GEARED continues talking to solo drum guru GRANT COLLINS, this week focussing entirely on songwriting.

GEARED: It’s all structure. A lot of the time we put songwriting down to hooks and melody, but they are embellishments to good structure and pacing. Repeating when you need to, changing when you need to ... that’s the bread and butter.

GRANT COLLINS: Exactly, and I think that comes from experience too – people who sit down and listen to a lot of songs. I know when I write mine I don’t necessarily look for a hook. I like a lot of classical contemporary music, and a lot of pop music, and then I think when people listen to my stuff they go, ‘Oh I loved it when you put that little bit in there.’ It gives them something to relate to, because as you’re saying, song form, structure, hooks, that’s what people relate to in a song. It might be a number one hit single and people might only know the chorus, they don’t always know the little bits going on. All those little bits help keep the flow up. But it’s those few parts of the song that are highlighted which really grab people’s attention. Like you mentioned, it’s an art knowing when to put them in, how long to do it for and that sort of thing.

G: Do you think songwriting as a whole is evolving as time goes on? Or are we still using those very fundamental principles in pop music that people have had since the ‘50s?

GC: I think it depends what genre you’re talking about. If you’re talking about pop music today I think there is a lot of similarities in the way they do it, because of the pop formula. Also with the instrumentation of pop: guitars, bass and drums – you can have someone who has been playing their instrument for two years, and they can come up with a really cool idea and put it into a song. So it’s not like they’ve had to study or they have serious technical skills under their fingers or that kind of thing. Yet, if you’re looking at the classical contemporary realm, it’s a different thing, because people there, you’re not necessarily driving because you need a number one hit, they’re just trying to express these new creative ideas, they’re not really worried if no one is going to dance to it or it’s over three and a half minutes. The limitations aren’t as great.

So I think maybe that is an area that is really developing, and we’re still always bringing in from the old – I think it’s really important to learn the roots of things. While I was doing African rhythms, I studied right back from the folkloric rhythms right up to the modern contemporary players, that sort of thing. Good pop music I think, when you get the really good pop writers, they’ve done the same thing – they’ve studied the classics over the years, so they have a really good vocabulary and depth of knowledge. For some of the younger dudes it might be difficult, because they’ve got an instrument they might only have been playing for a couple of years, they can write a few great tunes, they put out an album, then all of a sudden the record company are going ‘Quick we need another album, we need another album!’ And it’s like ‘Well, we haven’t got a lot of ideas left at the moment.’ And that’s where those guys can go back and listen to a whole string of music that came before them in their genre and other genres to help generate and influence different ideas in their creative selves.

G: Then they get blasted by their fans and the press for writing a throwback album for their sophomore effort, and fall off the radar...

GC: Exactly, how many have we seen that happen to? You couldn’t count them.

G: It’s so true though, when I first picked up a guitar I wrote a song, because I couldn’t play other people’s songs, because I couldn’t play guitar. If you extrapolate that by a year or two years – as you say – then you have people writing a bunch of songs and probably getting quite good at them, by virtue of the fact they can’t play much else.

GC: It’s funny that, and that’s how sometimes new fresh ideas happen, because people don’t know the rules. It’s a combination of the two. It’s like with Einstein, when he came up with some of his best things, it was before he actually knew what the foundations of previous statements were. Then later in his career he didn’t come up with many because a lot of his knowledge had been developed to a point where he couldn’t think outside the box as much.

You’re totally right, I remember doing that with friends because we couldn’t touch any of the stuff we liked listening to, so we would jam and make up our own things. But that’s where the fun comes from and hopefully people can learn to keep that spirit and that creative self.

G: How do you keep that spirit?

GC: Music for me is not a job, I’m lucky that I love what I do. With my solo stuff I’m always listening to different styles of music, and even analysing different composers and the way that they do it. I look at the way the composer has set his instruments interplaying, compositional techniques like counterpoints and isorhythms, and see how they use those and try to apply those to my music, and with the solo drum set, there’s no real existing repertoire out there, I’ve got to write it. So I draw from all these composers, and then that way when I’m on the kit, I’m not looking to do a rock beat, I’m coming from a total blank canvas. I’ve got certain idiosyncrasies within my playing, things just come out. Then the idea is I try to bend those into something I’m not familiar with. Like if I’d normally play something on my right hand on a cowbell, I’ll put it down on my left foot, so then I frees up the other limb. I go ‘Wow, okay, the right hand can’t play that any more, I have to come up with a new idea’. So now when I write, I’m writing for the four different limbs.

GRANT COLLINS brings his One Man Percussion Orchestra show to Redland Performing Arts Centre, Wednesday Sep 3 & the Brisbane Powerhouse Friday Sep 5.

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