SAHAJ TICOTIN: Overcoming creative fear, the science of melody, and the final 10% of a hit song

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Joey Sturgiss tones, creating unique audio tools for musicians and producers everywhere. Unleash your creativity with Joey sturgiss tones. Visit joey sturgis tones.com for more info. And now your hosts, Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek, and Eyal Levi.

Speaker 2 (00:24):

Welcome to the Joey Sturgis Forum podcast. Thanks for tuning in and how are you guys doing? Doing awesome. They're both awesome. We're both so awesome. We take

Speaker 3 (00:35):

Team the awesome.

Speaker 2 (00:37):

Who could that be? Who is that new voice that we don't recognize?

Speaker 4 (00:42):

I am Sahaj Ticotin. I used to be in a band called Rah on Universal, and now I produce records.

Speaker 3 (00:49):

I remember that song. What is it you call my name?

Speaker 4 (00:52):

Do you call my name? Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:53):

Do you call my name? You call my name, whatever. No, I'm kidding.

Speaker 2 (00:57):

So if you're not aware, guys, this is the songwriting month and Sahaj has a little special interest in songwriting and is good at it, and we're going to learn some things about songwriting from him. So kick things right off and get started here. How did you get started in songwriting and tell us a little bit about your background.

Speaker 4 (01:16):

I grew up in New York City and my family's in the entertainment business, but they were all smart enough to get into the movie side of the entertainment business. I was the only idiot who went into the music business, but by the time I was graduating high school, I was already kind of in a band and wanted to do stuff and I was obsessed with Sting and the police. I was a singing bass player in a trio band, just like everything I did was modeled around what Sting did and I tried to copy his songwriting, honestly. I mean that was the first one was Sting. The second one was Paul McCartney, and then weirdly enough Black Sabbath. So it went literally in that run. DMC somehow made it in there as well.

Speaker 3 (01:59):

That's an interesting array of influence.

Speaker 4 (02:02):

I'm in my forties now, so it was hard to grow up in New York City in the early eighties and not somehow be influenced by hip hop. So I did graffiti, I was really into run DMC and all that stuff, but then musically I was really into Black Sabbath and all of these other things. My brother actually played a lot of fusion jazz in the house, which I think there was one group called Return to Forever, which was Al Dela Stanley Clark and Chickillo, all these guys that were crazy jazz guys. And their sense of melody I think was one of the first things that I latched onto even as a kid. And then I think that's what ultimately led me to Peter Gabriel's Sting the Police, Paul McCartney, even The Wing stuff. And even prior to the Beatles, I was really into Paul McCartney because I just discovered everything in the

Speaker 5 (02:49):

Wrong order. Do you attach yourself to him because he was a bass player mainly or because of his songs?

Speaker 4 (02:54):

I think what it was was that as with Return to Forever, I was only really attracted to music that transported me. I wasn't really ever attracted to music that made me feel like I was kind of connected to the moment. I was always interested in songs that seemed to move me to another realm. So later on when I discovered Pink Floyd, obviously that became a huge part of my life because it was always about feeling like Boeing somewhere else. The police thing was very deserty and Arabic to me, and I guess that set up the whole thing in my brain of how things ended up playing out for me. But from a songwriting standpoint, I wrote my first song about Hamlet in my senior year of English class with a guy that I didn't know, and I ended up actually being in a band with that guy for 10 years, but it was literally a last ditch effort to do a final project that was due in two days, and we just wrote this song about Hamlet and I ended up singing it in a classroom, which I hadn't sang in front of people before, and it just went really well and we were like, Hey, let's write another song, and it just kept on going on.

(04:01):

But I mean, those songs sounded like terrible police demos, I promise

Speaker 5 (04:06):

You that. How many songs would you say it took before you would classify them as not terrible anymore or kind of passable?

Speaker 4 (04:15):

Okay, so now this is where I sound like the screaming douche bag two is the answer because the second song I wrote, which was a song called Please Tell Me I did in 1988, and I actually released it on my solo album of 2012, and it's not particularly changed very much. So it was like, I think the second song I ever wrote was kind of the thing that made me feel like I could actually do it because it came out so good. I was like, wait a second, this is good. And it's on, I mean, it still sounded like a police song, but it was really good. And I mean, I never let it go. I mean, I literally rerecorded that song probably eight times in 12 years, but it was the second song I ever wrote.

Speaker 3 (05:00):

That's sick. So how did you get involved in the band and what's the story behind rock? Well,

Speaker 4 (05:04):

Like I said, the guy that I met in high school, we ended up being in a band together for 10 years and it was kind of like a rivalry relationship, a little bit, A bit of everything I did he competed with and everything he did, I competed with, and it wasn't particularly a healthy situation, but we lasted a really long time. I wrote a bunch of songs. I ended up getting a couple of small indie investor deals to make records in 94, 95. And through that I met this one guy who was an investment banker, a hedge fund guy, and he ended up kind of mentoring me for three or four years and bought me $150,000 studio in his house in Greenwich, Connecticut. And I kind of just learned how to engineer and stuff there. I really had no idea what I was doing.

Speaker 5 (05:55):

What did he mentor you on? Business and life or music?

Speaker 4 (05:59):

I think it was just the nature of this guy was 34 years old, he was already retired. He had worked for Goldman Sachs, he was friends with Warren Buffett. It was a weird kind of, he dated my sister for five minutes, but we ended up hanging out. I ended up moving into his house basically, and he just was a guy that was so successful and went to Harvard and had just this incredibly different perspective on what it took to do things that in that regard, I felt mentored. I felt like he was an example to follow in terms of how to get things done because up until that point, I'd always been kind of a little bit of the guy that the project's due the next morning, it's two o'clock in the morning and I'm still finishing it. That was my life. I was a serious procrastinator and I always thought things were easy, but he kind of taught me how to take things to a extremely serious level and take them to actually finished stuff.

Speaker 5 (06:53):

Anything you can share about that?

Speaker 4 (06:55):

I think it's funny because as an artist, which was what I was back then, I had no idea how hard it was to actually consistently make music. That was good because I was really worried about making 10 to 15 songs a year, and I think the discipline back then was still something I didn't really accept. I wasn't focused on getting things finished in a timely fashion. I had this luxury of living in this guy's house, I had this luxury of time. I was young, there was all this other stuff. As I got older, and especially now because I'm so busy the whole time management and discipline aspect of getting things done, I see the bands that do it well, and I see the bands that don't do it well, and almost always, it's not the talented band that wins. It's the band that really has the discipline to get things done and has a vision and believes in it and has the ability to follow through.

Speaker 5 (07:53):

I've noticed that as well, not just with bands, but with individual musicians, with producers, with, I mean really in any profession, I think actually getting things done is way more important than being talented.

Speaker 4 (08:06):

Yeah, it's magical When you see someone who you absolutely have no idea why they're successful and yet they are,

Speaker 2 (08:13):

I think it's part of the human condition almost because anything that you do creatively is not going to impress everyone or make everyone happy or enjoy it or whatever you're trying to accomplish or even feel something from the song. So the rule of it doesn't have to be the greatest thing ever, but as long as it's great, I think is a good guideline. That's something we talk about is if you're mixing a song and you're working on it and you mix this one song for six months and you still don't show anyone, you're not getting the idea that you'll never step off that ladder or go to the next step of the ladder unless you actually just put it out, accept your mistakes if there are any, or accept your shortcomings and just move on to the next project and get another opportunity to try again. Because it's ultimately, I think you fail if you just sit around and sit on material for too long.

Speaker 4 (09:14):

Yeah, I get that. And to me there's like a zen aspect of that because on the one side you have to have the confidence and the courage to move on to whatever, to not dwell on something for too long. On the other side of that, you have to have the strength and the courage to fight for a good idea however many times you have to fight for it. There've been many times that I've had a song that I would walk away from and then revisit and be like, oh, this is really great. I should do it this way. And then I would revisit and I'd do it this way and I would do it that way. I mean, the song that Joel talked about, do you call My name? I wrote that in 1997. I think I recorded it eight or nine different versions before the time that it actually came out in 2002, and it was one of those things where I had to be able to walk away from where I started, otherwise it would never have been able to evolve. But by the same token, I recognized that there was something there that needed to be cultivated and built into. And I think that what you're saying really applies, but it also, it's tethered to the other side, which is to make sure that you fight for the great ideas. If you have a great idea and you for whatever reason you can't make it work, don't stop trying. But

Speaker 5 (10:25):

I guess the key point though is that you still moved on to other things.

Speaker 2 (10:29):

Yeah. You didn't let it prevent you from creating other things. And also I would argue that through time you gained the wisdom to know if it was right to apply energy to or not.

Speaker 4 (10:42):

Absolutely. I think you have to have the sheer audacity to just walk away from something that in your mind, you built up so heavy, you made such a big thing out of it in your head, and then you walk away from it. Sometimes that's literally what it takes to be able to go back to it and do it the right way.

Speaker 5 (10:57):

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean then I guess we're really saying the same thing when you break it down, which is that getting too attached to things for the wrong reasons is a bad idea, and being able to move on is always the best plan of action because if you have to ditch a bad song, great, the quicker you move on, the better. Or if you have something great that just isn't ready for whatever reason, moving on and evolving is also the best solution so that you can come back to it stronger. So something that you said earlier that I'm still interested in hearing some more about is this guy kind of taught you what it takes to actually get things done in the world of winners or whatever, if this is just my way of phrasing it, but you also said that there was a lot of luxury of living in this dude's place and having whatever amount of time to just do whatever in. How did the whole time management thing, how did that get drilled into your head under those kinds of conditions?

Speaker 4 (12:02):

Well, I think there was always an underlying understanding that my time there was limited. In fact, I think I moved in there with the intention of staying three months and I ended up staying three years, but for the entire three years, there was always kind of this understanding that, hey, I might meet a girl tomorrow and I'm going to kick you out of the house. You know what I mean? So it was always kind of a little bit of this. I always felt like, geez, what a crazy opportunity to have all this gear at my disposal, not have to pay for it, live in this crazy house, be able to do things on my own terms. I was always like that even before that, to be honest, when I had a little home studio, I was always like, oh my God, I have three hours right now.

(12:45):

My parents aren't home. How am I going to maximize this? I honestly believe that's part of growing up in New York because in New York City people have this urgency. It's something that was actually hard for me to get rid of when I moved to Los Angeles because in Los Angeles, people don't have that sense of urgency. People come into the studio they do for socializing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean they show up at a session and it's 45 minutes of let's talk about what happened at the game last night. And then we're going to smoke weed for an hour and a half, and then we're going to talk about the track maybe for a little bit, and then finally maybe three hours later we get some work done.

Speaker 3 (13:18):

Oh my God, I could never do that.

Speaker 4 (13:20):

Of course, it depends on the band, and luckily I work with a lot of bands, not from la, but when I do pop sessions, they're almost always like that. You set a call, time of 12 o'clock, people show up at one 30 and you start working at six. I mean, it's retarded.

Speaker 2 (13:35):

How's the New York session go?

Speaker 4 (13:36):

When I was working in New York, actually a big good friend of mine is a mastering guy named Paul Lo, and he's amazing. And we actually, we co-produced the first raw record that we did on Universal, and this was a guy, he showed up on time, you got the ball rolling, everybody was ready. The studio, it was Puffy Studio sound on Sound on 45th Street and eighth. And I mean, that place was professional. There was no laziness. There wasn't people sitting around doing nothing. Everybody walked in and was on point. It just seemed like there was an urgency to everything. And even in my meetings with New York record people, there was always an urgency to get to, even if they're excited about it, it wasn't a negative thing, it was just they always wanted to get into the meat of the matter as opposed to talk about a bunch of dumb stuff.

Speaker 3 (14:21):

I love that. That's awesome. I mean, the three of us are very much guys like that, and we run our stuff like that. I mean, I even piss with a sense of urgency because I always feel like I'm running out of time. So it's really cool to hear that and refreshing. And every time I deal with East Coast people, I feel like that's something that is reciprocated and appreciated. But then you deal with somebody on the west coast and they'll be like, yeah, man, give me that demo. Give me the demo. And then you hit 'em up after they badger the crap out of you, and then it's like, oh, you haven't listened to it three weeks later. And it's like, are you kidding me? You're riding me every day for a month. I finally turn in the record to you, and then you take three weeks to listen to it. Oh my God, I'll kill.

Speaker 5 (14:57):

Has everybody here seen the Wolf of Wall Street? Yes, of course. That part where he goes to Switzerland to deal with his banker

Speaker 3 (15:05):

And

Speaker 5 (15:05):

He's freaking out and he doesn't want to do the eight minutes of customary small talk.

Speaker 4 (15:12):

Right, right.

Speaker 5 (15:12):

Yeah, that's that sort of thing. I've never thought that people are dicks when you walk into a meeting and they just want to get right down to it. I actually prefer that.

Speaker 4 (15:21):

Yeah, I mean, the thing that, obviously there are people in LA who are obviously not like that, but it's just kind of like an overwhelming, especially in the pop world, there's an overwhelming sense of, there's almost like an attitude of, well, we're so good at this, we don't need the whole day to do this. We're going to get into it for a few hours, knock out a hit, and then we're going to go home.

Speaker 3 (15:45):

Well, let's guess it's like good mixing. You've got to be confident going in, right?

Speaker 2 (15:48):

Well, let's say that the environment though on your upbringing here probably contributed to your success because when you're around that kind of mentality, the one that's with the sense of urgency, it really will kind of formulate how you approach your creative outlet.

Speaker 4 (16:07):

I used to say just the fact that as a blossoming adult in my early teens having to take the subway to school, I went to LaGuardia High School in Manhattan and I lived in Queens. The responsibility and the pace of just getting on crowded trains and going from train to train, it really makes you feel like there's a mission. It's never just gooding on in la you're 16 years old, you get in your car, you go to school, you park, you probably have a nice car, you take your time, you say your friends. I had to run I to, I couldn't miss the F train. I would miss it and it would be a problem. And there was always a sense of urgency, even as a young teen. And I think that that was something that always immediately pushed into your head that missed opportunities are always going to be there, and you have to be on point in order to get them. That's

Speaker 2 (17:00):

Beautiful. I think there's a lot of people that don't have stuff like that, and they are struggling to get further along, and I think songwriting is probably the toughest to actually get stuff done. It's hard to finish a song and call it done. So I think that's a great example for people to realize that your environment, everything is affecting your ability to be good at it.

Speaker 3 (17:24):

So if somebody wanted to get into songwriting, I know we have tons of listeners in here that are probably in between a lot of things. They may play in a band, they might produce a little bit in their house or whatever, and they might do some songwriting. But for the guys out there that are listening to this that want to get into the game of writing songs for a living and doing nothing else, is there a path you can recommend to follow or a direction to go, or where do you start, I guess is what I'm asking?

Speaker 4 (17:48):

I'm going to jump into that and I'm kind of responding to what we just said about the discipline and the urgency and all that stuff too, and kind of blend it into one answer. Because one of the things that I think from my perspective, and I'm really curious if actually if any of you guys agree, of all the aspects of making music performing, the mixing part, the producing part, the business of the music world, I honestly feel that the most fear-based decisions go into songwriting that most people make their decisions from a songwriting standpoint based on fear. I think that when they come up with an idea, the immediate reaction is, oh, is this good enough? Oh, is this that this, does this sound like this? Does this fit here? Does this fit there? I think that one of the biggest things to overcome when you decide that you're going to start being a songwriter is to try not to make your decisions based on fear. Because what happens is the second you say, oh, man, I love that part, but it kind of sounds like bring me the horizon, or, oh, I love that part, but it kind of sounds like this other, as soon as you start getting into that game of comparing it to the rest of the world, in my opinion, it's almost like you've not even taken the first step and you're already backtracking.

Speaker 5 (19:11):

I definitely agree with you. I think that it should be two different processes, the creative process and then the editing and refinement process. And I've always found that my best writing happens when I get into this weird creative state where that voice literally doesn't exist. There is no questioning the ideas because the ideas are flowing and they're great. And then afterwards you can get in there and decide if you actually like it or not, or if this needs to be shortened or lengthened, or if it sounds just like a riff I heard in another song and I'm just mimicking it and didn't realize it at the time, but I've noticed exactly what you're saying. When that voice is on during the creative process, it literally murders the creative process.

Speaker 4 (19:58):

Yeah. It's like you're literally fighting with one arm. And it's a frustrating thing when I deal with bands that have that mindset because I'm trying to be fearless and I'm trying to be like, look, let's go through a thousand bad ideas to find five good ones, but a lot of them won't even get past two or three bad ideas before they've kind of just stricken the entire idea down completely. Going back to Joel's actual question, the first thing you should do as a songwriter is try and write songs like the bands that you like. Don't be afraid to be like, geez, I like Metallica. I'm going to go write a Metallica song. Oh, I like this. And I'm talking about at the very beginning process of trying to break into songwriting, the last thing you're going to try and do in my opinion, is reinvent the wheel from your first song.

(20:46):

Like I said, the second song I wrote was just the police song, but it was a good police song, and now literally 30 years later, it's on an album and nobody says it sounds like a police song, but it was. And I think that when you make the decision to become a songwriter, the first thing you have to do is not be afraid to show your passion. Somebody said this to me the other day, and I could be misquoting, but I think Andy Hor said, the great artists are just flat out thieves, and the average artists are guys that borrow ideas.

Speaker 5 (21:17):

A mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal,

Speaker 4 (21:21):

Right? So there it is. So I mean, from my perspective, there's a strong truth to that, and I think that when you kind of let go of your fear of sounding like something or being familiar, that's

Speaker 5 (21:31):

The first door into songwriting. In Paul McCartney's autobiography, he was talking about the time when The Beatles were a cover band. They used to play five nights a week, five sets a night, and do all covers when they were in Berlin. And they did that for years and they started writing songs based off of the songs that they were covering, and their thinking was, we'll steal this from this Elvis Presley song and just write it better. We're better so fuck it, we'll just steal it and improve it. And that's what they did. That's what all their early music was, was they were literally ripping off stuff from their cover songs and just tweaking it a little bit and evolving a little bit at a time. From there,

Speaker 4 (22:15):

I think that obviously it adds weight to what we're saying, but I think the next step beyond, okay, now that I've got this idea, I copied it, how do you filter it through your perspective? And if you don't have a perspective, then that's the thing you really need to start looking at is whether or not as a writer, as a person, as a person, talking to your friends at a bar, do you have a unique perspective on take on things? One of my good friends out here, I wouldn't say he's my best friend, but he's a good friend of mine, is a pop writer. He makes a ton of money, doesn't know how to use pro tools, can't sing, doesn't play an instrument, but all he does is come up with hook ideas and he does it for all these Dr. Luke's songs. And he makes a ton of money because he just sees things the way no one else sees them.

(23:05):

And through his perspective, he can make a song a hit song because he's changing reality for the listener. And I think that that's one of the things that as a songwriter, you have to do, and that can't be just lyrical, just melodical or just instrumentation. It has to be a combination of everything. And the second part of it for me is melody structure. As soon as you start figuring out what your favorite bands are, you're going to run to a point in your life and say, well, I wrote a song that sounds just like Pink Floyd. Why is Pink Floyd so much better than me? Why is that sound so much cooler than my attempt to write that song? 90% of the time, at least in my experience, it comes down to the fact that the melody structures and the way that everything is designed to move from moment to moment is done on an expert level, is done on this high level where the melodies and the leading tones go from moment to moment properly, and that allows you to build a song from a moment of low intensity to a high giant epic chorus.

(24:11):

Those are the things to me that a lot of people coming into the business, they don't even understand that the shape and melodies of hit songs are specifically designed to lead you to the next moment of the song. It's not something that when I sit here with bands, and I'd explain this to them, their eyes are wide open and they're like, what do you mean? Because it's not something you think about. You hear a nickelback song, it may be annoying, but you're like, eh, it's just a pop song, but there's a science to the way that those songs lead into the next moment and how the loops and all the parts are oscillating against each other

Speaker 5 (24:47):

To keep you interested the whole time. I think that some people just refer to it as tension release. I think that that's one of the most important things to develop as you get better. But you're right, it is a collection of nuances, so there's really no way that a beginner would be able to do all those little things. I think that that's where the years and years and hundreds of songs later, you can start to get kind of good,

Speaker 4 (25:15):

And then you do run into young people. I mean, there are occasionally, there are people who walk in here and I'm just like, damn, your melodies are just awesome. Yeah,

Speaker 5 (25:21):

It happens.

Speaker 4 (25:22):

It's just instinctive to them. They just know that that feels right at that moment, and it's kind of amazing to me. But for the most part, most people, it does take hours and it does take many, many, many songs. And then of course, taking that one step further, you have the idea of, okay, so now you've created these melodies that work and you have let's say chord structure that supports the movement and everything else. What's your next step? Well, the lyrics, but the lyrics can't just be the lyrics. The lyrics have to sing well, they have to come out of your mouth in a certain way. It has to be something where the vowels and consonants work in tandem with the melodies and the moments and the inflections. I mean, there's so many, of course, millions of details that make a song work. But when you're writing, I would say the primal feeling of this is good, this is bad. You have to start out trusting that a lot more than I think a lot of people do. And that goes back to my original point of fear. Let your gut tell you when something feels good and don't stop until it does feel good. Don't be lazy.

Speaker 2 (26:24):

I think we're kind of on a macro tangent, which I love, but I have a micro tangent that I'm curious what you have to say about it. I feel like the art of it kind of goes with what you just said about how the lyrics can't be just the lyrics and parts of the sounds and the language coming out of the mouth and how that is creatively good sounding. I think the art of that is starting to get lost, especially in my field. There's a lot of dudes that just don't care about that. And I feel like that's part of what makes a song really great is kind of that mix mash of the language, marrying the beauty of melody and rhythm and getting that to work together in a really interesting way.

Speaker 3 (27:14):

Yeah, I have a saying, it has to roll off the tongue. It has to be easy to say, easy to repeat. You want to sing it along,

Speaker 2 (27:21):

But not just easy though. It has to be interesting and infectious and all these things. And

Speaker 3 (27:30):

There's

Speaker 2 (27:30):

Certain ways to say certain things that sound sad and certain ways to say things that sound happy. And I'm not just talking about word choice, talking about everything. So in your eyes or in your perspective, do you notice that same trend and especially in popular music as well as independent music?

Speaker 4 (27:49):

I think, yeah, you're a hundred percent correct. And I think if Bob Marlet were here, and I work with Bob a lot, and Bob always tells this story to bands, he always uses Lincoln Parks crawling as a great example of how to use the syllables, the consonants and everything with a simple melody to make that. He always points out that the whe in that song is so impactful is because when it goes to the chorus, that hard sea of crawling in my skin, all of those words are designed to create the angst that the whole chorus is about. So it's not just the meaning of the words, but it's the attack of the syllables and the attack of the consonants. And I think that what I've noticed, I can't honestly say that I've ever come across bands in my entire career that were ever really cognizant of this new bands, most bands seem to be at a loss when you say these things to them, but I do think that it's become certainly less prevalent on the radio if you listen to, and I try not to listen to butt rock as much as I possibly can, but it does seep into my life when I have to play a song for a band or somebody's asking me about a song and I have to know what it is.

(29:00):

But yeah, I think that as pop music moved towards more conversational lyrics, I think Rock has tried to mirror that, but in the process, rock has lost the finesse of being able to get the words to feel poetic and compelling so that you can actually come back to the song and listen over and over again. I honestly think that the reason why bring me the horizon is become, bring me the horizon isn't just the fact that they're cool looking and they have cool riffs and their melodies are poppy and this and that. I think it has a lot to do with the way he massages the vocals or that the vocals themselves are massaged and held and delicately treated

Speaker 2 (29:42):

Well. Also, he has very interesting things to say, like true friends stab you in the front. Those kind of little things that go against the grain of you, you always hear stab you in the back or whatever. So it's like, that's what I was trying to say is like, okay, so you have an interesting idea. That sounds like a really bad local band song. So true Friend Stab you in the front is an interesting idea because it's ironic and it goes against the common saying, and then take that and put it to a really good chord progression and sing it a certain way and have it flow like this. And it's powerful when that all goes down. And I noticed a lot of bands, I've overheard many sessions where bands are talking about, well, all you need is okay, you need to come up with the melody.

(30:28):

So here's the notes we're going to sing. Alright, now let's make a rhythm. Alright, now this is the order that the notes are going to go on. Now let's put some words to that. And there's nothing wrong with that process. If you do that process and then come up with a great song, then you're a winner. But if you look at it from that point of view and you think, well, all it has to be the definition of all it has to be is notes, order, rhythm and just some words. And if you do that and you execute that and you feel like it's good, but it's not actually good, then I feel like that's where the failure comes in. And I've noticed, I was working with a band, I'm not going to say who it was, but we were working on a song and it was pissing me off because we had this beautiful thing that I felt like sounded really good, but the band didn't want to do it because of one of the words.

(31:18):

And I was like, wait, you don't understand. This sounds awesome because these words flow in a certain way. And I really, honestly, as much as you hate to hear this, I don't care what it means, it just has a beautiful sound to it. And I'm sure that someone else listening to it will be able to formulate their own meaning out of it. And they're like, well, I don't like what this word word puts us in a certain category and makes us look this way. And I'm like, well, okay, but now you're going to change that word and it's going to ruin the whole part. So this is, I

Speaker 5 (31:51):

Feel it was very, that's fear based thinking he was talking.

Speaker 2 (31:53):

Exactly.

Speaker 4 (31:55):

Absolutely. Yeah. The other thing I've noticed, I mean just to jump in on that point, I think what's interesting again is because of technology being inexpensive and so many people being able to record at their homes and all this other stuff, I blame a little bit of the dilution of all formats of music to explain why people are taking less time and less delicacy in creating the art form. Because what happens is I think we're dealing with mathematical averages where if 50,000 people are writing crappy songs on their laptop today, then there's kind of a chance that one of them is going to strike onto something that's interesting. And I feel like those things that aren't truly evolved, that haven't really proven themselves as great art, suddenly they rise to the top and they end up being mainstream music somehow. And what happens is because people are listening to it and it's like, oh, it's successful in its way, they give that lack of evolution, that lack of finessing, they give it weight.

(33:05):

So then when they go to write their songs, they're like, well, that band, they don't care about how cool the words are or how interesting this is. So I'm not going to care either, because that's in, I think that that ends up blowing. I remember talking to a famous producer guy named Mike Barro, and Mike was a guy that did Appetite for Destruction and a whole bunch of other stuff. And one of the things he told me about was that when he started working, no one could get a record deal. It was so unbelievably expensive to make a record that only the guys who had already blown the doors off of creativity were the people that record companies were actually looking at. You had to be Jim Hendrix to get a record deal. You had to be Janis Joplin to get a real record deal. It had to be mind-blowingly amazing. Nowadays, if you have 400 bucks, you can buy a laptop, go online, get a cracked version of Cubase, and you're in business. So it's a very difficult thing to filter out, and I think what happens is these random bands that strike up that get lucky with a kind of interesting take on something, they get blown up as mainstream, and then you're sitting there, well, wait a second, this isn't really good. It's just kind of like a gimmick. And then you're

Speaker 5 (34:25):

Rebecca Black Friday. Rebecca Black

Speaker 4 (34:28):

Friday. Exactly.

Speaker 2 (34:29):

Well, I just want to say I think the rise of small business in the music industry, that's been part of the challenge because it used to be big business, all of it, almost all music. You had your local bands that play in bars and stuff, but those bands never toured. Those bands never made albums. In fact, I would argue and say that they probably mostly played cover songs, and of course you had your bands that would play cover songs and originals and whatnot and everything in between, but the separation from small business to big business was just so, it was just a night and day thing, and now the rise of small business, YouTube, iTunes, and all this and tune core, and now you can put your own music out and you can look like a real established band. You can look just like Lincoln Park.

(35:22):

All you have to do is get the right sunglasses, get your $400 camera at Best Buy or hire your $150 photographer. Most pictures are a good quality. Now, even if you're a bad photographer, same thing goes with video and all these things combined together. So it really does come down to now I think we're starting to go back to that time where we're like, wait a minute, we need to be looking for super, super talent instead of just talent or even look, I find it interesting because I can remember when a band like Korn or whatever, and I'm kind of speaking to the new metal era, but a band like Korn was just so unreachable. They just seemed like rock stars just the biggest thing ever. Yeah, they were. But now you've got people that look like rock stars, but in reality, they work at Jimmy John's and they still live with their mom. They

Speaker 3 (36:29):

Still act like rock stars

Speaker 2 (36:30):

And they're on the record label. It's pretty crazy.

Speaker 5 (36:33):

You should also listen to some of those songs that help them sell millions of records compared to the songs that you hear from these bands you're referencing to now. And there's no comparison. Like those songs that Korn was putting out that help them become a multi-platinum rock level band were amazing.

Speaker 2 (36:54):

The songs that you can remember every lyric, and you can still sing the melodies and you never forget them.

Speaker 4 (37:01):

I just remember listening to issues and remembering that song falling away from You, and listening to that riff, which was clearly just a jazz chord followed by a low A, and to me, the adventurousness of that, even at that point in their career where they could have been safer, that was the thing that I thought that I feel a lot of bands just don't have the balls to do anymore. They just don't have a vision to evolve. A lot of modern rock bands, and we all know which ones they are, are very happy to make the same record over and over and over again.

Speaker 3 (37:39):

I feel like on the investment side or the label side of that, it's the same thing. Everybody is afraid to take a risk because the marketplace is just so much tighter than it used to be.

Speaker 4 (37:50):

I agree, and from a business standpoint, maybe there's logic to that, but it's very shortsighted logic, no matter how you look at it, it has to be eventually there's a point at which whatever you're doing, if you do it over and over again, it loses its newness. For me personally, there's very few modern rock bands that seem to have courage, and that's one of the things that bums me out more than anything else. And then when I say that, I can think of a lot of indie, maybe underground, even genty bands or crazy bands that are really adventurous, but these are guys that we all know are selling 10 or 15,000 records total. It's a little frustrating on both sides.

Speaker 2 (38:28):

Yeah,

Speaker 4 (38:29):

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (38:30):

Well, I really love the insight that you have on this, and I think it's right on there. And I guess I have a question for you, and I think the audience would love to hear your answer. So if you are a songwriter or maybe you do a little bit of songwriting and you're not necessarily, you don't have the goal of doing, you're not trying to do a hundred songs a year and you're not trying to write with a hundred different people, but you do work with your own band or you write 10 songs a year or 10 songs every two years, what's some advice you have to improve the workflow of songwriting? What's some good habits that people can get into and how can they approach songwriting to make it easier to make great material?

Speaker 4 (39:18):

I think the first thing is to acknowledge that there are a lot of the things that we discussed today from a songwriting standpoint are things that require time, experience and all of that. But at the end of the day, the audience is looking for one thing. The audience is looking for something that relates to them that they believe and impacts them in an emotional way. You can write a shitty melody, you can write, you can have a terrible snare drum and a really crappy guitar riff. But if you come up with something even lyrical or a combination of melody and lyric that makes people feel something that really makes them feel like they're either at a sports game, they're sad, or that they're living in some moment with you, that you're dragging them through some real moment with them, then you can get away with a little bit of murder.

(40:10):

And I would say the first place to write from is don't ever write a song that doesn't mean anything to you. Don't ever write a song that doesn't have a personal effect on how you live your life, because if it doesn't affect you, it's not going to affect the audience. So you have to make sure that whatever you're writing about you have to be passionate about, then you have to struggle and practice to be able to use the tools to refine how to get that emotion onto the song properly. And that goes back to learning the melodies. That goes back to learning how to write lyrics that flow nicely and feel right. That goes back to making sure that if you write a melody that you like and it has seven syllables, don't write lyrics that have 15 and try and shove it into the seven syllable melody you wrote. Amen.

(41:08):

Right, because nine out of 10 times your first instinct, your first idea of that melody is probably where you should be. But that's my art, bro. I'm with you, dude. I'm all about melody. And for me, the whole thing could fall apart by adding two four syllables to a melody line. Make sure if you're preserving the feel of a melody, make sure the lyrics are working with it, not against it. That's the first thing. And then as far as workflow goes, try and do stream of consciousness at first. Don't get really stuck on, oh, she went to the park and then I lost my heart. And you don't get so stuck on exactly what rhymes, what doesn't rhyme, all that stuff, get the body of the idea down and then chip away at it. Look at it like a piece of clay that you're going to shape.

(42:01):

So if you have an idea, just be like, oh, this is cool, this is cool, this is cool. How do I make these words work? How many syllables can it be? Do I have to pull out two or three to make this fit the melody and then work that way per line until you feel like, oh, this actually makes sense and it's cool. And the other thing is, oh, this is actually a pretty good tip. I think this is really important. Don't write in layers. Don't write a song that's about one thing and then has four subtext layers about four other things. If you're writing a song about being mad at a guy, write a song about being mad at a guy, not about how being mad at that guy, now you're bringing in your band mates, or you're bringing in some sort of other context that has nothing to do with it, really right about the one subject that it is.

(42:50):

A lot of people will come to me with songs and they'll be like, well, I wrote this song about this girl and she's cheating on her husband, but then she meets this guy and then the guy doesn't really like her because she's this, and I'm like, wait a second. You have one song about the girl cheating on her husband. You don't need all the other subtext because the other subtext is just distracting from what the core of the emotion is of the song. So just in my opinion, it's very, very important to find, to chisel down your concept for a song so that the chorus, the verse, the pre and the bridge are a really all sending one message. And that will help you not have an audience that's sitting there saying, well, I kind of like the song. I don't really know what it's about, but I like it. That happens a lot.

Speaker 3 (43:35):

Yeah. What do you think makes a hit song or what qualities or commonalities or your opinion makes something that really resonates over the long run over time with people?

Speaker 4 (43:45):

I've been talking about this a lot, and I think that Dr. Luke, who's a pop guy, and Katie Perry and all this other stuff, and he's a terrible person to bring up in this podcast, but no, he is great.

Speaker 3 (43:55):

We love Dr. Luke. We're all fans. Okay.

Speaker 4 (43:57):

I've had conversations with him, and one thing he said to me, which I think really, really resonated is he said, every hit record he's ever worked on became a hit in the last 10% of what went into the song. He said the first 90% of the work was getting the song to the point where it was a great song, but what made it a hit was the last 10%. Now specifically, I think, and I'm interpreting here, I think what he was talking about is those ideas and those production things that make a song go from being kind of finished to really polished than a hundred percent. In my experience, a lot of times it takes, even in the mixing process, I'll hear something that can completely alter a song into something that makes it really fantastic. And I think that when you're analyzing a hit song, the thing that always seems to stick out to me personally is the level of detail and the perfection. When I think of Lincoln Park Hybrid theory, meteor, there's a perfection to the way that that's produced. When I think about the weekend and Can't Feel My face and all these other songs, there's a perfection that goes into the sonics that bring the song to you in a certain way. Now, that said, the songwriting itself, of course, is incredibly crucial. And I think sometimes the mastery in hit songs is making sure that the production and everything gets out of the way of the song itself.

Speaker 2 (45:30):

There's people who don't quite have the ability to see or hear this, and one of the examples or sayings that I like to preach that I feel like helps people connect to this concept is that a really great song can stand on its own acapella or acapella with an acoustic guitar. Now you get this all fancy production and this big pop production or this big rock thing, and it makes the song sound huge and cool. But if you were to strip all that down and just have one dude on an acoustic guitar and one dude singing, or maybe even just a guy singing, it's still going to be a great song. You can sing that Crawling In My Skin example. You can just sing that in the shower, and it's as if you're just in this beautiful fantasy land.

Speaker 3 (46:19):

If a song's a hit, it doesn't matter the genre, it's all the same calculus. It doesn't matter if it's a metal or a pop song, you can take that song and put any genre, AKA, change the production around it, and it's still just as good in any genre. Hence why different genre covers are so cool and effective because the song's pop punk, but now it's pop, now it's metal, now it's hip hop, but it's always a great song no matter what is behind it.

Speaker 4 (46:43):

And I think there's one other layer too, and I think that I've noticed as of late that the conviction of the people making the song as well as the talent of the people performing on the song, but the conviction that the commitment that they're making to delivering this song unapologetically, that's a big part of hit songs to me. I feel like a lot of times you can kind of suss out which songs are like, oh, well, we kind of got it to a point, but then it got a little bit lost, so we just added a whole bunch of shit. But it's still kind of a hit, and it's just kind of this and it's kind of that. But the first time I ever heard Sober by Toole, you're just like, the conviction of the way everything was handled is just single-minded and so unbelievably clear that there's no way that song isn't compelling from the very beginning to end, even though it's long and it doesn't really move that quickly.

Speaker 2 (47:40):

Yeah, absolutely. That's freaking awesome. Sahaj, dude, thanks for being on the show. We got to wrap this up, but you've been a great guest and we really appreciate your time and all of your advice that you have to give to everyone. And I have to say, I hope we can have you back.

Speaker 4 (47:56):

Well, I'd love to come back. This was great. I'm really into it. It was interesting. You guys all had great perspective as well, so I'm very impressed with the whole thing. I'd love to come back.

Speaker 2 (48:07):

If the audience wants to take this further and look you up, is there something that they can check out online?

Speaker 4 (48:12):

Yeah, there's sahaj ticket tin.com. It's just my producer page, and then I'm on Facebook, so either way.

Speaker 2 (48:18):

Sweet. Awesome. Well, thanks again and we will talk to you soon, I'm sure.

Speaker 4 (48:23):

Awesome, man. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1 (48:24):

Yeah, man. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure. This episode of the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is brought to you by Joey Sturgiss tones creating unique audio tools for musicians and producers everywhere. Unleash your creativity with Joey sturgiss tones. Visit joey sturgiss tones.com for more info. To ask us questions, make suggestions and interact. Visit URM Academy Podcast.