Co-writes (and Co Tipping)

Another couple from Sunday at the MCT with Brooke and Co

(pic by Linda Burnett)

Still Got You to Hold is the first song I wrote with Brooke Taylor. It came about quite organically during one of the numerous covid lockdowns Melbourne was experiencing a few years back. Brooke had just joined the band and after a few rehearsals was keen to get out and play. We all were. We did a short warm up set at Basement Discs in Melbourne and then on the eve of our first gigs together another lockdown was instated. We waited and stayed in touch. We planned another tour, we rehearsed when we were allowed. And then as a full national tour approached other states started to look shaky. We lost shows in Tasmania, then Western Australia closed its borders to anyone from the East. Ultimately Victoria decided all gigs were off and the whole tour was in the bin. I remember the horrible feeling of sending an email to the band telling them as much, and thinking with Brooke, the weight of it was even greater as it would have been her first one. It was an odd realisation that I hardly knew the person I was tasked with delivering this catastrophic news to. I think my email just said something like I don’t know what your situation is but if you have someone to hold then you’d better go and hold them. It was a tough time.

(Roving Commission at Basement Discs - pic actually by Graham Stockfeld (not Mark Hopper. Whoops).

And when we finally did start playing, and we found ourselves actually driving to rehearsals and shows, Brooke remarked to me casually that she had a lyric that came out of that simple statement and did I want to have a look at it? It was well and truly on the way as a song by the time I came to it but I think its virtue lies in the shared experience that inspired it in the first place. Often with co-writes, one person - or even both people - have to imagine a given scenario that is the back story for a song, but with Still Got You to Hold we were both there, in that movie.

As You Lay Sleeping is one I wrote with Felicity Urquhart after we were placed together to write on one of the Mushroom songwriter retreats. I’m not sure they still take place, (or maybe they do and I just don’t get invited!). They were generally held at regional locations and to my mind seemed to be an effort of the publishing company to create some creative sparks through genuine cross genre pollination. They would place the country artists with the rock n’ rollers and see what happened. In the three or four that I attended I got to write with everyone from Paul Kelly, to James Blundell, to Sara Storer, and of course Felicity. I think we felt the couple that we initially wrote at the Hunter Valley retreat were promising enough that I followed up with a trip up to NSW a couple of weeks after.

I think co-writing for me has a couple of things going for it. Firstly, you often find yourself in a position where you actually have to finish a song that might have been hanging around for some time as the scantest of ideas. When you sit down across from a person and they say what have you got for me? then suddenly you might be forced to dispense with the doubt you have over a lyric, an idea or a musical passage. You bring out what you have and the other person says okay, let’s do this or that with it. Let’s try it in a different time signature or reverse the tense of the narration. Let’s take that line at the end of the first verse and make it into a chorus. Let’s write a bridge to give some relief from the chorus we have just devised. There’s a thousand little decisions that will be made, that need to be made. But at the very least you have finished a song.

The other thing I like about co-writing is that someone with a different melodic sense will have a different way of finishing off a tune. After a lifetime of writing I have a pretty standard set of tricks as far as chords and tunes go. Consequently I often find myself trying to do what I wouldn’t normally be expected to do. Which is sort of futile as ultimately it’s me writing and whether it’s me writing in my usual style or me trying to not write in my usual style I am still the one making those decisions. But sit me across from another person who is confident where a tune is heading and they will find a different way of resolving a chord sequence or a repeated line. And it will quite often be a far simpler way of getting to the end.

Talking to Nick O’Mara (who was in the Roving Commission with his partner Jac Tonks for about a year) he says the thing about writing with Jac, and with female writers generally, is they often have a more developed sense of melody than he has and therefore will get something established without the bells and whistles of intricate chord sequences or involved instrumental passages. I think making this a gender based conversation is controversial but the fact remains that when you write with someone else you are looking for a different way of solving a problem. Isn’t that the point of having another person involved? And the fact remains that a good amount of my successful co-writing has been with women: Sara Storer, Carla Geneve, Brooke Russell, Amy Saunders, Hana Brenecki and of course Brooke Taylor

(pic by Linda Burnett)

Recently online I have noticed ads spruiking AI platforms for taking ideas and turning them into songs (I think SUNO is the main one perhaps?). Apparently you just say your line or play your riff and then AI spits out a full song. It’s that easy apparently. It has quickly gone so far that friends who run studios have been asking that people do not send demos of songs created using SUNO. I read somewhere these generically created robot songs already constitute a high proportion of the Spotify top ten. It’s a worry on so many levels, but while we are discussing co-writing (with people, not machines) the thing I think they are missing is, this is one of the really enjoyable parts of the process. Writing songs is fun. Why would you want to assign that to a machine? Taking any strange little riff, a simple chord sequence or funny little lyric and building a song around it is a potentially glorious creative process. Sharing that idea with someone else to see what they make of it, explaining what you were hoping the song might say or what inspired it in the first place, and seeing where they might take it is the whole point of the exercise.

I remember reading a Johnny Marr quote where he said one day he had a beautiful meandering guitar riff and chord sequence that he left with Morrissey and when he came back in a few hours Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others was born. What a song - amazing. I’m sure there are technology zealots who would tell me the machine can be programmed to be outlandish and cutting edge but could a machine replicate the response of the rest of the Smiths that I’m guessing was a weird mixture outrage, hilarity and satisfied disbelief. Give me a crossed out lyric in a Spirex book and a garbled voice memo on a phone, a couple of hours and three cups of coffee at a kitchen table with a musician I respect any day.

Here’s the couple of songs that got me thinking about this stuff in the first place.

Still Got You to Hold - with Brooke Taylor and Co Tipping live at the MCT

As You Lay Sleeping - with Brooke Taylor live at the MCT