chefs eat there.

Herein lies the challenge of creating commercial songs that still have some flavour. It’s such a hard balancing act.

I think the savvy commercial writers realize this and don’t reinvent the wheel every time they write a song (they just change the tyre). They’re earning big bucks while we’re busy trying to sneak our square wheels through… Please don’t misunderstand me, I am in awe of these writers who find new ways to paint the same little box in a new colour.

As a finally analogy, we could cast our eye over some Hollywood blockbusters; the ‘buddy’ movie for example. There have been hundreds of these kinds of films. There are many takes on it. ‘His buddy is a dog’, or ‘2 cops don’t like each other at first but they gradually warm to each other!’. Fundamentally though, it’s a film about friendship. As songwriters, a lot of us would be trying to pitch this idea.


‘O.K, it’s a buddy movie, but the twist is, and this is SO cool, they’re not friends at all'.


Have a great week.

Jez