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Here’s a fun exercise for learning songs by ear on guitar!

Learn how to play along to popular 4-chord songs!

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/five-notes-will-change-your-life-pentatonic-scales/
Scales, scales, scales!

Major scales, natural minor scales, harmonic minor scales, melodic minor scales, chromatic scales, diminished scales, Lydian augmented scales…

Just how many scales do we really need to know?

What if there was one scale to rule them all?

Well, there is one scale that – while it may not rule them all – is by far the most useful.

Hint: it’s not the major scale!

Check this article to learn the 5 notes that will change your life!

And he’s taken this lens of analysis to the music of the Beatles and specifically in the “Beatlemania” years of the early sixties when teenage girls would scream and faint at concerts and TV performances – to find out what exactly the band did that produced such extreme reactions. And how they carried that on throughout their career in ever-changing ways.

In this conversation we talk about:

• The combination of music and visuals that led to Beatlemania and the specific techniques the Beatles used to stoke that hysteria
• Whether the Beatles did all these clever things instinctively and subconsciously or if it was an intentional, conscious process
• And how the Beatles’ use of musical elements to support the message of the lyrics changed over time through the five distinct eras of their music that Scott identifies

We love when an interview on this show provides a new way of looking at or listening to music, and we think you’re going to enjoy the little “homework” exercise Scott sets at the end of our conversation as a way to open your mind and your ears to what made the Beatles so effective and so successful.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Alan Pollack “Notes on …” Series

Transcript

Scott: Hello, this is Scott Kuehn from Clarion University of Pennsylvania and you’re listening to the Musicality Podcast from Musical U.

Christopher: Thank you. Welcome to the show Scott, thank you for joining us today.

Scott: Thank you very much, Christopher. It’s great to be here.

Christopher: I was saying to you before we started that it’s a particular delight to have you on the show because not only are you an expert in the Beatles you’re actually a member of Musical U as well. I’d love to begin by hearing a bit about your musical back story and when you got started in music, what that look like, and when the Beatles enter the picture for you?

Scott: Well, in actuality we could start with how the Beatles came into the picture, their influence on me is how … Well, what inspired me to get into music. A cute little story right here in America the Beatles first appeared publicly on The Ed Sullivan Show. On February 9th, Sunday February 9th 1964, I was a five year old visiting my mom’s, mom’s house. Mom had many siblings, two of them were teenage. We had dinner, The Ed Sullivan Show comes on at 7:00, we’re getting ready to leave but everything was really curious and strange because the two teenage sisters of my mom Patty and Cathy were jumping around the room saying, “We got to turn on Ed Sullivan. We got to see this, the Beatles are on,” and we’re all like “What, what, what is this?” Right?

Little five year old, putting our coats and getting ready to leave. Mom takes the coats off and says, “Well, let’s see what this is all about.” The Beatles come on and essentially you can see the clip on YouTube and what not. Ed Sullivan says basically, “And now the Beatles,” and my two aunts screamed at the television, “John, Paul, oh my god, there they are.” We have never seen anything like that before. I said to my mom, I’ll never forget I said, “Mom, are Patty and Cathy okay? Shh, just be quiet dear.”

Having seen that I immediately asked, “Can I have a Beatles record mom?” She bought me Meet the Beatles, it was the American version of the With the Beatles that was the UK album and from there it was wow, music is such a nice thing, such a fun thing. I’ve got to learn how to do this. As a kid, took guitar lessons and in college, I was a music minor. On my way to doing other things music has always been a part of my life, sort of in the background.

Performed in high school and college in little garage bands and things like that. Played a lot of Beatles songs at parties, of course. Music has been part of my life ever since. Lately, I’ve decided that wanted to work on learning to record and do ambient style music perhaps as a thing to do in retirement maybe record jingles. I’ve been a lot into composition, relearning some things now, hence my membership in Musical U, and working hard on that. Getting prepared now to take a sabbatical and spend some time actually diving into some of my music creatively here, full-time.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well I’ve been particularly looking forward to this conversation because people often assume I think that that Beatlemania era was just all about appearances, it was just that they were pop stars and it was just kind of PR and press fuss. It’s funny that scene of you and your aunts at the TV reminds me vividly of my sisters going nuts over Blur and Oasis when we were growing up and they were kind of the Brit-pop phenomenon.

Scott: Okay, yeah.

Christopher: Comparable in a way but I was keen to talk to you because you have really dug into where did Beatlemania come from and what was going on under the hood because as we’re going to be talking about today. It wasn’t as simple as these four good looking guys with the right outfits up on stage and the teen girls are going to go nuts. There was a lot more going on and particularly musically. I love if you could-

Scott: Absolutely.

Christopher: If you could maybe explain to begin with what your specialty is as a university professor and how that relates to your interest in the Beatles?

Scott: Okay. Well, one of my specialties is understanding the meaning in media messages and how that meaning change out to audiences. What’s intended by media message producers is not what audiences always understand. To understand the impact of messages we want to get a sense of how those messages are interpreted, perceived, and understood by audiences. One of the ways we can do that is to use a theoretical framework called semiotics which essentially breaks media messages down into little parts called signs.

Signs are little units of meaning that you can interpret and look at in different context. Semiotics is the study of signs. Signs and little, you could think of them as building blocks of meaning in a media message. Of course music is one of the most popular mediated messages and the messages that chain out to audiences in music are sophisticated and culture based, they affect culture, and interact with culture. That sort of what I’m into studying, in that sense.

Having an interest in music myself that helps me in my endeavour to interpret the meanings in music. That kind of leads me into Beatlemania as one of the most outrageous examples of the impact of music and pop culture in 20th century culture as a whole. It’s a glaring example and a wonderful endeavour for us to have a closer look at.

Christopher: Yeah. You clearly were there at the beginning you saw it firsthand, you saw the reaction to the Ed Sullivan Show – but for someone like myself who sadly missed out on that experience, could you just paint a picture when we say Beatlemania, what are we talking about there and what was the world that Beatlemania arrived into at that time?

Scott: Well, it’s kind of interesting, talking to baby boomers, those of us who were little kids at the time looking around that culture. You start with this one thing that the culture was ripe for a big explosion of something different. The music scene in the early 60s was what we could call today schlock rock. It was filled with music that was formulaic made by people for teenagers who people were writing it who were much older than teenagers using clichés both in the musical styles and in the lyrics.

If you can think of for instance now I don’t want to offend anybody but The Four Seasons in a song like Sherrie, right, where Frankie Valli uses his falsetto for effect and well, that’s really what schlock rock was. It was just cute little techniques for effect that weren’t exactly landing on the emotional impact that you can have with music. They were cliché techniques and people dumping a lot of stuff out there, you did have some high quality stuff in the mix. You had things like Motown music which the Beatles were influenced by.

You had R&B music in the background, Isley Brothers, et-cetera, but for the most part we were really in an era of boring music and formulas. When you have something new pop up, people take notice. Now, not only do you have a new sound, you’ve got a new look. The mop top look was an incredibly different thing. Now, the Beatles got it from a trip to France in 1963, they decided they would let their hair go down and grow it because it was the style … In France, they didn’t know anything like it would start some kind of trend, right.

That hair became an icon for basically some kind of image of androgyny but sexiness and that started in England. We’ll talk a little bit later about their visual presentation and how they use their hair in order to fan desire but when Americans saw that hair, now remember Americans had that slicked back duck tail look. Here was something different, the sound was different, it was filled with enthusiasm and as I’ll talk about a little bit later the music was you may think of it as simple but it was sophisticated in that everything was compounded correctly to really boost emotion in their songs.

That was really what happened here, we had excellent artists not exactly knowing the impact they were having but writing excellent music with an excellent presentation.

Christopher: Cool. I’m so glad we started out here because I think looking back we often think or maybe make the mistake of assuming that because the Beatles later records was so groundbreaking and so fascinating musically. We compare them to those early records and think those early ones they weren’t a big deal, they weren’t that sophisticated but as you say compared to the times they were groundbreaking in a number of ways and there was a lot more going on under the hood that we might give them credit for.

Scott: Now, there was a lot of counter fight against what is this pop image. I mean if you look at their second album, hair is essentially featured in the picture. The hair coming down there made them look effeminate and so there was a lot … In terms of that time, there was a lot of talk about that and a lot of the iconography in terms what the Beatles represented for better or worse, they would just show hair. Long, little, mop toppy hair and say, “Those are the mop tops. That’s bad, look at that long hair. That’s interesting, good.”

If you look back at some of the critical analysis of them, the older critics would often just make fun of their look as well as the simplicity of their music but some were picking up on the fact that it indeed was hitting a note. One of the things we study is how media messages chain out through an audience. We can call this fantasy theme and with Beatlemania, the fantasy theme that started in the UK was, “These boys are so cute. Oh my god, they’re so cute.” Right? When the Beatles would sing and shake their head and do, “Wooh,” and shake their heads back and forth, it was a queue for those British girls in the spring of ’63 to yell and scream.

Now, American girls picked up on this before the Beatles showed up in America. There were all kinds of TV news clips of British girls in Beatlemania mode yelling and screaming and chasing them and it was a big story in America in December and through January when I Want to Hold Your Hand was released and reached number one in America. The girls were ready but when they saw them live like Patty and Cathy did, boom that was it.

Christopher: That is so interesting. I think we would look back and think the American girls or the British girls going nuts, so the American girls went nuts and it was all just kind of this fever or this hysteria that quote on. You just said something really fascinating which is there was a hair thing going on, there was a move at play when the Beatles performed. I really want to dig in to more of these examples of I think the signs you would call them the things going on in the music or the performance that are having that particular resonant effect.

Scott: Right. Two types of desire that their songs fanned. One where I called it a cultivation and this was essentially or probably the biggest one but in terms of the numbers of their songs from their albums, if we look at their albums for instance the first one Please, Please Me. If you look at the back, the sides of the covers, we’ve got songs like Love Me Do, Do You Want to Know a Secret which was a McCartney-Lennon song, sung by George, and Ask Me Why which essentially are Lennon and McCartney tunes that say “I want you to consider me as an object of desire” in a teenagey way.

Their singles from the time which they didn’t include in the albums in those days were the ones that really had these lyrics and musical signs that emphasize desire. Now, when we study musical signs, we take the lyric as one building block and then we see musically when that lyrical bit is happening, what’s being done for instance on the guitars, with the voices, with the drums, we add the music blocks together. At any given time we can stop a section of the song and say, “Oh my gosh, look at how the emphasis is being placed on this particular lyric, let’s feed it back to audience reaction. Okay, this is where the girls scream in this part of the song. Okay, see what they’re doing. Wow, they’re taking the fifth chord off the scale and now they’re raising the fifth note of the fifth chord, making it an augmented cord and they’re singing, well for instance they’ll sing a major six and then they’ll drop down to a major third, and so Paul is singing really high and John singing high. This is, “La.” From Me To You is an example of what we could see, their second big or third big hit actually.

Their first big hit was Please, Please Me then She Loves You, and then From Me To You. The interesting lyric of From Me To You is “I’ve got everything that you want”, okay we’ll start with that. I’ve got everything that you want has Paul singing a harmony. That “want” is stressed: want, desire, right?

Okay, so starts off a better way to do this would be just to go through the song. We’ve got a little melody being sung kind of like “every day, this is every day”: “da, da, da, da, dan, dan, da, da, ra, ra, da ra, ran, da.” You’re going through your life every day. “If there’s anything that you want”, right, first lyric. “If there’s anything I can”, okay I can’t sign it in my baritone voice too well.

Christopher: Sure.

Scott: We got (Plays) a simple melody, really effective for teenage mind first of all. “If there’s anything that you want, if there’s anything I can do” when we hit this, “I can do”. You’ve got Paul singing really high, John singing sort of high. That raises it to a kind of emotional tension and the girls right there are like, “Oh my gosh.” I can do if there’s anything I can do so they hit this in terms of a semiotic building block. You’ve got the right lyric, you’ve got the right kind of musical movement happening here.

The semiotic blocks of meaning are adding with this musical meaning. The vocals are giving us some tension and right on this idea if there’s anything I can do, yes there is Paul, John, right? It’s a really good example of how they were just able to build this tension and desire right there in the context of a simple melody but using it in a very effectively complex way. I got to tell you the schlock music before that they had the same kind of things happening but they didn’t put it together the same way.

Christopher: Got you. You mentioned before that there were two kinds of desire being fanned or cultivated and one was I want you to see me as an object of desire, is that right?

Scott: Right. Yeah, that’s cultivating desire, they’re setting up desire. The second one is satisfy me my desire. Of course, the best example of early Beatlemania music on that is “Please, Please Me”. The part of Please, Please Me where we see this building of tension and here’s the Rickenbacker here that we get from Lennon. You got a very simple song
please, please me just with a simple one, four, five progression in the key of E. We have E, A, and B through most of the song but it adds a really interesting middle part where it ads emphasis going up a scale with a different little chord progression in E starting with A so we’ve got this part that goes come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on which is building tension for desire.

Please, please me as this again is this song where Lennon is saying satisfied me, come on, come on, come on so we’ve got A, come on, come on, to F sharp minor, come on, come on, and then a third time with a C sharp minor come on, come on, and then back to A with one more come one, come on. Then, resolves back to the one, four, five with E please, please me, oh yeah and that means you, like that. That last part with the one, four, five, takes the tension that’s built in the middle part and resolves it back to the singer.

Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, please, please, reaches that tension, me, oh yeah and that means you, resolves on you. It’s just so expertly done where it raises the tension and the only way to solve it is that it resolves with you. Okay, that’s not-

Christopher: Fantastic.

Scott: Yeah, that’s not unintelligent, that’s done very, very strategically and very well done.
Lennon, the ultimate word master said he was interested in the lyrics because of a Bing Crosby song. If I could just read to you an interview with Lennon from shortly before he was killed, The Playboy Interview, he goes through all his songs.

This is really interesting because it’s another thing of interest to us doing semiotic analysis. The Beatles were folks that pulled in many different techniques from many different people and use them on their own. We call this intertextuality. You take a text from Motown, you take a text from R&B, or in this case in Please, Please Me, Lennon takes it from a Roy Orbison song. Playboy asks Lennon, they say, “Okay, please, please me.”

Lennon responds, “Please, please me was my song completely. It was my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song, would you believe it? I wrote it in the bedroom in my house at Menlove Avenue which was my auntie’s place. I remember the day and the pink eyelet on the bed and I heard Roy Orbison doing only the lonely or something. That’s where that came from. Also I was always intrigued by the words of,” and then he sings please lend your little ears to my please a Bing Crosby song.

“I was always intrigued by the double use of the word please, so it was a combination of Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison.” Those were Lennon’s words from October of 1980 a couple of months before he was killed. This idea of taking all these different techniques and building them in a way that raise this tension is just an amazing way of building the blocks of meaning in a very effective way which I think built Beatlemania to what it was.

Christopher: Fantastic. Are there other examples, you gave a couple there of the ascending up the scale to create tension and adding vocal harmony on the most important words. Are there other examples of those in use or other musical techniques that were used to emphasize things in this way?

Scott: Okay. We didn’t mention drums but Ringo is playing with toms was innovative in the day. You take a song like “She Loves You”, and you will hear, “ta, da, da, da, da, da, da,” right under the parts where we’re kind of moving to a resolve and then to the next phrase. Ringo’s drumming added a lot to the underpinning of the heartbeat of desire. You can listen to a lot of these different songs and today, you just hear a steady drum beat that sounds almost like it disappears in the background in today’s nomenclature you kind of think it disappears.

Back then, you got to realize that a snare drum and a bass drum was about all people we’re using and Ringo’s got a small said yes, but boy he’s messing those toms. He’s got this ringing cymbals going in a song like, She Loves You and in Please, Please Me. You’ve got guitar techniques that George’s fills add excitement to a lot of these songs as well. George, excellent guitar player in many different ways, he’s not underrated because people talk about him in terms of how he was such an expert at making the short fills and the short lead breaks that hit the mark almost every time.

Now, in later years you see George come into play in terms of writing really interesting songs and of course playing some really interesting guitar parts. In this time, George had the real task in the group was to provide the feel and the movement of the song, to move it along. The song All My Loving, a faster paced Beatle kind of again cultivating desire song shows George moving the song with his guitar, keeping the pace of the fast chord changes moving with a really cool top melody line.

That moves the desire through the words of the song, Paul is essentially singing in this song “I’m out here doing stuff but I’m thinking of you and I wish I was with you”. Boy, that message for those little teenage girls was strong. We can look at pretty much a whole lot of the later Beatlemania stuff as well. Where it began to change was in the spring and summer of 1964 when they were writing this album and recording A Hard Day’s Night. I really look at this album as sort of the culmination of their Beatlemania style but yet also starting to move away with more mature song writing.

For instance, you got A Hard Day’s Night which is a very much a Beatlemania kind of song but the lyric is about being a husband. Okay, that’s a different take it’s growing up. Then, you get to, And I Love Her which if you’re familiar with that song is all acoustic and there’s no real drums, there’s bongos and it’s subdued. It’s got this wonderful again short little teasing lead part that bounces through the song done by George. Again, so it’s a more mature kind of look at love and it’s taking us away from the teeny-bopper desire into a more of a grownup look at what real true love and devotion is.

Although, the teens look at it one particular way, we do see if you interpret the lyrics, Paul moving into other things as well. “Things we said today”, another Paul song, is another mature look at love, “we’re saying these things and we’re making pledges to each other. In the future, these are important things that we’re pledging”. If you look at it in comparison From Me To You or Please, Please Me, it’s a totally different animal. Moving away from this cultivation of desire into more let’s look at mature relationships which then comes out in the next album Beatles For Sale but nonetheless.

I think one of the very last Beatlemania type songs, we see in Tell Me Why and Anytime At All which in Lennon’s discussions, he said they were just toss-offs trying to make hits and he didn’t put much thought or feeling into them at the time. But when you look at things like I’ll Be Back, oh my gosh Lennon writes about that song in terms of thinking, “Well Bob Dylan says to write about your experience so after meeting Bob Dylan I thought I’d write a song about what it was like to lose my mom.”

In this particular book The Playboy Interviews, Lennon talks a lot about this underpinning of how many of his songs were about the relationship he had with his mother and how his mother was killed right when he was trying to get to know her. Lennon kept progressing as an artist and by the end of ’64 in terms of what Lennon and McCartney are thinking, they’re done writing songs that were just trying to be hit making, techniquey-kind of Brill Building kind of things, and they’re actually doing their version of art. That’s when we start to move into the next phase of Beatle eras.

Christopher: And in that album Hard Day’s Night, are you able to see the musical elements the kind of tropes and techniques mature and evolve in the same way, were they still using the same kind of elements to emphasis and how did things change?

Scott: Yes. No, nice question. Yes indeed, I mentioned the acoustic guitars on “And I Love Her”. We see use of more acoustic instruments, “Can’t Buy Me Love” more subtlety rather than throw that electric stuff out there, it’s a fast song but you hear them playing acoustics behind the lead guitar. You hear more sophisticated drumming. I’ll Be Back, again that song, acoustic guitar background but we do have piano creeping in, in some of these things as well.

You have piano being used to emphasize stuff in If I Fell and Tell Me Why and Anytime At All. These things become obviously much more pronounced. The amazing thing about how their music progresses is if you look at the presentation of the band from month to month you see their guitars change, you see for instance buying Epiphone guitars and using them starting in ’65. Then, you hear them distort their guitars at the end of ’65 we’re literally a year and a half away from where they started yet their sonic techniques are changing in their mix of instruments are changing.

Probably for me the most interesting time of change was the Rubber Soul album where if you listen to that album, almost wholly acoustic until you get to some fills with more distorted guitar sounds. They’re clearly saying some things about – the sound of these guitars are creating new meanings that other bands picked up and we’ve come to kind of understand the role of that. I’ll never forget as a kid in ’66, playing for the first time the Revolver album. I was seven years old, I didn’t understand a lot what was going on but the album opens up with Taxman and taxman has this incredible barrage of distorted guitar sound coming at you.

By the way, that distorted sound, it was a George song but the lead guitar is played by Paul. Yes, a lot of people don’t know that Paul is playing the lead guitar in Taxman and you hear the other guitars just hitting kind of a distorted choppy set of notes, chords on it. No other song at that time had put together those kind of distorted sounds for Taxman was not about love and desire. It was about the fact that they were given their money away, right. By the time we get to ’66, the Beatles are definitely not doing Beatlemania stuff anymore.

Christopher: Got you. I want to dig in a little there because you said something there about the meaning associated with a particular thing, I think the distorted guitar. I think someone might hear what we’ve been talking about and think, “Okay so they just … They wrote some lyrics that would appeal to the teenage girls. They figured out what the big words were and they added another instrument or they made things a bit louder then.” I love if we can just unpack like how much subtlety, how much sophistication was that to I guess the consistency with which they used a certain technique for a certain thing?

Or the innovation involved in some of these means used to emphasize? I guess what’s underneath my question is with this whole series on the Beatles, I’m most interested in how much do they know what they were doing in the sense of were they sitting down being like, “Okay, if we do this particular thing then the girls will go crazy here.” Was it more kind of instinctive and exploratory, can you kind of pick that up for us a bit?

Scott: Sure. A lot of us would have love to been flies on the wall in Abbey Road Studios to see exactly what was happening. I think in the early days, when we’re talking about the Please, Please Me era, they were trying to write hit songs using the kind of craft they saw happening around them. I mentioned the Brill Building that place in New York where they got a lot of song writers like Carol King et-cetera just sitting in rooms with pianos turning out hit songs.

They saw themselves doing that. Their manager gave away a lot of the songs that they wrote in that era to other bands he managed. Some of the songs they never sang were hits in the UK and later on even in the United States. When we have the what’s called here, the British Invasion sound in that ’63, ’64 era, a lot of what they were doing was writing hits. That changed at the end of ’64 where they actually began to write to suit themselves.

I guess your question is did they know what they were doing, well when they were writing the hits they knew that they could do certain techniques like we were talking before to emphasize notes, to emphasize the meaning of a lyric, and to make it effective. They knew that what they were doing when they shook their heads and sang, “Woo,” and they knew that effect and they got tired of it. You can tell.

In their interviews later and in the Beatles anthology video series and what not, they talk about one particular time where they had been moving away from it in August ’65 they gave that incredible concert at Chase Stadium and you can look at video in the anthology and maybe even on YouTube where they couldn’t hear themselves for all the screaming. Paul in the anthology says “John went literally nuts and he just was doing whatever he wanted during the performance because we all knew nobody was listening and so we stopped touring and we went into the studio and we wanted to make what pleased us”.

Their work … We talk about in the middle period is them in Abbey Road Studio playing and working to please themselves. Rubber Soul, parts of Help were the first attempts to that. Yesterday appeared on the Help album but just consider Yesterday comes out at the end of the summer of 1965 – what a different song Yesterday is compared with From Me To You or some of these other songs that were literally Christopher talking about a period of 18 months as a difference. Paul got the inspiration for Yesterday from visiting his girlfriend’s parent’s house in London, Jane Asher was his girlfriend at the time.

By the way, if you listen to … I don’t know if there’s a UK version of SiriusXM radio, Peter Asher is all over the Americas on the Beatles channel talking about his reminiscences working with the Beatles. Of course Jane Asher’s brother Peter was an important music producer in his own right and artist in the UK Peter and Gordon who actually sang some of the Beatles songs back then too. Okay, I digress but nonetheless Paul wrote Yesterday in their attic bedroom on a piano and knew he had something really good. He shared it with John and said, “Somebody else must have done this melody.”

John said “No, I can’t think of anything.” He went into the studio and played it and “anybody do this?” and they helped him finish it and they said, “We just can’t put this to electric guitar and drums and what not, we’ve got to do something else with this.” They got George Martin to do the string quartet and there’s history the most recorded song in western civilization history right, Yesterday. The story behind it is essentially the one that you’re asking me about, did they know what they were doing?

Yes, and by the time we’re in 1965, they’re doing what they figured was art not just technique hit writing. They were extending art in that way too.

Christopher: I see. Talk us briefly, so you mentioned there were different eras and we talked about early Beatlemania and I think you said there was kind of a later phase of Beatlemania. What do you see as the different eras of Beatles music?

Okay, sure. We’ve got this middle part where they’re doing their version of art and then they begin to bring in lots of other kinds of music but we’re going to call in semiotics intertextuality. Then, at the end of 1966 they go back into the studio and they think they’re going to do an album about the places where they live. Lennon does Strawberry Fields and you’ve these things sitting in Abbey Road where they’ve got little record loops of flutes and all kinds of instruments on a keyboard like this, it’s called the mellotron and Paul comes up with an introduction to Strawberry Fields that sounds very pastoral and there you go.

Now we have sounds associated with psychedelics and that sort of thing. Lennon’s love of word play is used to emphasize a dream-like state and of course they’re all about their subculture, baby boomer subculture, it was cool to do drugs, right, they didn’t know about the effects of LSD. You got Timothy Leary saying do LSD and reach Nirvana kind of state and people were taking that seriously in that day. Of course now, we know there were many casualties from that era. Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac for instance, and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd lost their minds to LSD essentially.

Lennon pretty much could have, I’m glad he didn’t. Drugs were harmful but in those days they were looking at them as a way to fuel their creativity. The stuff that they did then became again semiotic signs of, “Okay, if you’re in college in 1967 you’ve got the Beatle Sargent Pepper’s album there, you’re picking up meanings and this is what is cool in ’67. This is on top of culture.” Again, if you look at and I can pull this out for you, you look at the cover of Sargent Peppers which is quite iconic right?

There they are, here I am, here we are in ’67, we are no longer the Beatles from the Beatlemania era, you can kind of see here’s wax figures of their old selves, here they are colorful, pop psychedelic right there. They’re moving the music with all kinds of intertextual new sounds and new meanings associated with it. It’s amazing Christopher they built this huge audience in 1963-64 and a generation of people saw them as leading things, they took it in an American context, they got the football and they ran with it, right?

They just kept going and I guess it was the power of having this pop culture behind you being on top of it, we can do what we want. We don’t have to make money touring, we can go in the studio and send the album out on tour is what they said. Essentially, sell lots of stuff and make lots of money being creative. I don’t think that today we can find artists that can come close to doing that in today’s music.

Christopher: It didn’t end with Sargent Pepper right, where did things go from there?

Scott: No, it certainly didn’t. Sargent Pepper was a creative high point. After that, they had a number of challenges. Right after that they essentially tried to find themselves in the context of their fame. They ended up going to India right before they were to leave to go to India and study with a maharishi, their manager died. And so all the business things that Brian was taking care of for them fell into their laps. Suddenly, they’ve got a deal with tons of business issues and be businessmen and when they actually started to look, they realized they weren’t making as much money as they could.

They were doing drugs and that wore them down. When they went to India, Lennon stopped doing drugs and his experience in India was essentially drying out and they all wrote a bunch of songs that came back and ended on the White album. By the time they came back to do the White album the pressure to recreate the magic of Sargent Peppers was too great they did a TV show in Britain at the end of ’67 called Magical Mystery Tour. It was not well received, it was kind of a clunker, a weird TV show but the music was great.

From that, they made an album that came out in the United States and subsequently was reissued in Britain as a record which is called Magical Mystery Tour. Some of that is very psychedelic “I am the Walrus” for instance is on that collection and Blue Jay Way another Harrison composition, very psychedelic. It wasn’t as good as what we saw in Sargent Peppers, so there’s a lot of pressure for what became the Beatles White album and it’s titled the Beatles but the White album is how we know it.

By the way, it was recently remastered and remixed again a couple of months ago released in a 50th anniversary edition. I think it was in October. Wonderful remix as you can hear all kinds of cool stuff in the songs. Another little fact in those days, they were really glad they had a new mixer at Abbey Road, it had eight channels, eight tracks. Back in the days of Beatlemania Hard Days Night was recorded on a four track machine which meant that you had to bounce things together in order to get it all put together. They were doing eight track and it gave them a little bit more leeway to do things but still to make the sounds add up, you had to record one thing on one track, and let’s say we had 12 different sounds we wanted on a track, you had to bounce them together. You’ll lose quality. They were able to take a lot of the stuff and throw it into modern digital equipment, keep the sounds similar but yet you can hear everything much more closely. Today, you go into a real recording studio and they’ve got 254 tracks, well you probably know it’s a lot more sophisticated today.

The White album has all kinds of cool things that they were writing in India. Everything from Paul’s Blackbird which is a cool little thing with acoustic guitar and finger picking. They learned finger picking in India from Donovan. Donovan taught them how to … That finger picking is where you’re not using the pick of your guitar but you’re using your fingers right?(Plays) Paul is doing this kind of thing and so he’s no longer strumming chords, he’s actually picking up chords and pieces off the neck like that. Much more sophisticated.

The other thing about the era when we hit to the White album is that they’re fighting and they’re learning that they’re kind of doing really cool things on their own and that they can do things on their own. The White album experience is tempered by the fact that Ringo actually got mad and left and quit the band for a week and they brought him back in but there was a lot of tension rising. Personal lives were also causing that tension.

It was the same set of sessions where Paul wrote Hey Jude probably again one of the most popular Beatle songs ever. The story goes that George wanted to do some really cool guitar fills on Hey Jude and Paul said, “No, I don’t want it,” and really upset George, right? That experience now shows that they’ve matured as artist and as creative forces in their own right? They weren’t the four boys anymore, they were men who wanted to do their own kind of thing and sort of felt trap by the fame and the pressure of producing “Beatles music.”

We get to the end, the Abbey Road album was recorded in the spring and summer of 1969 after a failed attempt to do a live album which later became the Let It Be sessions. By the way, Paul right now has released a whole bunch of audio that was recorded when they were trying to do a live album. The idea in January and February of ’69 was let’s get together in a TV studio in the north of England and simply record, let everybody see us writing a bunch of songs together and it ended up just watching the Beatles fight over things.

That became Let It Be, they shelved it for a while and they went back and they said, “Were fighting a lot, but let’s just do one really good album, and well, who knows what will happen after that”. The last album was Abbey Road where they just sort of behave themselves with each other the best they could and put together one final effort which is amazing in and of itself. There’s sort of a breakdown of the Beatles.

Christopher: Thank you, yeah, wonderful. I’d love to wrap up by just asking as someone who got to know the Beatles right at the beginning and love their music and was inspired it sounds like to go into your own music playing because of the Beatles and that early experience. How has approaching that music from this semiotics perspective and looking for these signs and connecting the lyrics and the music. How does that changed your appreciation of the Beatles?

Scott: That’s a great question. It has given me a greater appreciation for them not only as a creative force but also as intellectual force. When you’re a kid and you’re learning the songs like I did, you learn about chord progressions and you learn how songs fit in a key, and how melodies bounce off of the chords and the key. You just think that that’s just something people do. But when you break the songs down and analyze them in terms of how they’re using certain techniques to emphasize lyrics and Beatlemania and then later how they’re bringing in experiences from around them and making them gel together and unique ways during the Rubber Soul and Revolver and Sargent Pepper’s era.

You gain an incredible appreciation for the intelligence and the dedication and the creativity these men brought to their work in a way that is such an incredible influence on the entire world in western music. They are the Mozart of their age incredibly so, they’re the Chopin of their age. They were incredible innovators and in terms of music, rock music hasn’t really changed much in terms of what is put in to rock music today from what they were doing in the White album and in Abbey Road.

The sounds and techniques that you hear in those albums, you hear an any modern rock album today. Who could say that in terms of musical direction? That’s what I get out of it.

Christopher: Terrific and I wonder if we could just leave our listeners with a kind of homework exercise. I know a lot of people would have been really inspired and intrigued by this different way of listening for what’s going on in the music. I wonder if you could give them, if they were to go back to one of those early Beatlesmania records and listen in a way or try tune in to certain things. Can we give them something to try out to hear things and appreciate things in that way?

Scott: Yeah, let’s do. Now folks you can go in the internet and you can find every single one of their songs note by note broken down. You can use all kinds of tablature sources whatever – you can find them. What I would like folks to pay attention to in the Beatlemania era songs: Discover the keys that they used, discover their core changes, look at how in songs like Please, Please Me, From Me To You, Thank You Girl, some of these early songs even maybe some of your favorites like She Loves You or I Should Have Known Better or If I Fell.

Look at the chord progressions and look at how as Andrew from Musical U says look at how the notes are fitting the cartography of the musical chord progressions and then follow how the lyrics fit in with their meaning. By the way, Andrew is an expert also at finding the meaning in the way the music is fitting together. His idea of cartography is wonderful.

Christopher: Well, let’s just unpack that a little bit to make sure people understand what you mean by that. If you say you should be listening for how the melody and the chord progressions work together in terms of cartography, what does that mean?

Scott: Let’s find the meaning of the lyric in how the song is moving musically. What are they doing with their vocals, what are they doing with the melody, how is that chord progression moving the song and moving the meaning of the lyric through it in a way that emphasizes ads to and enhances the meaning of the lyric. You will be amazed as you break it down into it.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well, you’ve given us such a great insight there into kind of how to trace back what we often think of as the innovation of the Beatles and how they were breaking new ground and trying new things in their later albums. I think you’ve shown us how we can actually trace that back to even their earliest singles and appearances. I really thank you for that because certainly for me it’s given me a new perspective and a new appreciation – having talked with you and I listened to those songs, I definitely hear the techniques they’re using in a different way that I would have thought about them before. 

Thank you for sharing that with our audience today and I’d love to leave them with a pointer where they can go to learn about you and your research into the Beatles?

Scott: Sure, sure. I would … You can catch me on Facebook, you can connect with me on the Clarion University of Pennsylvania website but I’ll leave you with a one more website. A man by the name of Alan Pollack did in depth analysis of every single Beatles song and he has a website. The name is Alan Pollack and I’ll send you the information Christopher. His website is a wonderful treasure for knowing anything about any musical attribute of any Beatle song. It’s a great resource to use in that regard as well.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, we’ll definitely have all of those linked up in the share notes of this episode. Huge thank you Scott, as I said at the beginning it was a particular delight to get to bring in an expert, he was also a member of Musical U so I hope you won’t be bombarded now with private messages inside Musical U from members wanting to chat with you about the Beatles.

Scott: I wouldn’t mind.

Christopher: Wonderful, well, a huge thank you again Scott for joining us today.

Scott: Thank you for having me.

The post The Message in the Music of the Beatles, with Scott Kuehn appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-surprising-ways-to-become-more-musical/
Have you ever struggled with wondering if you truly have what it takes to become a great musician?

If you’ve asked how to become better at music you’ve probably heard the same advice time and time again: practice your instrument, learn classic repertoire, drill your scales, study the theory, pass the exams… and so on.

But what if there’s another way?

There are actually a wide range of ways you can become more musical.

Here are 5 ways to become more musical which might seem like strange suggestions at first… but each one can rapidly transform your musical abilities.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/best-songs-female-solos/
While many songs sound great performed by both male and female singers, some tracks are definitely better suited to one gender or the other.

Whether it’s due to the lyrics, the emotion, or the melody, there are a number of tunes that seem to sound best when performed by female vocalists.

Wondering which tunes we’re talking about?

We’ve rounded up 6 of the best songs for female vocal solos, ranging from light and playful to deep and soulful.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/bassline-melody-four-ways-hear-difference/
You might think that telling bass from melody should be an easy task.

But from the Baroque era to the music of today, the bass line has always been a powerful attractive force in music, pulling our attention away from the melody line and sometimes causing us to lose track of which is which.

It doesn’t help when composers purposefully blur the distinction, or the bass player steps up to take a solo!

So what can you listen for when you’re not sure what’s melody and what’s bass?

Here are four ways you can tell these two apart.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/even-tiny-steps-can-make-you-a-stellar-musician/
Becoming a musician can be overwhelming.

Sometimes we look at the greats: Beethoven, Joplin, Hendrix, Florence—or whoever your idols may be—and we are so impressed it seems crazy, perhaps even arrogant, to imagine we could ever reach their heights.

So should we even bother to try?

“Always aim for the Moon.
Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars” — W. Clement Stone

This quote perfectly illustrates the right attitude to music. It’s not an all-or-nothing game! Even if you don’t make it as a world-renowned artist, the process of trying will make you a far better musician than if you set your sights lower.

Or to put it another way, keep your goals ambitious (and making sure they’re MAGIC) and you greatly increase your speed towards becoming a stellar musician.

Never let the overwhelming world of music, music theory or aural skills stop you from getting started—or from keeping up your momentum!

Read on to discover more tips to unlock your musical freedom.

Since founding the site in 2009 Matt has written over 500 detailed posts on what he’s learned from studying the songs of the Beatles – and he’s written over 300 songs himself.

You see, unlike some song analysis websites you find, Matt’s site is particularly notable for being very practical in its focus. Although it’s fascinating to read his posts purely for interest, every one is written with the active songwriter in mind, to inspire and guide them to better and easier songwriting, inspired by the principles used by The Beatles themselves.

In this conversation we talk about:

• How The Beatles could obey and break the conventional rules of songwriting so expertly if they never learned music theory.
• Some specific ways The Beatles modified chord progressions to be more effective and distinctive in their songs.
• Matt also shares what actually causes writer’s block and how to fix it.

We also talk about the ways Matt has benefitted from all his Beatles studies in his own songwriting, including specific examples of songs he’s written using particular principles he learned from the Fab Four.

You’re tuned in to Beatles Month at Musical U.

Listen to the episode:

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And Access To An Exclusive Special Offer!
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Links and Resources

• Mattblick.com
• Beatlessongwriting.com
• Matt’s “Be-altetudes”
• Ticket to Write 1: Use the flat 6 (bVI) chord in a major key song
• Ticket to Write 33: Subvert a 12 bar blues by altering the chord sequence
• Ticket to Write 67: Repeat Verse 1
• Ticket to Write 24: Repeat words and sentence structures
• Stream Matt Blick – “Let’s Build An Airport”
• Matt Blick on Twitter @realmattblick

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Matt. Thank you for joining us today.

Matt: Thank you for having me.

Christopher: So I am just a huge fan of your Beatles Songwriting Academy and it’s been really interesting to kind of peek behind the curtain a little bit to learn more about Matt Blick, the man behind it so I’d love if you could share that a little bit with our audience. Who are you as a musician and a songwriter? How did you get started in music?

Matt: Okay. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 14. I started in secondary school after brief flirtations with tuba, believe it or not and drums. I started playing in a band, a rock band, almost immediately, really, playing, kind of, Motley Crue hair metal kind of stuff, this was the 80’s, and continued in rock bands, largely, until the mid-90’s but along the way always seemed to get involved in lots of other, kind of, musical adventures.

When I was 16 I played in a band that played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the theater festival. The following year I was involved in writing the music for a show, went back to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I played in a big jazz orchestra as well and then in the 90’s I started attending a church and then started doing the music in church, writing music, arranging music at the church, still continued with theatre stuff, wrote for choirs while playing in heavy metal bands as well over the course of the years I got involved with helping refugees and that ended up with me playing in musical situations with refugees from Iran and Iraq.

I later went on to play in a Balkan gypsy wedding band —

Christopher: As you do.

Matt: — as you do, a chaotic, eight-piece monster that was wonderful and terrible at the same time and just been open to really any musical opportunity that’s come my way and just shaped me through that and then at the same time also in the 90’s while I was waiting for my rock career to take off I started teaching guitar and that was a very big catalyst as well for me learning a lot more because I honestly did on a, as a little bit as a scam at first.

I was on the Enterprise Allowance scheme and being an unemployed musician, not making loads of money, the choice that the government gave me was get a job or we’ll pay you 40 pound a week to start your own business and so I started my own guitar business teaching guitar and I had three pupils and as the year went on, because they only supported you for a year and then you were on your own, I started to get a few more pupils. Also, I really began to enjoy it and I began to realize that I was learning because I had to learn more, not only new things but I had to understand how I did what I already did so instinctively now I had to break it down and be able to understand what I was doing and present it in bite-sized pieces to other people.

So teaching was a big influence and then probably in the last eight or nine I really focused on songwriting kind of to the exclusion of a lot of other musical opportunities, both studying and teaching and doing it myself and that’s where I am now. I guess I’m a singer-songwriter but more songwriter than singer.

Christopher: Gotcha. That’s fascinating. What a rich and varied musical background and what jumped out at me was that you talked both about, kind of, diving into all of these incredibly varied musical projects but also about having to, kind of, pause and reflect and learn more to be able to teach and I think from the first bit people might think, “Oh it all came easily to him. He’s just one of those musicians who do anything,” but obviously that wasn’t the case, so could you talk a little bit about the learning process through that whole journey, like, how did you find learning music in general?

Matt: I was really, really motivated to learn. One of the things that I’m really grateful for in hindsight is that I went to a what I would term quite a progressive secondary school. We were allowed to call the teachers by their first names. There was no uniform and I think when you’re a kid, whatever situation you’re in, you think it’s normal so if you’ve got a horrible home life and whatever you just think that’s the way it is and I didn’t. We’re talking about education now but I just thought that was normal, as well and it’s only now as I teach in other schools I realize how completely abnormal that was but we had three music teachers and they were all, kind of, working musicians. They weren’t people that just taught, so, and I’m going to name check them because I think you have to honor where you came from soSteve Millward, Jonathan Trout and Leslie Lear.

So we used to have school plays but people in the school would write the play, they would write all the music and then the kids would perform it and I always remember one time I wrote this little chord sequence and I was one of these kids that just liked to write music down, write the dots down even though I couldn’t really read it I had a rough idea of what I was doing and this piece that I wrote just amounted to one chord sequence with some little variations happening but I showed my music teacher, Johnathan Trout, and he stopped the lesson, the music lesson that was planned and he got everybody in the class to play my composition and he arranged it on the fly, said to the flute player, you play the top notes of the chord and you do this and they played my piece of music and, again, it didn’t make a big impact on me at the time because that’s normal then, that’s what happens in a music lesson, your teacher just throws their lesson plan out the window and you all jam on your tune. Well, that was an atmosphere that I was in.

One of the other teachers, she’d, at lunchtime she’d sit at the piano and play Gradus ad Parnassum by Debussy, just jamming out, just being a musician but that all soaked into the thing so I don’t think I’m really answering your question here, but it didn’t come easy, no, but I had, I took every opportunity that I could so when my art teacher, so I’d go to this jazz orchestra kind of night class, do you want to come along. I had no ability to play that kind of music but that didn’t stop me saying, “Yes, I’ll have a go, I’ll come along. It sounds interesting,” and the same when two Kurdish refugees say, “We want to record an album. Can you find us a studio,” and I said, “Yeah, I can book you a studio,” and they said, “Why don’t you come and play on it?” and I said, “I know nothing about Kurdish music. I’ll have a go,” and so I got to experience pop music with quarter tone intervals in it and try and fit in, work with that, so [recording cuts out here, ambulance siren] I think it’s all about us being prepared to say yes and jump in the deep end and think some water up your nose and —

Christopher: (Laughs) There’s so much that I want to dive into and cover with you but I do want to just pause for a second because it’s not an easy attitude for a lot of people to take, I mean, hearing you describe it it’s kind of clear the benefit you get from it but were you nervous to say yes to everything? Were you just a fearless kid and not worried about failing, or how were you able to take such an open and ambitious or, yeah, how were you able to take that attitude?

Matt: Yeah. To be honest, it’s hard for me to put myself back in the mindset because I was quite a messed up kid and music was the only thing that I had that I really liked and I was the wort of kid that would have a hobby for two weeks and then have a completely different hobby and music was the only thing that I stuck with but in hindsight I think music or progressing in music and maybe life as well is all about failure.

You know, if you’re going to do anything, learn to do anything you are going to fail a lot of times before you succeed and so it’s not looking at failure as, this is a sign telling you to stop, it’s just almost like if you said, “Okay, to get this bar chord, the way to learn a bar chord is to fail to do a bar chord 200 times,” and then you’ll do it because actually in reality that is how you learn to do bar chords, you know. I’m just putting an arbitrary number on there, but you could say it in a different way but why not say, just, do it really badly 200 times and then you’ll be able to do it. And I think that’s certainly true of songwriting. You need to write a lot of bad songs.

Christopher: So tell us about your own journey of writing bad songs. How did you come to focus on songwriting in the last eight or nine years, the way you mentioned?

Matt: Well, the two things that happened, coincided and I don’t know which one influenced the other more. No, actually I do. So I was looking at my songwriting and I was realizing I was writing a very small amount of songs, maybe about five or six a year, I was averaging and I was laboring over them. I was revising them and revising them, rewriting them, playing them to people, getting feedback, rewriting them again.

Songs would go through three or four completely different sets of music, lyrics would be revised again and again and again and again and I just thought, “This is not working as a thing,” because I didn’t feel that songs were noticeably better once I’d finally, you know, revised them to death. I felt sick of them, mostly, because I’d spent so long writing them and I thought, “Maybe I’m not going about this the right way,” so I set myself a goal to, oh, and what happened was, as well I had an opportunity in the summer to use some office space to go and write every day so school holidays, six weeks, and there was an empty office and I’ve got a big family and it was, I could go there, have some peace and quiet for a couple of hours and try and write every day and it was really fruitful so I thought, “I’m gonna try and write every day,” and in 2011 I think it was or 2010, “I’m gonna try and do some writing every day,” and at the same time I realized that this song, I was trying to write songs that were very accessible.
They were mainly songs designed for congregations to sing in church so they needed to be the sort of songs that people could pick up instantly and yet I was very interested in music like Beethoven and very complex music and I thought, “I need to study someone who’s really accessible but still musically interesting,” and that’s where the Beatles came into the picture. So I thought, I’m going to analyze all the Beatles songs in one year and it’s going to really, you know, and also, as well I was wanting to find out, “Are they really as good as every body says?” You know, “I don’t know.” So I started that one-year project nine years ago and it’s, I think I’ve done about 90 songs out of 211 so far so I’m not even halfway.

Christopher: Gosh. Well, it’s interesting that you started with a bit of doubt, there, about the Beatles. Tell us how had you thought of them up to that point, you know, it sounds like you weren’t a lifelong devoted Beatles advocate.

Matt: I think, and I don’t know who said this, but I think the Beatles are both underrated and overrated at the same time so it’s very, because they were so culturally significant it’s very hard to get past that to what was their musical influence on, you know, their pop music, has it stood the test of time musically in songwriting and does it have any [recording cuts out here]? Are the people now doing what they did far better than they did?

You know, it’s like, nobody’s driving model T Fords now. You say, “Well done, Henry Ford, for pioneering but other people have taken what you did and expanded it and made it much better,” so I didn’t know and also I think you take them for granted. There influence is so pervasive that you don’t notice it. Everybody knows Beatles songs but then I realized when I thought about it, I haven’t even heard “Abbey Road” all the way through as an album. I think I know it because I know lots of songs from it but so I thought, “I’m going to go to the source and just find out for myself.”

Christopher: Wow. And clearly that one-year Beatles project turned into a longer project. How was the one-year writing project?

Matt: I wrote 47 songs in that year and one of the things that I did as well was I heard about this thing called February Album Writing Month Forum, FAWM.org which was a challenge in February to write 14 songs, one song every two days and that would be an album’s length of material. You didn’t actually have to actually record an album, you could just demo it or even just post the lyrics but the idea was to create an album’s worth of music solely in February so I thought, “Wow, I’ll never do that, but, I’ll never manage that,” you know, having written seven songs in twelve months I didn’t think I could write 14 in one month but I thought, “It can’t do any harm. I’ll sign up,” and it’s a massive online community and I wrote 24 songs in February and some of them were terrible but the biggest revelation was a song that I wrote and demoed from start to finish in an hour and a half and was and still probably is one of my best songs today and it was written, all I had to start with was the title of a children’s book that I had seen in a library at school which was called, “Let’s Build an Airport,” and so from that title I wrote a song from start to finish, complete and I still play it today. It’s the first track on one of my EP’s and it’s one of my best songs and so that showed me, actually, it’s not about the agonizing over the material and trying to fine-tune it.

If you keep writing good ideas will come out. You will get the skill. The skill level increases and then you can write good songs. It doesn’t mean every song’s going to be good, it doesn’t mean every song is going to be a little bit better than the one before. It’s a weird up and down chart but the overall level of your writing rises and, again, studying the Beatles, this is something that’s really clear because I’m even doing it in a chronological order.

So you have a song like “Something” by George Harrison, which is an incredible song. It’s an all-time classic in my opinion and lots of others and it breaks so many rules of songwriting but it’s an incredible song, without a doubt, and the next one that he did was “Old Brown Shoe,” which is a B side. It’s a terrible, terrible song and so it’s not like George Harrison got better at songwriting and then he was knocking it out of the park. He wrote a song. It was amazing. He wrote a song. It was terrible. He wrote another song. It was okay but the overall quality, if you think about George Harrison’s songs on the first couple of albums to George Harrison’s songs on Abbey Road to George Harrison’s songs on All Things Must Pass, his first solo album, there’s a definite improvement so, and that came from just writing.

The funny thing is, “Old Brown Shoe” breaks some of the exact same songwriting rules as “Something” does so even that plan doesn’t, sort of, you can’t nail it down to specifics but I think the general lesson is, write a lot. The only way to get good at songwriting is to write.

Christopher: Fascinating. So I believe this is one of your bealtitudes, your, sort of, not quite ten commandments. It’s the Beatitudes, but the Beatles songwriting principles which was, “Blessed are the prolific,” and another one that jumped out at me was, “Blessed are the co-writers.” So you alluded to George Harrison’s songwriting there but I think, you know, for most people it would be Lennon and McCartney that they immediately think of if you say, “Beatles songwriting,” and there’s this, such a romantic aura about that duo, you know, that that pair of names conjures up so many assumptions about the songs they wrote. What’s your own perspective on that? I mean, you had a beatitude of “Blessed are the co-writers,” so clearly it worked, but why did it work, do you think?

Matt: There are so many aspects to their partnership that made them the perfect partners for each other. I’ve often thought about, would it have worked with Lennon and Harrison or McCartney and Harrison or Lennon and McCartney and Harrison and I think there is a, I guess just like a marriage or a business partnership or anything there are good partnerships and not-so-good partnerships and so finding someone that clicks with you is important. That’s not to say that someone in our position has to wait for Mr. Right or Mrs. Right. It’s good experience to co-write anyway but what they gave to each other, I think, to start with, and maybe this is something that’s really helpful to your listeners where they are is in the early days they functioned as song finishers for each other and actually even later, much later in their career so if you think about when you try to write a song there’s the, what people call the craft and the graft or the inspiration and the perspiration so you get inspired and maybe you get a chord sequence and a bit of a melody or maybe you get the first verse and the chorus and then you get stuck.

You feel it’s flowing through you, you’re channeling something and then you get stuck and many songwriters will show you their folders of half-finished songs and so what Lennon and McCartney did a lot is they finished each other’s songs so what you say and there’s a few that everybody always gives examples to but “We Can Work It Out” is a Paul McCartney song. (sings) “Try to see it my way,” it’s very chirpy and happy and whatever and then John Lennon comes in in the minor, the relative minor key, “Life is very short and there’s” and it’s the dour kind of alternative to the chipper McCartney verse and then actually George jumped in a little bit because it was his idea to do the 3-4 “fussing and fighting my” 1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-3 “I have” — so that was his little contribution, which was an important part in the song or “A Day in the Life” where the bridge “And they woke up, dah, dah, dah, dah,” that was a McCartney, it was even a little bit of a song that Paul McCartney had written that they’d just moved into, there and the kind of, wordless bridge that proceeds that was a co-write so that took the pressure off them trying to, as I say, especially in the early days when they didn’t have the skill, to complete a song the other one would chip in and get it over the finish line, so that’s one thing, a song finisher.

They were also massively inspired by each other so it’s, you often hear people characterize, “Lennon was this,” “Lennon was political and McCartney was romantic” or “Lennon wrote horizontal melodies, the (sings) “I am here as you are here,” they’re all, (sings) “Picture yourself in a,” it’ doesn’t move very much where Paul McCartney is (sings) “the long and winding road.” He’s up and down, all over the place but those differences don’t hold up because anything that McCartney did that was fresh and interesting John Lennon immediately stole and copied and anything that John Lennon did Paul McCartney immediately stole and copied so all through their career you see things like John Lennon writes a song that echoes his growing up in Liverpool, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and then the very next song that Paul McCartney writes is “Penny Lane,” which is about growing up in Liverpool and you can see that happen with instruments, with chord progressions, with lyrical themes, with structures that as soon as one guy gets hold of something the other guy takes it as well. So it’s that kind of influence exchange and there’s lots of other things as well. I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to ask. Anything else you want to, going on that? I could talk all day about that topic.

Christopher: No. Very cool, I think one of the things I most like about your site is it’s highly practical, you know, there are some academic researchers who do that kind of hard core music theory analysis stuff but it’s kind of hard to think that and do anything with it whereas your site is always, I guess, because you are a songwriter yourself and you teach songwriting it’s always, you know, “Here’s what we can learn from this,” and I think what I loved about your writeup of that Bealtitude was you kind of ended it by saying, you know, “Which of these four or five roles could you do if a co-writer on?” I think one of the others that I remember was being an ideal reader where your, you know, I think it was Stephen King, you were saying, has this notion of an ideal reader who’s going to check your work and give you the most honest and useful feedback and that’s another kind of co-writing role that someone can play for you.

Matt: Yeah. And it’s important to say that ideal reader is a real person, because sometimes I think we can get derailed in our songwriting by imagining, you know, whether it’s literally an or, you know, “Oh this would be great if Beyonce heard this song and covered it,” or something like that. I think that tends to derail your writing process but if you know you’re going to show your work to a peer that you trust and like John Lennon is going to say, “That’s crap,” you know? Then you know it’s almost as you write you know, “Ah, this chord progression’s not going to get past them. They’re going to hate this,” or then it makes you, even before you get the feedback it makes you deal with the parts of your song that you know aren’t up to scratch. You fix them before you even get the feedback so that’s the way they function. They both have high standards and it worked as well because the other guy was capable of writing something better. If you brought something shoddy, they were competing for A sides later in their career, the A side of the single, Lennon wanted his song as the A side, Paul wanted his song as the A side, so they both needed to up their game to within that little competition, really.

Christopher: Interesting, and hearing you talk about that having a high standard and, you know, pausing to ask yourself if the song is good enough, how do you balance that with the being prolific and I guess another way to ask it is having written 47 songs in 2011 are you writing 47 every year or how have you found that balance?

Matt: No. I’ve written more some years, I’ve written a lot less this year because I’ve been working on my album but I think there’s a, there definitely feels like a critical mass where you have to get through all the stages of songwriting so often that none of them have any fear for you anymore so sometimes you’ll be, “I can’t finish a song,” or “I’m stuck.” I think you have to get to the point, as well where you realize writer’s block is not a thing.

There is no such thing as writer’s block, it’s fear of writing something bad or writing something stupid or writing something cliché’d or derivative, or, you know, you fill in the blanks and once you get over that fear, but, and the way to do it is by writing something stupid or cliché’d or derivative and the world not ending that you stop being afraid of it but the more important thing is that all that judging stuff has to come after you’ve written so if you try to evaluate too much while you’re writing that is what causes the paralysis as well and a lot of the writers that I work with, they’re over-analyzing. Well, they’re analyzing “Is this really any good” before they’ve even written it and there’s a quote in a song by Mike Viola which I love. It’s, like, the best songwriting advice but it’s in the lyrics of the song and it goes, “Songs, songs, songs, they pour out of me. Not all of them are worth finishing but you’ve got to finish them to see,” and you, that is what I really learned by writing that song, “Let’s build an airport,” is, it was just song number 13 or 14 in the list of things that I was trying to write but then after, when people heard this collection of songs everybody zoned in on that one. I played it at an open mike and before I got halfway through there was a drunk guy at the bar singing along with me on it so you need to evaluate stuff afterwards.

It’s — another thing, I don’t know how far I’m getting off the topic here, but another thing that I think is that if I played you one song and I said to you, “Christopher, is this song any good?” you, that is such a subjective question to ask you, whether you’re commenting on my songs or you’re commenting on the Beatles or you’re commenting on your own songs but if you write ten songs and I say, “Christopher, which one is the best?” that’s a very easy thing for you to do and also for you to articulate why it is the best because these chords work better or the lyrics are particularly good or the concept is strong but, so I think that’s why I know the reason that it’s not just being prolific because it’s good to, you know, produce songs in bulk but being prolific makes you a better songwriter and that is one of the ways it makes you a better songwriter is you can evaluate much more clearly. Is “Old Brown Shoe” a good song? People could argue but if you say, “Is Old Brown Shoe” better than “Something? ” you’ve got to be crazy to say it’s better once you compare? Yeah?

Christopher: Interesting. So as well as your bealtitudes on your site you have what you call “Tickets to Write,” which is, kind of, more fine-grained songwriting lessons that you’ve gleaned from this extensive analysis and, you know, there’s umpteen different ways this can be useful and interesting to people to dive into but I think for me I really thought of it just now when you were talking about songwriter’s block because for me, even as a non-songwriter who is just dabbled a bit in the past, as I read through that list I was, like, ‘Oh, I want to try that,” “Oh, I could write a song like that,” “Oh, that’s something interesting to try.”

Matt: Yes. Exactly.

Christopher: So I’d love if we could just share a few of those and maybe we can pick up some of the interesting musical ones and these are, you know, across the board from nitty-gritty music theory to overarching songwriting principles and I think you began, I don’t know if these were chronological but the first one on the list, anyway, is using the flat six chord in major key song.

Matt: Yeah. That, they are chronological. That’s why there is no rhyme or reason to the numbering. (strums guitar) So you have a ticket that is just, like, “Use this particular chord,” and then the next one is quite a slightly esoteric lyrical concept and then there’s something about arranging and then we’re back to chords again. It was a definitely, it was the second or third Beatles song that they ever released is where this came from, I can’t even remember what song but basically if you’re in the key of A, for example, (plays) the three major chords would be A, D, and E and so a lot of simple pop songs would use those (plays chords) something like that and then nowadays we would go to this minor six and there’s a whole industry built on the 1-5-6-4 chord sequence but what the Beatles did sometimes was, or, what the Beatles did most of the time, which grew out of their, sort of, ignorance of music theory was used chords that didn’t belong in the key so when I studied the whole collection of songs I found that out of something like 190 or songs that they’d written there were only about 11 that did not go out of key at some point so you perceive the Beatles as being very melodic and not atonal, you know, or avant garde, particularly, but out of all of those songs there was a real tiny minority that purely stayed in key and that’s quite amazing.

So one of the things they did was if you’re in A they used the F chord which is borrowed from the A minor scale and sometimes they’d just use that on its own or sometimes they combined that with the G which is the flattened seven chord so you’d have a song that’s kind of major (plays) and I always call that the Billy Shears chord because at the end of “I Get By With a Little Help from my friends” it goes, (sings) “Billy Shears,” and he sounds so happy because you’ve got that raising up which would normally go to the minor chord, like you get that progression for “Stairway to Heaven,” (plays) at the end but this goes (plays) and you just get a major lift at the end so you’d get that in (plays) “Suffragette City” by David Bowie, same thing.

That’s basically in the A “Hey, man, leave me alone” there’s the flat six “I said, ‘Hey, man, get off the phone’,” so you’ve got that switch between major and minor happening constantly because of that F chord, that flat six, so that’s, as you said, that is exactly how I, like, discovered the tickets and how I use the tickets, so I analyze the Beatles songs. I say, “Hey, this is an interesting thing they’re doing with this song. They’re using this chord. Now I’m going to try and use it,” so, for me, the big one was not the flat six but in a major key (plays) using the minor four, so in the key of A that would be D minor and they used that so many times but (sings) “Don’t take chances with romances,” but that was a cover.

That’s where, and so the interesting thing as well, is, because the Beatles recorded covers, not only can you go, “Oh, this is an interesting songwriting idea that they use,” but sometimes you can also see where they got it from so they’re playing a cover and you go, “Ah, that’s where you learned that idea,” and that’s an interesting thing, I think, perhaps, for your listeners is that they didn’t come out of the womb fully formed as musicians. Even the most avant garde and strange chord progressions and scales and ideas you can find the germs of earlier in their music and you can find the germs of in the music they grew up playing so they were influenced by Broadway musicals and stuff like that that Paul McCartney’s father and John Lennon’s mother would sing so you get in “Here, There and Everywhere” it has this strange little intro (sings) “To lead a better life I need my love to be there,” and then the song starts. That’s so bizarre. What is that? Well, it’s the same kind of verse that a jazz standard would have where you’re in a Broadway show. This person’s going to randomly start singing in a minute and it’s the lead into (sings) “Why I’m going to sing this song,” and they took that into pop music.

Christopher: Fascinating. So there was another lovely chord progression one that stuck in my head which was about taking the twelve bar blues but doing something a bit different with it.

Matt: Yeah.

Christopher: Could you talk about that a bit?

Matt: Yeah, because people, the Beatles played a lot of twelve bar blues music as they were, kind of, serving their apprenticeship in Hamburg but what’s really interesting is, in their own compositions they very rarely played a totally straight twelve-bar blues and but they still used the form so it’s interesting to note that something like “The Fool on the Hill,” which is not a twelve-bar blues or a blues of any description but it has a twelve-bar structure which is really unusual until you think that they grew up playing twelve-bar blues songs but a more straightforward one is “Can’t Buy Me Love, ” which is, you’re on the one chord , the C, (sings) “I’d buy you a diamond ring, my friend, if it’d make you feel all right.” So you’ve got four bars of the one chord then you go to the four chord “Give you anything my friend,” then go back to the one, “Make you feel all right.” Now, a normal twelve-bar blues would go, five chord, four chord, one chord, five. So and that would be “I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love.” It works okay, but they didn’t do that. They stayed on the five chord for an extra bar, no, sorry, they stayed on the four chord for an extra bar so you have, “I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love.” So they delay going back to the one chord.

Now, you could say, “Okay, they just fiddled around with it and that’s the lesson, now, just muck around with things the sake of it but what’s the song about? It doesn’t go, “I don’t care too much for money, money can’t…” so when you do it like that, when you do it the regular twelve-bar way the emphasis is on “I don’t care too much for money, money can’t…” so the emphasis is on “money can’t buy me love,” you’re arriving back home on the word, money. But what it actually is, “I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love,” and that’s the point, love.

So it’s, now with a lot of these ideas it was Paul McCartney thinking, “Ah, I want to emphasize love so if I delay,” but of course he wasn’t but the reason why great artists sometimes get a little bit mystical, and Paul McCartney’s definitely guilty of this, is that they’ve internalized the music so much. They’ve internalized what feels right and what feels wrong that they don’t know why they do what they do but it is for reasons like that. Why do you instinctively pick words that rhyme or words that chime that have similar vowel sounds or whatever? Because they feel better when you sing them but if you analyze it you can say, “Oh, because you’re using the same vowel sounds all the time.” So, and, that’s what I was saying to you about my journey as a teacher is that I had to work out how I was doing the things that I was doing instinctively. So, yeah.

Christopher: That’s really cool. I’m glad to hear you say that because there is this, kind of, traditional online debate about whether you need to know music theory and everyone always points to McCartney and says, “Well, he didn’t know music theory and he wrote some of the best songs,” and I don’t know, my perspective has always been, “Well, he didn’t study music theory. He didn’t know the official terminology but he knew music theory, like, he had it in his head.

Matt: Oh, yes.

Christopher: He knew how it worked and I think it can be helpful to people to understand, like, it’s not about knowing the official name for this, that, or the other. It’s about having that understanding of how it all fits together.

Matt: Yes, it’s certainly true. I mean, the Beatles, as you said, they didn’t come from nowhere. They didn’t hatch out of an egg. They were a band that was obsessive about studying music. They would go to NEMS records, they would put B sides in the little booths and listen to them over and over and over again. They played for six hours, seven hours a night in Hamburg learning songs, taking requests. They knew every detail of hundreds of songs. They were, and so they, when you say they didn’t know any music theory, you’re completely right. They knew tons and tons and tons of music theory.

They didn’t know what things were called. They didn’t know the labels but they knew exactly which chord would produce this feeling or this sound and if you stopped them maybe they couldn’t explain why they were doing what they were doing, just the same way if you stopped Picasso and said, “Why are you doing that bit green and not red?” “Well, if I sit down for an hour and I think about it maybe I could give you an answer but it just feels the right thing to do,” but the way you get there is by studying music and so I just think, you know, sites like yours and sites like the Beatles Songwriting Academy just making it a little bit easier, you know? Yes, if I locked you up in a room with all the Beatles albums and a guitar you would discover everything that I’ve figured out and anybody else has figured out but, you know, why not make it a little bit easier for yourself?

Christopher: Absolutely. Speaking of making things easy, I love that in your list are not just these slightly sophisticated songwriting ideas that connect to music theory there are also other broad things that we might overlook if we were just looking for those most distinctive and unusual things such as you have one which is repeating verse one. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Matt: Yeah. Well, I felt, as a writer, the reason any of these tickets are there is because they made an impact on me or I thought, you know, if it’s just, if it’s, like, buy a guitar and play some chords that’s not really a songwriting tip that I needed to tell myself, you know, but I felt that repeating a verse was cheating because it showed you were too lazy to write another verse, write a third verse, so when you say, repeat verse one, when the Beatles often did was that verse one, verse two, a bridge and then they repeat verse one again scale, again, which is another idea that pretty much comes from old jazz standards but I realized that although sometimes they did say, “Well, we’re running out of time so we’ll just repeat a verse one,” I realized that the Beatles, one of the contributing factors to them being so memorable is repetition and hooks and things like that so of course, if you repeat a verse it’s going to be more memorable than just having another verse and another thing that I had to get out of was the need to write a bridge for every song because not every song needs a bridge and so sometimes we sort of subconsciously picked up rules about songwriting that aren’t helpful, especially no, I would say, songwriting rule is helpful if you feel you’ve got to rigidly apply it every single time. You can break rules.

As I said, with the song, “Something,” it’s just not good to break every single rule, every single song, every single time but sometimes that little breaking of the rule can be the thing that makes the song stand out so in the song that I mentioned already, “Let’s Build an Airport,” I had verse one, verse one again, a bridge, verse two and then verse one again and that’s probably how I could finish it so quickly but also that’s what makes it so memorable and was such an unusual concept to begin with that, because they’re building an airport is a metaphor for, it’s a love song, basically, but you wouldn’t think it from the title that it bore repeating. It wasn’t, like, “I love you, you love me, let’s, you know, make a family,” so yeah, so repetition, I think, is one of the things I’ve learned from the Beatles that growing up playing very complicated heavy metal influenced by classical music and I needed to learn it’s okay to repeat yourself. The Beatles repeated the lyrics in other really creative ways, as well which I can talk about, as well, if you want to.

Christopher: Mm-hm. Please do.

Matt: So they would, sometimes repeating a verse outright doesn’t work because it, you might be in some kind of story structure where it doesn’t make sense to go back to the beginning again but they often used lyrical structures and repeated those so if you think of the song, “A Day in the Life,” which is a brilliant, brilliant song but it has no chorus, there’s no, so although it’s very memorable, there isn’t a traditional hook of a, you know, (sings) “It’s just another day in the life.” That’s not there. You can see why the Beatles are better songwriters than I am.

What he does is he has a structure so he says, “I read the news today, oh boy,” and then there’s the next part, “I saw a film today, oh boy,” and then he’s got “Woke up. Got out of bed. Tried to comb,” and there’s lots of waking up and getting going and so there’s, like, little ideas that keep repeating “Although the news was rather sad, although the film was rather,” I can’t remember exactly but these phrases that keep coming back but with different words dropped in or in the song “Because,” that John wrote, it was, “Because the wind is high it blows my mind. Because the world is round it,” you know, it’s because the the is the it makes me the, and once you use structures like that it becomes memorable and it becomes easy to finish because you just have to fit words in the slots you can mix and match them until you get something interesting so they did that all the way through their career, with lyrics.

Christopher: Very cool, so one thing I should mention is that Matt, you’re very good at, you know, just off the top of your head, coming up with song examples for each of these but I should mention that, you know, on your site, when you describe these you list out, like, “Here are all the Beatles songs I’ve found that do this,” and what I doubly love is you also list out, “Here are some other band songs we can point to where they’re doing the same thing,” which I think is just a really fascinating thing both for aspiring songwriters and music fans to just, kind of, take that on a listening journey. It’s really fun.

Matt: Yeah. Well, that’s, I think that’s important. Again, in a kind of permission way, so just like I felt like I needed permission to repeat verse one, you can get an idea from the Beatles, like, a chord progression. So, like, there’s, if I say, what people call, line cliché, where the minor chord, for instance (plays) so there’s a note going down chromatically within a chord,okay?

So that’s “Michelle” so you think, “Well, okay.” If you liked that song there would be a lot of resistance to going, well, I can’t just take that chord progression because everybody will go, “You stole that from the Beatles,” and then you’re in, you know, especially if they’re lawyers, say, but then you realize that that chord progression in “Michelle” is the same as (sings) I don’t want to leave her now, you know I believe in how,” so you’ve got “Something.” Okay? But then in the beginning of “Something” you’ve got the same thing. (sings) “Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover.” You’ve got it in the major key and then you go to something like (plays) so John’s using it in “Strawberry Fields Forever, ” and then, so you go, “Okay the Beatles recycled, recycled, recycled whether it was conscious or not there was chord ideas that they used,” but then you find lots, as you said, lots of the artists using that same idea then it’s almost like somebody giving you permission, saying, “And you can use it as well because if the Beatles used it and then this person used it and that person used it and that person used it then maybe it’s yours as well.”

Christopher: Absolutely. And I think that goes both for the kind of nitty-gritty unusual things like the chord substitutions we were talking about before and for these things that you might, kind of, think were too simple or to obvious to use in songwriting but if it’s good enough for the Beatles and all these other bands maybe it’s good enough for you, too.

Matt: Yeah. Because I think what’s obvious and simple in one genre is something that’s never done in another genre so it might be something that the Beatles did a billion times but in the style of music that one of your listeners might be playing it’s something that’s never done and then it’s a fresh, “Wow, where did you get that unusual concept from?’ and, again, that’s something that the Beatles were great at because they were so influenced, by, obviously Indian music and jazz music and blues and rhythm. Even Motown girl groups were a massive influence on the Beatles and so they kept sucking in all these different influences and maybe they weren’t the best at any of those styles but absorbing them made their music far richer.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, I love that you’re not finished with this project but you’ve put in a good few years and clearly it hasn’t discouraged you in any way, you know, I think some people would be nervous embarking on this to feel like, “Maybe I’ll just realize the Beatles were the best and I shouldn’t bother.” Clearly, it’s had the opposite effect on you. It’s been really inspiring so I’d love to hear where is your music now and what’s your current songwriting project?

Matt: So, I have just, I’ve finished recording an album called “55 Stories Down” and it is an album of just me singing and playing a baritone guitar tuned down to A so it’s a super low, it’s still a six-string. You still fret the chords exactly the same way as a standard guitar but it’s seven frets lower so it kind of feels sometimes like you’re playing the bass on the guitar or just the bass or, and, what I did, I deliberately decided to go that route because my songwriting is very eclectic. I write a punk song that’s got a political message and then the next thing I’ll write a Christmas song that’s very romantic but that’s got a kind of weird little twist to it and then I’ll write a very heartfelt song about losing someone that I love to Alzheimer’s and then I’ll write a, just, a stupid song that doesn’t mean anything at all, it’s just about having a good time and stylistically, as well, it’s very varied so I felt like I needed some unifying principle to bring those different things together so I decided just to limit myself on one instrument in the way I recorded it.

So it’s all, almost all live, playing the guitar and singing at the same time and just capturing the best versions that I could of that and so that was a really interesting project. I think that the whole thing (recording cuts out here) about limitations is that it’s a blessing in disguise. Again, I’ve written about that extensively on Beatles Songwriting Academy but, yeah, so that album is finished. I’m just in the last stages of post-production and it will be out in January.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, I certainly can’t wait to hear that and I’m going away right after this interview to listen to “Let’s Build An Airport,” which I believe is available on iTunes and Spotify and all the other good places.

Matt: Yep.

Christopher: We’ll have a direct link in the show notes for anyone who is eager to hear that song. Matt, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you. Tell the listeners where they can go to learn more about you as a musician, learn more about your songwriting, teaching and learn more about the Beatles Songwriting Academy.

Matt: Well, obviously, Beatles Songwriting Academy you can find at beatlesongwriting.com. You can find my personal website is www.mattblick.com , M-A- double T, B-L-I-C-K. It’s a lifetime of having to spell my name out for people. You can find me on Twitter as well where I’m realmattblick and, yeah, so if anybody wants to contact through those things I’d be happy to say hi. Yeah.

The post Writing Songs the Beatles Way, with Matt Blick appeared first on Musical U.

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We are all born with ears capable of understanding music on a deep level, and we can all become that “natural” musician through practice and training.

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