Collaborating Mistakes I’ve Made, So You Don’t Have To. (You’re Welcome!)
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My first songwriting experiences were lonely ones.
I remember staring out the car window on long car trips or sitting by myself on the bus, daydreaming in awkward and clunky rhyme. Once the guitar got involved, I’d spend countless hours alone in my bedroom working through whatever teenage drama was dominating my life that day, with Kurt Cobain style guitar riffs I was burly able to play.
In time, the rhymes got less clunky, and those guitar riffs rang out more clearly, but the process remained the same: an empty room, a guitar, and conversations with myself. I imagine most songwriters can relate. After all, developing one’s initial songwriting instincts is really just a lot of mental gymnastics, which isn’t exactly a group activity.
But once we move out of the bedroom troubadour phase and step out of our cocoons, we soon realize that the making of music is anything but a lonely experience. No song makes it out into the world these days without some sort of collaborative effort. A writer with another writer, writer with producer, a producer with an artist, an artist with A&R, the list goes on and on and on.
In today’s music business the most important skill a songwriter needs isn’t being a great lyricist, or the ability to come up with super hooky melodies (both of which are important and SHOULD be practiced and studied extensively). No, the most essential skill a songwriter needs is to be a good collaborator.
Working on a shared vision is the day to day process of songwriting in today’s music industry. It is also the hardest and most complex concept to navigate and implement. Why? Well, for starters it’s quite the shift in mindset to go from those conversations with yourself about the deepest darkest reaches of your soul to sharing them with others and seeking their approval. You have to become comfortable with your ideas, the good and the bad, so that you can, as they say, “Dare to suck.”
Then there’s ego. You like your ideas. You’ve spent so much time honing your skill and finding your voice, and when your co-writer doesn’t like them, the ego instinctively wants to lash out and say: “what do you know?! You @$&*#!!!!”.
And what about your cowriter’s ego? You can probably safely assume they’ve spent an equal amount of time on their craft as you have, so it’s more than likely they know what they’re doing. But you just hate the hook they came up with! How do you tell them? And what happens when there is more than one writer? (As is most often the case these days) How do you come to an agreement when three different egos pull in three different, but all viable directions? How do you make the objectively right choice in an inherently subjective situation?
All of these reasons and many more, are why true collaboration is hard (and incidentally why most bands eventually break up). But as I said before, if we are to become successful songwriters, learning how to collaborate effectively is crucial. And while there are no guarantees a collaboration will be successful, there are things we can keep in mind to help the process.
In my experience, the best collaborations are built on respect and trust.
First and foremost, the writers have to respect each other. I’m not talking about the basic respect a human being needs to show another. Hopefully, that’s not something I need to discuss here (don’t be a jerk!). I’m talking about professional respect.
If you are going into a session with an established successful writer, you need to respect their process and their experience and the knowledge that got them there. If they accept the session, it is likely that they have some knowledge of you and your work, but you’re still gonna have to deliver and come up with the ideas that will make them respect your skills.
Next is trust. You must trust your co-writers with your ideas the way you trust yourself with them. You must learn to ignore the ego (it wants to be right, and it wants to be superior) that says you are the only one who knows what’s right for your ideas and let others dissect, analyze and change them as if they were their own. This will take some time, but if you all respect each other, trust will soon follow.
Those two should be pretty obvious, but surprisingly they are not. I am here to confess that I’ve made the mistake of not trusting a co-writer before. I’m sure it was partly their fault, but I’m just as sure that my ego had as much to do with it, as they did.
Here are a few more mistakes I’ve made and learned from, over the years:
Be prepared, but not TOO prepared.
I like doing my homework. I don’t know when that started. I use to hate it in school, but I love it now. I have a bag of ‘tricks’ I bring with me to every session. Riff ideas, concepts ideas, hooks, you name it. It’s nice to be prepared, but sometimes it can derail a collaboration. In the past, I’ve made the mistake of having ideas that were far to flashed out and complete. A complete chorus and verse, or the entire melody of the song all thought out. I would present this to my co-writers, and they would like it, but as soon as everyone started working on them, I’d get less than happy about the changes, or my co-writers would feel creatively handcuffed by what was already there.
There is nothing wrong with presenting an idea to start the ball rolling and the juices flowing. But ideas that are almost finished turn your co writer’s creative input into more of an afterthought, then another driving force. Collaboration should be about adding a creative voice different than your own to the process, so that the resulting song becomes something you wouldn’t have come up with on your own.
And after all, if you spent all that time working out your ideas till they are almost complete songs, you might as well finish them yourself.
Forcing it
A collaborative session is basically a snapshot of that moment in time, with those people, and that mind frame. If the same group of people met on a different day to write a song about the same subject matter, the result would undoubtedly be a completely different song. It’s all about the current vibe in the room and your ability to read it. That’s why forcing an idea you’ve been thinking about on a room that doesn’t have the right vibe will not end well. I’ve heard it referred to before as writing the song in the room, vs having the room write the song you brought into it.
Rationalizing why YOUR idea is better
I have defiantly been guilty of this. You got a hook, a rhyme, a chord that you just LOVE. It makes the song for you. But your co-writer is not feeling it. So you start explaining why this melody is superior, why that chord is better. But still, your co-writer doesn’t see it. I’m sorry to say that I’ve been in too many session where the conversation turned from trying to write something, to a long discussion of why I prefer one chord over another chord, effectively stopping the creative process. I would rationalize this by telling myself that I am fighting for what I believe is best for the song. But sometimes I was fighting for what was best for my ego. The truth is that working on a shared vision means compromising. But fear not! You might think your idea was great, but there is always a better idea out there, and the session and song will be better served trying to find it, then trying to convince others your first idea was the right one.
Being the “No” person
Some days you are on fire. Lyrics are effortless. Hooks pour out of you. You can do no wrong, and end up being the driving force behind a killer song. Other days you can’t complete a sentence. Your melodies seem stale, and your most significant contribution to the song ends up being mostly correcting everyone else’s grammar.
Regardless of what kind of day it is, your attitude will affect the vibe of the session. If you are having an off day, and no idea seems to be resonating with you, try not to be the constant “no” person who shots down the ideas in the room. There is nothing wrong with not liking the ideas, but constantly shooting them down without offering up other viable options, will quickly bring down the room and kill the vibe.
Try to be the “I like it, but how about something like this instead” guy. You might not come up with the best ideas that day, but your attitude will not be lost on your co-writers, and the positivity and willingness to keep exploring will fuel the creativity in the room. In general, it’s best to keep the word “no” out of the writing room.
Being the constant “yes” person
Liking and praising every idea everyone in the room comes up with all the time, is equally as unproductive. Yes you want everyone to be happy and feel good about their ideas, but not at the expense of the song. If every idea is the best idea you’ve ever heard, how do you pick which one goes in the song? Many songs have been ruined by too much of a good thing or several ideas that might be good on their own, but together make no sense.
Be honest with your praise, and constructive with your criticism. Worry about keeping your own ego in check, and don’t concern yourself with your cowriter egos. That is their responsibility.
There are so many more mistakes I’ve made and learned from (admittedly slowly learned from), far too many to list here. So I will leave you all with this; It is not uncommon for a working songwriter to have dozens and dozens of new collaboration sessions every year. What is less frequent, is finding those collaborators you want to work with over and over again. So be cool, be kind, and bring good vibes to every session.
Award winning and multi platinum selling songwriter/producer Chen Neeman's songs have been recorded by artists such as Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, Joe Jonas, Zendaya, and The Muppets, among others. Chen is dedicated to helping aspiring songwriters learn how to write better songs through personalized one-on-one coaching sessions via Skype, FaceTime, or in person at his L.A Studio.
Find out more about Chen’s Pro Songwriting Coaching, at HitSongCoach.com