We Must Be Heard! Lyricists unite!

I am the group’s predominate lyricist. I’m left by the two guitarists to basically do whatever I want to in this department. Although I am seeing some interest by one of them on the horizon to submit his own work (Yaaaay!), generally this has always been “Casey’s thing”. Not that I mind it. I’m actually coming to realize a new level of quality in my lyrics as of late. It’s making me appreciate this work and making me want to do it more and more. Some of us musicians thrive in this department and it’s to those of you who share my interest that I share this post.

Since way before I was even in a band and had a good reason to write lyrics, I gave myself license and wrote them anyway. I was 15 years old when I wrote my first set of lyrics and I haven’t looked back. Although generally speaking, I was never great at it, I loved this particular aspect of the song. When I wrote lyrics, sometimes they would come on the wings of a melody beginning to form in the background somewhere. Sometimes a particular phrase would pop into my head and I’d then place it to a melody. Just because it was that good.

The main thing I want to share to my fellow lyric writers is this: stay the course. Some of you will never fail to pull great lyrics out of thin air as effortlessly as breathing. To you all I say more power to you. The rest of us need encouragement. Writing a good lyric is work and it is exhausting. Not that it is drudgery or even torture. No, if you truly love to write lyrics, you’ll chase after that elusive phrase if it means death and you’ll love doing it the whole way there!

What comes out of a good writer is exactly what goes into him. Read a lot. Read out of your comfort zone-even if ocassionally. Listen to people give speeches and lectures. Listen to the kinds of people you normally may not in your daily routine. Read some more. Read fiction. Read non-fiction. Read magazines. Read something online. Now you’re half way there. Why only half way? Because you’re not going to chicken out and regurgitate what you’ve read or heard. Now you’re going to think about it. You’re going to digest it. You’re going to form your own conclusions. You’re going to respond to it all. Now you’re going to speak your mind about all this. Your mind in your own words.

Doing this will allow you to more easily communicate what you are thinking or feeling about what’s going on in your life and in the lives of those around you. You are the first person, the second person and the third person. Now you are whomever you may wish to be.

-Casey

The Door (2009 C5 Music)

The Door 009 C5 Music

 

The Door is open. Come on in! 13 new tracks from your favorite songwriting team. The songs are available for stream or download via our media page.

Writing more complex music (Jason)

Jim and I have technically done more writing together than either of us have with Casey.  When Casey left Force That Binds, Jim and I continued on with another singer (and eventually yet another), and the two of us still wrote the songs musically-speaking.  When FTB finally folded, we went on to another band together (called Solidify) where we also wrote the music together.  In the post Solidify days, the two of us have spent time writing for our “Audio Challenge” projects (maybe one of us will explain that in more detail in a later post), and we spent time re-working and in some ways re-writing a lot of our old FTB songs together.

But as I’ve said in the past, the two of us have always agreed that our best writing that we’ve ever done is when we’ve written with Casey.  We work better as a trio than we do as a duo.

One of the biggest reasons for that, in my opinion, is that Casey always pushed us to come up with more parts, more change-ups, more dynamics.  A good number of our songs from the early FTB days had characteristics that set them apart from all of the other songs, other than the obvious chord progression, tempo, and melody.  Some songs would have tempo changes.  Some songs would break away from the typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus patterns.  Some songs had lyrical bridges.  Some songs had musical break downs or interludes.  Some songs had intros that were completely separate from the other musical parts.  Some songs had outtros that were separate parts.  Some songs had keyboard parts through the whole song.  Some songs had keyboard parts in only small sections.  Some didn’t have keys at all.

Toward the end of Casey’s time in FTB, Jim and I discovered the amazing world of digital recording, and we started writing song ideas individually instead of collectively, mainly because of the ease of plugging into a device and hitting “record” during our own free time.  As we started to do that, our songs became much more simplistic in structure and arrangement.  I won’t speak for Jim, but in my case it was probably because I was so excited to write “songs” that I just wanted to get one done and move onto the next.  Unfortunately that was forming a bad habit for me (and if I can be so bold, probably Jim, too).  When Casey left the band, we continued writing in this way, and pretty much all of the post-Casey FTB or Solidify songs (with a small handful of exceptions) where much more basic verse-chorus-verse-chorus style songs.

When BHP started getting together again, I’d present song ideas, and typically they’d have two different sections, and Casey’s first comment was typically “I have some ideas for some more parts”.  I never told him this, but I usually thought something along the lines of  “Can’t we just put vocals to this and call it done?!?”  But, over time it started becoming really obvious that our songs were becoming much more solid, and much more interesting.

Don’t get me wrong… sometimes simple songs with 2 parts can still come out great.  For example,  one of our songs on the RPM challenge disc (Fallen They Be) was called “My Offering”, and it’s a simple 2-part song that Jim and Casey wrote, and it’s probably one of the best songs on the entire album.

But for the most part I find myself drawn to having much more complex pieces.  Having songs with intros, pre-choruses, interludes, a guitar solo over a unique progression, key changes, tempo changes, etc, etc, etc.

On a related side-note, I’ve been on a Metallica kick lately.  I’ve always liked Metallica, but for some reason over the past couple weeks, or maybe even months (time gets away from me so fast these days) I’ve been hooked on them more than usual.  “Death Magnetic” is such a great album, and I’m really really intrigued by all of the different parts that each song has, and how the band managed to blend them so seamlessly.  I’ve been reading interviews and watching some behind-the-scenes type things, and Metallica’s favored way to write is that they jam on a bunch of different riffs (both separately and collectively as a band), then they take those riffs and chop them up and figure out how they all tie together.  It’s an interesting way to put together a song.

Jim and I did something similar on a song called Starlight that will be on our next CD (finished at the end of June).  Jim had a great guitar riff from years ago that we have never really used.  He figured out how to play it again, and then he and I turned on a drum loop and started jamming on parts in that same key.  The next day I pieced together the different parts we created into a song, and it ended up being a very dynamic very interesting piece.

I’ve been doing that in my own writing time lately… instead of just trying to write a verse and a chorus and calling a song idea done, I start up a drum machine, pick my key, and start coming up with riffs.  I try to lay down 5 or 6 different parts at least, then later I’ll come back and see how I think they might fit together.  Some parts end up being thrown out, and some end up sparking ideas for new parts, but it’s a creative way to put songs together, and it’s leading me in directions that I would’ve never gone if I had maintained my old habit of sitting down and trying to create an entire song from start to finish.

The strangeness of sound…

This week I’ve been working on a few things I’ve had laying around on my music project drive since before time began.  Okay, maybe not that long, but for several years at least.

Some of the things are just songs that I abandoned for whatever reason–I didn’t know how to finish it, I lost interest in it, or I just forgot about it– while others are songs that, at the time, I wrote, but really had no home musically for me at the time (ie. they didn’t fit in the musical projects/band I was working with at the time).

So, as I’ve gone through some of my old bits and baubles, carefully listening to each, and I’ve come to two realizations:  First, on a few of  these tracks, it’s readily obvious why I abbandoned them.  They were stale and very derivitive of the work and whatever phase I was in at the time I was doing them.  Honestly, going back to them now, they feel bereft of any real creativity on my part.  They lack soul, and deserve to rest in peace.

The second eye-opener came to me while listening to those tracks that I considered keepers–the ones I think are destined to be something someday, dang it –  when I realized just how important “in the moment” recordings are.    

As I’ve previously noted at length, I’m a by the ear player and writer.  I don’t read sheet music.   I know, really, nothing of musical theory.  I, essentially, just go by what my ear tells me is good.   So, when it comes to recording my inspiration I usually not only tab it out for prosperity sake I also make sure to record it using any means possible  future reference (for the record, I’ve even sent myself a recording via voicemail once).

Why go through this extra step of making sure you get a recording?  Well, as any rock god wannabe who’s picked up a copy of Guitar World or Guitar Player will tell you: Tab is not the end all to playing a song correctly or even well.   Sure, you could play all the notes just as they are written down, but without that sense of groove, that sense of the song’s soul, you really aren’t playing the song.

The strangness of sound is that an “E” isn’t always an “E”.  Sometimes the E is slightly distorted from the  heavy pick attack used to play it. Sometimes the E  is a soft, almost ghostly tone, brought forth with a light caress of a ring finger.   Sometimes the E is in one of the million degrees between they two, and that’s why reference recordings are so important.   Who of us hasn’t worked out a masterpiece the night before writing it down or committing it to memory only to reapproach the following day, or heaven forbid, days later only to ask ourselves “This is what I thought was so great?”  Chances are no, no it isn’t.  Because while we remember the notes, the chords, and  the progressions we’ve lost the grove, the vibe, the soul of what we were playing.

So, do yourself a favor, make a reference recording for everything you do no matter where you are at the time.  Be prepared for insipiration.  In today’s digital age, there’s no reason not to.

Getting to REALLY know the other two guys. (Jason)

One of the things I love about our writing sessions over the past 4 months or so is that I feel like I’m really really getting to know Jim and Casey, musically speaking.

That might sound ridiculous if you know me… after all, Jim has been one of my most consistent friends since the day that I met him… meaning other friends fade in and out and in and out of my daily life, but I’ve pretty much been in constant contact with Jim since late 1999 with pretty much no breaks. There were a couple stretches of time that we might go several weeks without physically seeing each other, but other than vacations and stuff like that, there’s probably never even been a week that we haven’t touched base in some way… probably rarely even a week DAY that I don’t talk to him (again, except for vacations and stuff). Obviously I know him very well on a personal level.

And even Casey… I’ve never talked to him as much as I have Jim (instant messaging keeps me and Jim in touch… Casey doesn’t have that luxury when he’s at work), and even though there have been stretches of time that I have gone without seeing Casey… a couple times even up to a year or more… our close work together in the FTB days and our mutual love for musical things has always made it easy for us to reconnect like no time has passed at all every time we get together again. And of course now I see him weekly, (soon to be twice weekly due to a church project we’re doing together), and we discuss things through email, so I have as much — if not more — contact than I’ve probably ever had with Casey.

I consider these guys two of my closest friends, so of course I know them personally.

And what about musically? The three of us wrote music together for 2 years in the FTB days. Even when we weren’t in a band together, the three of us, or combinations of the three of us, have went to several concerts together, we’ve traded CDs back and forth. Jim and I have worked on several musical projects together. Casey and I occasionally would get together to work on a song.

So how is it that I’m getting to know them musically better in the last 4 months than I have in the previous 9 years?

I really think all of this concentrated writing that we’ve been doing has really put us in some kind of “zone” so to speak where, although I know this sounds cheesey, we just have started communicating very openly when it comes to music. More so than we even did in the past.

I feel that right now we know each other’s strengths and weeknesses very well. We understand each other’s tastes very well. Some examples… when I’m writing a new piece, sometimes I just know “this needs to have some of Jim’s trippy ambience sounds”, or “I would probably end this section here, but I bet Casey’s going to want it to be longer for vocal reasons, so I’ll stretch it out.” A couple times recently we’ve been working on songs that one of the guys will make it clear that they don’t like it, and without them saying much I seemed to know exactly what they didn’t like about it, make some changes based on what I think they’re looking for, and they’ve ended up loving it.

Some of it has just happened naturally… I mean, we’ve worked on roughly 40 – 50 song ideas together in the past 4 months. We’re naturally going to learn more about each other. But I think part of it has also come from a conscious effort. I’ve spent time recently listening to bands that I know that Jim and Casey are into, I’ve spent a lot of time going through some of their musical ideas that we haven’t got to as a group yet (and there are TONS, let me tell you!!), and I’ve made mental notes of criticisms and concerns they’ve had as we’re doing our weekly writing sessions. I think it’s paid off.

Obviously we don’t want to become clones of one another, but I think the more I can read them, the more I can anticipate what they’ll like, the more I can do things that is going to make it easy for them to be creative in adding to the songs.

That doesn’t mean that they still don’t surprise me sometimes. Jim brought us a song idea the other day that sounded almost industrial with choir voices over one of the parts. Casey brought a synth part to a song we had that sounds WAY awesome, but it didn’t really strike me as something that would be Casey’s style. The surprises are still there.

But I think getting to know these guys has really musically over the past few months has made me a better songwriter. Our strength comes from collaboration, and the more successfully I collaborate with Jim and Casey, the better my songs come out. I’m pretty sure that both of them would say the same thing about their songs.

Learning to Collaborate…

Call it self-centeredness, a control issue, or just egotistical behaviour but in the past I’ve always been wary about collaborating with people from outside “the group”.  It took me awhile to really grasp the fundamentals of collaborating outside of my comfort zone.  Although, I must admit, I’m really glad I did.  

Largely, I think,  my problem was a boundry or trust issue that stemmed from my own insecurities as a writer/musician.  I just didn’t like venturing into the unknown territory and the uncertainty of dealing with a new voice.   With Casey and Jason I’ve always known I could be open and honest about an arrangement.  I could tell them and expect them to tell me when something  just didn’t work, and know it was just honest critism with no judement intended.   They were my bandmates and I knew I could expect that from them.  I also know I could expect the same level of passion and dedication out of them.

But a third party? 

What could I expect them?  Would I get the truth from them?  Would the share the same vision?  Would they bring the same passion?  Would they listen and take from my direction?  

Admittedly, that last one was my biggest fear.  Why?  Well, between the three of us, we know and have worked with some great musicians, and for me, nothing was more off-putting or terrifying than having a truely skilled guitarist in and play your song–the one that you wrote, and that  you struggled over–effortlessly and making it sound better than when you played it.  Now, admittedly, this has only happened to me once, and when it did they guy only showed up for a week, stole our drummer and started a new band, but, hey, it was another log on my insecurity fire, and nothing gets that fire roaring higher than the realization, erroneous as it may be, that you can be replaced.

Fast forward a few years…

With time comes experience and patience.  As Jason can attest, it took me a few years to start really trusting myself as a musician and define my style.  I am a late bloomer when it comes to music, but I’ve had to hit the ground running and learn things as I go.  Luckily, Jason is the type of guy who gladly offers uncolored feedback , relying instead on the straight-up approach, and  helped me re-enforce the fact that while, yes, there will always be someone who is technically more skill than I am, when it came to my music, that it really didn’t matter.   It took me awhile to see the forest through the trees, but I eventually realized  he was right.   Sure, someone maybe able to pick-up and play my song better than I do, but the fact is, it’s my song they are playing.   They didn’t write  it.  They didn’t slave over it. They didn’t compose or arrange it.   That was me.   I had created something new.  It really was, and still is,  a reassuring mantra.

As with most things, though, learning this brought new questions and  forced me to re-examine several  aspects of my songwriting.  Which leads us back to collaborating.

I now understand that collaboration is nothing more than a new tool in the songwriting shed. It’s not a replacement of a tool.  It’s just a different tool.   For instance, let’s face it , I’m never going to be a singer, and while Jason can do the occasion backing vocal, I don’t think he’ll ever refer to himself as a vocalist,  but there are many times when we are working on a song where we NEED another vocalist.  Where we need someone to come in and duet with Casey, or, as we’ve done recently, sing Casey’s lyrics and melody in place of Casey in order to achieve what Casey envisioned.  Now, while this may be collaboration in the loosest sense, it still shows the value of collaboration.  

Where collaboration really shines, is where we are at now as a group.  Now that we aren’t playing live anymore and worrying about how we’d perform a song live,  we are exploring all sorts of avenues, and collaboration helps us in this exploration.  We can also now, take a song exactly where we pictured it going.  So, not only can we have a studio musician come and fill in some parts with us, we can have folks from around the world actually WRITE with us.  

This, of course leads us to the ultimate truth about collaboration:

Collaboration can be liberation.

-Jim

Never throw away ideas…

The thing I’m quickly learning about working with Jim and Casey is to never throw away ideas. When we were doing the RPM challenge in February, I presented 3 song ideas one week. To be honest, I wasn’t 100% sold on any of the three, but we needed tracks fairly quickly, so I showed them anyway.

The guys loved them, two of them became songs on the RPM Challenge disc, and one of them is in our list of ideas waiting to be used.

In songs that I heard limited potential, Jim and Casey heard solid ideas. The two songs that got used on the RPM Challenge are 2 of the 3 songs that keep fighting for the “favorite song” spot for me from that CD.

In March we started gathering ideas we had laying around for our next phase of writing. I had a song in the batch that honestly I didn’t intend to bring to the table. I saw it as a remnant of my writing phase from a lot of years ago, and thought that it would be too outdated for BHP to use. Casey asked me to leave it on the ideas board so that he could play around with it. A couple weeks ago he brought us lyrics and a melody to that song, and it’s now called “Now’s The Time”. With some layered guitar tracks from Jim and a great melody from Casey, it’s a killer song.

Last night I presented two more song ideas. I would’ve graded them both as somewhere around a C… maybe a C+ if I was generous. But because of the previous examples I just gave, I had no hesitations about showing the guys the stuff. Sure enough, when I played the songs, I could see the wheels turning in both of them, and they wanted both of them left on the ideas board.

On the flip side of that, Casey has a ton of old songs that we thought we’d slowly go through over the next couple of years and pull some ideas out of here and there. I pulled a song called Walk With Me, and Casey was not sure how he felt about the instrumentation of the song. I went through and replaced some of that, took the song in a new direction, and he told me last week that all of a sudden it’s a song idea that he likes again.

Jim also had a short riff from WAAAAAAAAAAAY back around 2001 or so. I had always liked the sound of it, but we had never done anything with it, and Jim always said he didn’t know what direction to take it in. Casey said he thought the song would be right up his alley for writing vocals, so Jim and I just started brainstorming on parts. We plugged in guitars, hit record, and just started laying down several chord progressions that matched the key of the original. Over the course of the next week I snipped those progressions into song parts, and now we have a killer piece of music waiting to be finished up.

The moral of this story is simply this: Don’t ever throw away song ideas. Even if they don’t demand immediate attention from you, you never know when someone else will grab ahold of it and turn it into musical gold.

-Jason “I put the H in BHP” Hannah

Struggling for Inspiration

One of the best things to come out of the RPM Challenge this year for me was a reaffirmation that  ideas, both big and small, are all you really need to get rolling on things.

Back in the day, I used to think  that in order to bring something to the guys, I had to bring a nearly fleshed out song and arrangement with some general idea of where they song should go musically.   I didn’t see the value of  just bringing  an aenemic, tiny little riff.  Years later,  I see how wrong and short-sighted that thinking was.  I realized that part of the joy of writing with other people was that the smallest of things can start the bonfire of creativity.

To capitalize on this , as part of our weekly writing plan each of us are to bring 3 tidbits, no matter how small, to our weekly get togethers.  These tidbits can be a riff, a new take on  a section, a thought on an arrangement, or, really,  whatever.  Basically, we just want there to always be ideas to keep things moving forward.  Normally, this is pretty easy for me to do, but this last week it’s just didn’t happen.  

Why?  Was it the normal things:  family, work, etc?  No, those are always there, and are to be expected.  I work around those things usually.  No, this week,  I  can can lay my lack-of-writing sword (yes, I have one of those, and occasionally I do have to throw myself on it)  at the feet of disorganization.

Disorganization of my workspace  killed my inspiration last week.  I know it may seem trivial, but nothing disrupts my creativity like disoganization.  I hate having to fight with things. I hate not having essential tools at hand.  I hate having to stop and think when I’m trying to get something done.  

Last week, began ordinarily enough and with the best intentions:  I was working on a few PCs so I could hand them off to friends and get them out of my workspace, clearing up some room.  Of course, while I was supposed to be doing some beneficial for myself in the long term, the reality of the short term was that my that my studio workspace  ended up getting torn apart while I was hooking up and disconnecting the PCs and that things got moved around to make space to work.  

In the end, everytime I went to sit down and work on something musically, I found myself fighting with things.  Things were just not where they were suppose to be.  By the time I sorted everything out, the moment of inspiration I sat down to capitialize on was gone, and I was just going through the motions trying to force myself to be creative –which never works.

So, this week, I’m going out of my way and making the effort early on to clean and organize my workarea.  Hopefully now, with the Disorder Dragon slain, I can get back to do some real work.  

-Jim

A Musical Marriage

Anyone who is married can attest that the more you commit to it, the more enjoyment you get out of it. I’ve found this to be true as well.

It’s the same way with music. The allegory of being married to one’s bandmates notwithstanding, I’ve found that the more I am committed to the process of writing, the more productive I’ll be and the more enjoyment I get out of it. And let’s be honest, it’s crucial to be able to enjoy the music you are involved with. Otherwise it’s a sad and colossal waste of life to be in a band with any other end result.

Although BHP is not a band in the strictest sense, as we do not rehearse or gig, we do need to commit time and energy toward crafting our tunes. Otherwise they don’t get written and it becomes the whole sad and clossal waste… Sometimes pushing oneself even to do things one enjoys (songwriting, for example) is necessary. It’s not drudgery as it would seem at first. Always be mindful to push through the times where you may not be as inspired or when ideas don’t come as easy. It works. Giving yourself that extra push once in a  while keeps you afloat and in the game. I’ve learned this with lyric writing in the past couple of months. I’ve written more lyrically in 2 months than ever.

Of course, knowing that you’ve got committed band mates helps too. As a musician, you may have been (may be) in a band where you are pulling most of the weight somehow. First, do not panic. Realize that most musicians are flakes (there, I’ve said it). But realize too that if you’ve got the fire to write and perform your own stuff, then you deserve to be with other musicians who have the fire to commit as well. Otherwise, you guessed it, sad and colossal waste of time!

I’ve been lucky the past ten years. I’ve been priveledged enough to be in two bands that are committed and it’s made all the difference for me as a musician. It’s encouraged me to be committed and helped me enjoy the music so much more. Even today with my BHP group, I have that.

Commit to your music. You deserve the satisfaction of enjoying an end result. Your music deserves the committment as well.

-Casey

Writing for a band vs. Writing for the song (Jason)

When Jim and I started writing songs nearly 10 years ago together, we approached everything from a “live band” point of view.   There’s nothing wrong with that… after all, we were writing songs for a live band.  We were writing with the intention to play them in front of people first, and worry about how to make recordings sound good second.  Every time one of us wrote a guitar riff, we’d instantly start thinking about what the other one was going to play on top of it.  It was our goal to write parts that sounded full with two guitar parts, and occasionally a keyboard part.

The two of us wrote a lot of music for FTB when Casey was writing with us.  When Casey left, and we were writing for Al Flemming, and later Greg Brink, we were writing ALL of the music.  When we tried starting post-FTB bands on a couple of occasions (a band called Solidify being the one we got closest to getting up and running), we were again writing all of the music.  Besides the numerous songs we finished with each singer, we had piles and piles of unused music.  We did A LOT of writing together.

Here we are, over 6 years since I’ve been in any form of the band FTB, and I still have a tendency to want to write like I’m writing for a performing band.  It’s a hard habit to break.  I’ve forced myself to break it often, but it still feels so natural that I have to make a conscious effort to not trap myself inside the “band” box.  It’s become easier over the years when I’m writing for my own personal music projects to not think like that (obviously, because I’m playing ALL of the parts in those projects), but as soon as I get together with Jim and Casey, those old habits want to come back.

What’s the difference?  Well, in my mind, the difference between writing for a live band, and writing just to write is unbelievably huge.  When writing for a band, we have to keep from writing too many parts (because there has to be someone available to actually play the parts), but we also have to worry about not writing enough parts (performers don’t want to stand for too long at a time without doing anything).  When writing only for the sake of the song, we’re much more free to do what’s right for the overall sound.  If one part of the song needs 4 guitar parts and 3 keyboard parts, that’s what we put in.  If another part needs keys and no guitars, that’s what we do.

I think doing the RPM challenge last month helped push me further in the right direction.  We worked on songs so quickly that there wasn’t time to worry about who had enough parts every song and who didn’t.  There were songs on the RPM album that I didn’t even play guitar on.  There were songs that Jim didn’t play on.  There were two songs that Casey didn’t record anything on.  Yet all three of us walked away from the project very happy with every song that the group finished.

Now, a month later, as we are working on a huge collection of songs for a CD (or perhaps even a CD set?!?) that will be finished in the last week of June, I finally find myself more relaxed about “parts”.  It seems crazy, but this might be the first time musically I’ve worked with other people and not really been concerned with making sure we have the right number of parts, and making sure the right people play each part.

It’s a liberating feeling.

-Jason