*These are my notes from [Brian Eno's online songwriting course](https://schoolofsong.org/products/songwriting-with-brian-eno) organized by School of Song. The course is from 2025-01-05 until 2025-01-26 and consists of 4 lectures, 3 Q&A sessions, and 3 song-shares, all via Zoom. It cost $160. I hope these notes inspire someone who couldn't attend.* ![[eno-2025-01-05-chat.png]] Intro: You can tell a real story like a dream. Just by changing how you retell it, you can make it dream-like. ### In-class exercise Watch a short film (landscapes from a moving vehicle) and try to write a song this way - make it dream-like. Words of encouragement? "What have you got to lose?" Don't use your phone, ideally - take notes on paper. Post your lyrics in the Zoom chat. > pass me by > i can't wait > for all the boring places i see > wheat fields > oil rigs > ranches and farms > to pass me by > > there's nothing for me here > except my thoughts > and the skies > but i hope > they just pass me by > > fields of brown > and field of beige > peppered with dew > or fog > > i look out > and squint > until there are no shapes > just smudges of color > smears of brown > beige Now go through the chat and look for lyrical inspiration or even just images - grab anything from the chat and feel free to alter it. > flickering light > calling > from the distance > it's calling > a transmission > calling > i'm drifting > > flickering light > calling > calling > calling To finish the exercise, we had 20 minutes to write a song based on this. Brian suggested using chords G and C (or just one of them). ### Lecture continues In a certain way, I hate songs. They usually distract you from music. Also, they have lyrics, which are always stupid. When we wake up, we stuff ourselves with stuff: information, food, etc. Try waking up and doing nothing. Sit in a chair. "Inspiration comes, but it has to find you working." (Picasso) In doing something you will become inspired. The practice is: keep doing it. At some point something will click. It might be days or months. But it usually does, if you keep doing it. The ultimate condition of social media is that you become an obedient shopper. What you really want to be doing is finding out: "what do I really like?" (Jon Hassell) What clicks with me? What makes me feel alive? There is a huge industry: advertising; it's hi-jacking your attention. They don't give a toss if you write a song or not. They want you to buy a pair of trainers and go on vacation. Please don't forget that. It's an active rebellion to not take part in that. We're talking about innovation. How do we innovate? Sometimes people think of something genuinely new: like a bicycle. In music and art, people take something old and make it interesting. And sometimes you start by doing something else - and accidentally you come up with a weird thing (e.g. peanut butter and jelly). When you're making a piece of art you're carrying out a lot of old ideas: e.g. painting has to be rectangular. Look up Frank Stella. Leaving something out is going to be a big part of what we're talking about. The kiss of death is when a clever software manufacturer says: "Now you can do anything". It doesn't help. That degree of freedom is time-wasting. Everything that we call a structure is a limit: e.g. chord structure. E.g. a finished song will be exactly 4,5 minutes. Bell ringing (campanology): in old English churches there are up to 12 bells. You have to ring them in non-repeating sequences. The idea is to never repeat a sequence, and work through all the possible patterns. "When you were busy manufacturing a computer (he means the US), we (the UK) were bell-ringing". There was a magazine The Ringing World that was full of different ringing patterns. Eno wrote a letter to the editor of that magazine asking where he could listen to good bell-ringing. The response was: "What we are doing is not considered music, it's a branch of mathematics." Plays the song "The Roil, The Choke" from "Nerve Net". There's a bell-ringing-like pattern of how phonemes move in that song. ![[eno-2025-01-05-roil.png]] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/qLP9n54u3Rc?si=tw4mpL74tJMH1xTD" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> Rhyming really helps you: it limits the scope, you don't have to go through all the possible words, you only look for what rhymes. Microsoft once came up with something that said "Anything you can imagine". I don't want that, I want some structure. Limit the field of search. I often say in the studio: we're not using any of this today. New illness: optionitis. Happens a lot with software and hardware. Just commit to something. Tells about a ProTools session that had 1790 tracks. He had to mix it down to 16 tracks. A haiku has fixed sets of syllables (5-7-5). It's easy to write a good poem because the structure is so demanding. Great American writer: Studs Terkel. He was listening to what people around him talked about, and he made radio shows (NPR-style). There was a sense of dignity in giving a voice to normal people, not celebrities. Just go to the laundry and ask somebody who works there: what do you do all day? Karl Hyde from Underworld goes to sit in shopping malls and waiting rooms and overhears bits of conversation. He leaves out a lot of it and puts together phrases. Just listening & being selective about what you hear. You can do it with AI if you can be bothered. I think it's more fun to do in other ways. The first song that impressed me when I was 9 years old: "Get a Job" by The Silhouettes. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ysKhbaLyIFw?si=Ddg6Wz3CMDNruF5j" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> I said earlier: a song can have just 1 word. It also can have no real words. The relationship between music & lyrics has always been problematic to me. The singer always takes up so much space. Humans are attuned to other humans talking. Here's a painting by Polish painter Jan Stanislawski. But it's not a painting by him - because I put this little figure in. ![[eno-2025-01-05-painting-stanislawski.png]] ![[eno-2025-01-05-painting-stanislawski-figure.png]] As I was writing songs I wanted less and less of myself in those songs. I was trying to make songs shorter & shorter ("Spider and I"). "Spider and I" is an imagination of a world where everything has died. It's all gone and you're on a boat in the Pacific. It's idyllic and desperate at the same time. If that's the kind of world you want to make - the fewer words, the better. ![[eno-2025-01-05-spider-and-i.png]] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/k80fJbzcz38?si=YPwPG13lTuedjTis" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> Then I wrote "Sky Saw". ![[eno-2025-01-05-sky-saw.png]] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bNwhtnaoVZU?si=2LB0onZB0FufBMyu" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> I've also written songs with many words, especially early in my career. When you're writing a song you're making a little world. You can see it clearly in literature: e.g. "1984", you can get a feeling of living in a totalitarian society, but you don't get any of the consequences of that life. Artists create feelings, they create little words. We can create "War and Peace" or "Heaven's Gate" or we can create an earring. How can an earring be a world? You already have a language of earrings: a plastic spiky one or a big jewel. As a viewer & listener, you never hear something free of context. You hear a song & you think of all the songs you've heard. You're always thinking: what is special about this one? If you like it, you think - how can I make my world more like this? Or the opposite - how can I avoid this? Pain is the body's way of telling you to change your behavior. Pleasure is also such a way, your body says "I like this, let's do more of this". Artists give you something and ask you - how does this affect your life? Artists are curators of little worlds. What you want is ways of looking at our world by looking at different little worlds. "Miss Shapiro" - the idea was to make a song that's very hard to sing because it's hard to sing without stops. Very few people can sing something in one breath. ![[eno-2025-01-05-miss-shapiro.png]] <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2d8pUdwBV6c?si=OFa0WRFCXOADVLwb" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> How do I fit a figure into the landscape? In 1978 I came up with the word "ambient" and I just wanted to have landscapes. Later I started to work with David Bowie. I watched him write songs. We're at the studio and he's recording a vocal and says "It's a bit too lumberjack. It should be more like a clerk working in an office". He does another vocal take and makes a pose. Singing is role-play. The generation I come from is about sincerity. I say "fuck you". I don't wanna know anything about you. I'm interested in possibilities about what other people might be like. Our job is to write songs and sing them. They don't have to be from us. It's coming from a personality you have devised. We gravitate towards creations we make in our heads, and we think that's who we are. Tom Waits: I doubt he's the person he presents in his songs. It's fiction. A very fruitful and productive fiction. Early Bob Dylan: coming from the middle class but re-imagining himself as a Woody Guthrie persona. You design yourself. Bowie created a lot of personas. I have a very interesting uncle who was posted to India in the 1930s. He fell off his horse and was concussed & honorably discharged. He stayed in India and was fascinated by Indian philosophy. He said to me when I was 11, one of the most important things anyone ever said to me: "It's time I taught you how to lie." If you want to lie, the way you do it is by imagining what the world would be like if that were true. He also taught my brother the same thing 11 years later. Just call it "pretend". Art is about pretending. What if? What would the world be like? Artists should learn to lie and pay attention. A book about Chicago PD. The author asked a great detective why he's good, and he said: "If I do a double take, I do a triple take". Pay attention to what you're noticing. Listen to it. There's a reason something catches your attention. Writing strategy I introduced to Bowie while working on "Outside". Most of us start with improvisation. Few people have a song in their heads. We had 7 people, great musicians, we wanted to structure their improvisations. I came up with scenarios like these and gave one to each musician: 2008 Neo-Science Band: > “You’re a musician in one of the new Neo-Science bands playing in an underground club in the Afro-Chinese ghetto in Osaka, not far from the university. The whole audience is high on dream water, an auditory hallucinogen so powerful it can be transmitted by sweat alone—condensation. You’re also feeling its effects, finding yourself fascinated by intricate single-note rhythm patterns—shard-like Rosetta Stone sonic hieroglyphs. You’re in no particular key, making random bursts of data which you beam into the performance. You’re lost in the abstracted, rational beauty of a system no one else fully understands, sending out messages that can’t be translated. You’re a great artist, and the audience is expecting something intellectually challenging from you. As a kid, your favorite record in your dad’s collection was Trout Mask Replica.” Asteroid Club Orbiting the Moon: > “You’re a musician at Asteroid, a space-based club currently in orbit 180 miles above the surface of the moon, catering mainly to the shaven, tattooed, androgynous craft maintenance staff who gather there at weekends. They’re a tough crowd who like it weird and heavy, jerky and skeletal, and who dance in new sexy, violent styles. These people have musical tastes formed during their early teens in the mid-nineties. Your big influence as a kid was the Funkadelics.” Side note from reading the "Another Green World" 33 1/3 book by Geeta Dayal in parallel - David Bowie speaking of the same events for Interview magazine, 1995: > "What Brian did specifically on 'Outside' and he'd done it in various ways on our 1970s sessions was put everybody in another space before they started playing. He walked into the session and said, 'I've got something very interesting for us to look at today.' And out of his little bag he pulled these six flash-cards and gave one to each of us. He didn't tell me he was going to do this. He said, 'I want you to read these cards and adopt the characters on them for as long as you can when we start playing'. He said to our drummer (Sterling Campbell), 'You are the disgruntled ex-member of a South African rock band. Play the notes that you were not allowed to play.' And then the pianist (Mike Garson) was told, 'You are the morale booster of a small rag-tag terrorist operation. You must keep spirits up at all costs.' My card said, 'You are a soothsayer and town-crier in a society where all media networks have tumbled down, so I knew it was my job to pass on all the events of the day.' Because of this set-up, when we started playing, everybody came into the music from a very different space from where they would normally. So you had six really vibrant personalities with interpretive abilities playing from idiosyncratic points of view, and the confluence of all that produced an extreme atmosphere that was quite outside what one might have expected from a bunch of rockers." <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/7mhSoUZO0os?si=HjLWvzEP3yTmZeoK" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> [Oblique Strategies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies) are 50 years ago this year. The pressure of studios makes you forget your best ideas. A lesson from Japanese calligraphy: Slow preparation, fast execution. ### Homework 1: Start with a scape* _*as in ‘landscape’, ‘seascape’, ‘moonscape’, etc_. This songwriting prompt will require two distinct locations: a scape and a work station.  Scape: Any environment where you can sit and observe for 15 minutes  Work Station: Any place where you can write, play, and make noise Step 1: Locate a ‘scape’ where you can sit comfortably for about 15 minutes uninterrupted. Any environment will do – a coffee shop, mall, park, library, backyard –  inside your own home will work, as long as it is distinct from your work station.  Once you have found yourself seated comfortably, take 5 minutes to just relax, sink in and observe your surroundings. When settled, take about 10 minutes to write down your observations to these prompts.  - What do you see? - What do you hear? - What do you feel? - What do you remember?  - If there are words that you hear (e.g. conversations) or see in the space, write those down too. Step 2: Create a song that takes inspiration from your experience observing the scape. You could write a piece that evokes similar feelings to what you described in step 1. You could also write a ‘score’ for the scape – music you could imagine being played aloud in that space, reinforcing the existing aura or serving a complementary, distinct purpose. If you want your song to have lyrics, use your written observations as a starting point for inspiration and experiment by subtracting the normal elements to make it feel dreamlike. _How do you know when your song is finished?_ The deadline is Saturday – that’s when your song is finished :) --- *If you enjoyed reading these notes, please [consider buying me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/ivanzoloto)*