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 GEARED talks to DEBORAH CONWAY about the QUEENSLAND MUSIC FESTIVAL’s SONG TRAILS series of songwriting workshops.
GEARED: What, basically, does the workshop consist of?
DEBORAH CONWAY: I curated the song trails in 2007 and we started out by talking about ourselves and our personal experience as writers and trying to demystify the craft of songwriting; which is difficult but we gave it a good shot. I brought with me Dave Faulkner, Kev Carmody and Uncle Henry on that trip. So the four of us went through our personal experiences, then we engaged the participants in bringing the songs they held dear, or were working on at the time, to the public arena and tried to give them helpful criticism about those.
G: So from your description, definitely much more of a workshop than a seminar. Its not just someone whacking on about…
DC: No! No definitely, it definitely will take a workshop format, but what format exactly it will adopt, that’s pretty much up to Melinda [Schneider] and her other three writers, Leah Flanagan, Mark Gable and Eric McCusker.
G: What general advice can you give to songwriters?
DC: First of all, I do think it’s a very mysterious process, but there’s some good, basic rules that you can follow in order to make it a slightly less mystical process and I think number one would be always carry something with you – pen and paper, a little tape recorder whatever just something to get those ideas so they don’t sort of flit into your head and then leave again. They can be ideas like you might hear a snatch of dialogue on public transport or something happens on the radio that you think wow, that’s fantastic. It can happen anywhere at any time and if your mind is open and receptive to the idea, anything really can be turned into a song. That’s a great way to begin to be a songwriter.
G: So just be prepared to keep all of your ideas and save them for later.
DC: That’s right and be prepared to make notes and to jot melody ideas down and if you do note-take that’s great, if you don’t then a little tape recorder – most telephones have that facility these days – is always useful.
G: What about the role of critical analysis in songwriting? There are so many documents of fantastic songwriting out there that people actually own on CD and record and MP3. How important is being able to think critically and deconstruct a song and work out why it was so great and trying to incorporate that back into your own songwriting?
DC: I think that’s a really fantastic way to approach songwriting and in fact if you’re looking at blank piece of paper and you just can’t put anything down, sometimes it’s just a really nice circumstance or short cut to just kind of just get yourself out of that mindframe or mindset of being dry and uninspired, to go back to your favourite songs and to listen to them and figure out what it is you love about them and maybe try and write a song that sounds like that – and that’s okay too.
G: How vital is being ruthless and not being precious and cutting out things that don’t work?
DC: It is absolutely vital to the process. You know I never used to like the process of drafting and re-drafting but I actually do now and I think it’s very valuable because you do have to lose some favourite bits of what you’ve done in order to make a better flow or in order to take it away from an obvious cliché. But in the end you may end up turning around and putting some of that back but it’s good to go through the exercise, it’s good to listen with a very critical ear and if you don’t have it then it’s good to work with someone who does.
G: In terms of another band member or…?
DC: Another band member, another writer a producer, someone you can trust, a husband or wife or girlfriend or boyfriend. A relationship that you can trust they will not just be there to flatter you but to also helpfully criticise.
G: That’s an interesting point actually. There are a lot of great musical partnerships in history. Should people or songwriters be getting out there and engaging with other songwriters – trading ideas and trying to improve each other – rather than trying to hide away in their bedroom and trying to be their best by themselves?
DC: Well it depends; I think it depends on you as a person – as a songwriter. I always work with my husband Willy Zygier and I’ve found for many years it’s been a very fertile, productive partnership, that we are each other’s harshest critics. It’s also very helpful. You take the process of writing on your own and then to be able to show it to someone else, I find it very helpful.
G: When you are writing songs do you ever find that you use contrarianism to discover new ways of doing things? Looking at what you’ve done in the past and trying to do the opposite?
D: Well I think I’ve approached my entire career like that actually. With my approach to albums: String Of Pearls doesn’t sound anything like Bitch Epic and Bitch Epic sounds nothing like Ultrasound, and Ultrasound sounds a little bit like My Third Husband, but not nearly there, and My Third Husband and Exquisite Stereo are hemispheres apart, similarly Exquisite Stereo and Summertown are kind of a millennia apart, literally. So, yeah, that is definitely something that I use, not necessarily always to the greatest advantage, but it is a method and it’s a legitimate method.
G: And just on the flip side of that, contrarianism is very much about being original within your own body of work … but is originality – it’s something that critics always go on about – but is it…
DC: Is it always a good thing? Yes.
G: But is it always as important as people make out?
DC: Well, that’s a good question actually, because I think that people who have been incredibly original have copped a lot of flack for it – the brain doesn’t really like incredibly original. There is something in the human brain that abhors utter and complete originality. Having said that, it’s pretty hard to be completely and utterly original within the media or with pop and rock music and I tend to think it depends on what you’re definition of success is. There have been plenty of bands that have used The Beatles as their entire inspiration and have reworked those things to their advantage and have become incredibly successful – not particularly original, but nevertheless have created their own legitimate body of work. Other people who are entirely more original have floundered in obscurity.
G: Well there’s also the other argument that everything is plagiarism. Even the most original people came from somewhere, they didn’t just wake up one morning having not been exposed to culture and just write an album. Originality is just having influences that no one else knows about, really.
DC: Okay, well that’s a good definition.
G: Or being influenced by yourself and challenging yourself to try and move beyond that, I don’t know it kind of gets sticky around there.
DC: It does get sticky around there but you know, it’s an interesting discussion and one that probably doesn’t happen enough in Australia
G: I have a theory that there are four stages of an original artist. It starts with channelling your influences unconsciously where you’re derivative and don’t really realise – you’ve grown up with that genre it’s pretty much all you know. Then you start channelling your influences consciously – where you branch out and you see that there are other things and you see that you sound very much like one thing. Then you go to blending your influences consciously, where you start drawing from other places and folding them back into your own style and trying to move beyond where you started. Finally you start blending your influences unconsciously – where everything that you see immediately, unconsciously gets folded back into your own music and you start being influenced by yourself and progress beyond yourself. That’s my theory at least.
DC: That’s a good theory, I like that theory. I would argue that the truly original artist is often someone who really just doesn’t sound like anyone else when they first appear, and that they tend to have a kind of universal sound so that for example, when Joni Mitchell plays a song on the piano or on the guitar, she makes that instrument sound like her.
G: That almost sounds like if you have enough influences then none of them dominate, they’re all such a tiny slice of pie that the sound of them…
DC: The sum of them becomes a unique thing.
G: It’s more like the sound of the person themselves is able to come through over the top of them because there’s no dominating influence that’s cluttering everything up.
DC: Absolutely. Yes I would agree with that.
SONG TRAILS runs from Jul 27 – 31 in Brisbane and the surrounding areas, with the finale concert of workshopped songs at Brisbane Powerhouse, Sunday Aug 2. Visit www.qmf.org.au/events/view/song-trails-south to register for the free workshops.
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