*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 ran from 2025-01-05 until 2025-01-26 and consisted 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-2025-01-08.png]] Date: 2025-01-08 ### Producing others VS making your own record It's very hard to produce yourself, you don't have the distance. It's exhausting. Producing is the best-paid form of cowardice in music. If the record's good, they'll say "he's a great producer", but if it's bad - they'll never blame you. My work originates in a completely disorganized way. You need to be brave not to be alone in that process. Music is a collaborative process. If you have a close group of people, there are certain things that wouldn't be pleasant to say - it's nice to have somebody from the outside to say those things. If you're an outsider, you see things the insiders can't see. I once walked into the studio and realized I couldn't hear the bass guitar. Everybody else was so attached they could hear it, but it disappeared from the mix at some point. ### On melody Most of the great melodies I've seen come into existence very quickly. I carry a tape dictaphone (not digital, so no menu diving). I record the beginnings of great songs (the ones I hear) on it. I worked with Herbie Hancock once and watched him develop a riff. He kept playing the same keyboard riff, leaving bits out each time. It started with a block of melody and kept getting simpler and simpler until it became so funky it was great. Funk is what you leave out. It either comes quickly or not at all. There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning (Picasso). The one-line song is a theory I came up with - sometimes that's all you need. In the 60s there were a lot of instrumentals with just one line: e.g. "salt peanuts". We got trapped in thinking a song has to have a lot of details in it. Dylan and Cohen were that, and they were brilliant, but it doesn't mean we can't just have "sha na na". In musicals you had a composer, a writer, a vocal arranger. Now the poor songwriters are expected to do the whole lot together. When you listen to great songwriting teams like the Gershwin's team you notice how great lyrics are if a separate person only concentrated on that. As people get older, their melodies get flatter. Kids are all up-and-down, lively. As you age, you can either take flatness as a feature (Leonard Cohen), or you can pretend to be young. Sometimes you resolve a melody on such a predictable note it makes you sick. ### How do you usually write a vocal melody? Any tips for performing vocals when recording I hate headphones. And I hate doing vocals in the headphones. That should be banned or heavily taxed. It produces a situation that's so unreal. I set up Bono in the control room with a loud backing track. I always work sitting in front of speakers. If what's breaking through is music, why does it matter - it's going to be there anyway. Tell engineers: "I like singing better this way and I'm prepared to sacrifice breakthrough". There are soft, moody singers who like reverb - they are OK singing in headphones. Any signer who uses energy needs speakers. On expensive mics: SM58 is a great mic and most singers sound great in it. You want a mic you can hold. Why not take advantage of this. If you're producing, ask yourself: "How does this person like to sing? And how can we create the best situation for them?" Most songs don't start with the song in mind. Quite early a melody appears and someone's excited about that melody. Music shouldn't be constructed around chords. Most African music is not chord-based. A lot of instruments weave together to create riffs or lines. But it's not someone holding a chord. It's a series of fleeting, passing chords. "A lecture against chordism": to me, chord changes disturb the flow of the song. Listen to James Brown - the song stays on one chord until he says "Take it to the bridge" 4 minutes into the song. We end up with blocky constructions with chords. Don't build an obstacle course for yourself. I started playing a riff on guitar & singing over it. I thought if I were to write it down, it'd be "this chord, that chord". But the thrill of the thing was vocal parts stayed still and didn't change over the chords. A line or a riff that stays in place, and bass moves around it - there's some good energy in that. E.g. Giorgio Moroder & Donna Summer - I Feel Love. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/B2qI6UDD2uQ?si=puLr33UUHM6l0Yar" 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> Film soundtracks don't need a strong melody, the film is the focus. Think you're making a film soundtrack, not a song - that's very liberating. Before recording, there was a very limited number of sounds. As soon as we started experimenting with electronics, that changed. Just amplification changed the sound completely. Crooning was born when microphones allowed people to sing quietly. What I love myself to do is explore the landscape of creating sound as painting, without thinking of songs or singles. I create a sound world first, and then maybe a melody emerges. Think of how theater turned into cinema - we gave it a different name then. It's a different art form. But we didn't make that change with music. It gives people the idea they're continuing in the same tradition, but we're not in that tradition anymore. ### Jamie Lidell asking: solo music of Roedelius. As I've been trying to re-create those worlds, it confounds me how it was made, especially the organ sounds Roedelius is a quiet, calm, authoritative person. He's always been the elder in the German scene. I remember us playing & sitting in a room together. Sometimes a piece was finished, everybody's quiet, and we just start the next one. There was a lot of editing of full pieces. We worked on an 8-track, we took a piece to Conny Plank's studio. He was a fiery engineer with a lot of temper. He's one of the first people to take engineer/producer title quite seriously. He had a huge console, at that time nobody did automation. He wanted to be able to stop, do something else, and then go back to the previous process. He asked Zeiss to install a lens on top of the console to take a picture of everything, and then a projector could project it back on the console to put the knobs back. ![[connyplank.jpg]] Once in the middle of a mixing session he said "Should we take a drive to the forest?" We drive 20 mins, he turns on the radio, and the track we've been working on comes up on the radio. He had installed a transmitter to be able to listen to it away from the studio. Being somewhere else and in the car, immediately makes you think: that bit's too long, this needs to go there. Side note: [An introduction to Conny Plank in 10 records](https://thevinylfactory.com/features/10-essential-conny-plank-records/) ### Production: how you approach framing strengths & weaknesses, e.g. with Dylan's voice You should always think of limits and structure. If everybody does whatever you end up with jellyfish music. That music sounds hopeless and endless. We're very used to limits: tempo, key, etc. My feeling is: include everything in the room, in the space, as a set of limits. The singer's voice is part of those limits. Don't try and teach them how to sing. Celebrate what that person is and what they can do. I've become more and more interested in outsider art. My favorite museum is in Lausanne, Switzerland, [Collection de l'Art Brut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collection_de_l%27art_brut). It's the most mind-blowing place. I saw works by an artist who made "slightly gray postcards". Tiny little pencil drawings that were only found after the person had died. If you have a singer who's quite rough - you can do something with it. E.g. Lonnie Holley: I haven't seen the point before, but now I get it. It's not a professional singing voice, but it's a powerful, rough voice. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/C92XJr7-Naw?si=eg5k-0KmQM4HLKFP" 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> What doesn't work is polishing a turd. Let it be a turd, let it stink. In fact, make the stink stronger. The Velvet Underground was a band made out of people in various stages of incompetence. Moe Tucker, the absolute basicness of what she did made it sound amazing. A bass player can play just one note, let them be. You need an anchor - ask any ship captain. ![[moetucker.jpg]] ### On Artistic Self-Judgment. I read this Maggie Nelson book and she said artist is the least qualified to judge their own work... You exist in two minds: a child who's discovering things, and the other is the critical mind that says "it's been done before". You need to have both. The question is when do you make those judgements. Start in the child mind, stay there until it yields results. My rule is "no buts". Nobody should say: "but..." You don't want that. The baby is not yet delivered. Another rule is no comparisons to other songs. Nobody can ever say: "oh it's like that song..." A posh friend once said: "nobody is flattered by resemblance". Nobody wants to be just like somebody else. Once I was working on a song. The studio was booked, but I had no ideas (so I thought). I looked at the clock ticking and I was sobbing. I just carried on working. I left the studio miserable and when I came back the next day and listened to it - it was really good. Your judgement has almost no influence on the quality of the piece. My solution: give everything the respect of making a mix and putting it in my archive. I never leave the studio without documenting what I've been doing. Sometimes I listen back and think: I missed that, that was really good. Take everything seriously. Don't think about how you felt when you did it. My friend Peter Chilvers wrote an archiving system for me. Archiving is basically memory. Mine now has 11,000 pieces. I can tell my machine to pick 4 pieces and play them all together. My archive can also go through the whole 11,000 pieces and play just 2 seconds of each. When I tidy up the house or write a letter, I just have that playing in the background. And I take notes and re-use the bits I like. Side note: from this point on, until the very end of the course, Brian made references to his archiving system and software, so School of Song asked Peter Chilvers to write a note to the students after the course is over. Here is the note he sent: > Thanks to everyone who’s asked about the archiving software I made for Brian. I’ve had a number of queries about getting hold of a copy. Unfortunately it’s very unlikely to be publicly available for some time - there’s a big difference between writing software for one person to use, and writing software for many people to use. Brian has a particular way of using (and abusing!) software, and I deliberately leave out features others would expect to streamline things he uses frequently. Realistically, I can’t see it becoming publicly available this year, so sorry to anyone disappointed to learn that.  > > But… there are other packages! Brian originally used iTunes to store his library. It’s changed its name simply to Music recently, and is more focused on streaming, but the library management features are still there, and still very useful. I believe it also runs on PC. I’ve heard good things about PlexAmp, but not tried it myself. Spotify can include local files. I’m sure there are many other packages - I’d recommending sharing your findings on the Discord. > > **Playlists** > > One of the most powerful tools in an archive. Use them to prep an album, to group together tracks that would suit a particular collaborator or a particular market. Use it to record who you’ve sent tracks to. Some examples: “Film Music”, “Songs without Lyrics”, “Needs work”, “Crowd Pleasers”, “Short songs”, “Jingles” etc. > > **Ratings** > > You could use this to literally rate how good a track is, or how far you’ve developed it. 1 Star could mean a vague sketch, 5 stars a completed track. > > **Notes** > > A particularly good place to record what needs to be done to or with a track. > > **Genre** > > If possible, make up genre names personal to your own style. If you can assign multiple genres to a track, even better. The world needs more Atonal Funk Bluegrass. > > **Key / BPM** > > If this is an option, record them whenever you add a track, and your future self will thank you. > > **Title** > > Even if the archive you use has no additional fields/database, use the title to store useful information. I find it extremely useful to include the date a file is mixed (e.g. 3001255a), especially if I have to try and match it to a project file years later. > > Recording the initials of collaborators may avoid problems later. > > Never put the word “Final mix” in a title. It’s a guarantee that within two days you’ll have three more files with names like “Actual Final FINAL mix #3 (less EQ) (ignore the previous one)” > > As Brian’s mentioned, he makes plenty of use of the Random Shuffle feature to listen to tracks and reevaluate them. If the archive system you use doesn’t have that feature, find another way to pick a track at random - get some dice or close your eyes and point.   > > One of the things unique to our system is the ability to pick several tracks at random and play them together. I’ve long suspected that this may be uniquely useful to Brian, as his music has the type of space and ambiguity that allows two different tracks to somehow combine. I can’t imagine it working so well, if I picked two random Bob Dylan tracks and played them together. Brian raised the interesting point that maybe other artists would change their approach if they had that feature. I’d love to find out if that’s true. > > One final point: please keep regular backups, ideally including one at a different location.  > > Happy Archiving! > > Peter ![[eno-chilvers.jpg]] ### Art & culture is "rehearsing of empathy" I think of being an artist as being a world-builder. When you're writing a novel you construct a world. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was written by a wealthy white woman in the Confederate America. Suddenly, black people weren't "the other" any more. It's a very clever way of pushing messages into society. Same with the suffragettes. Earrings or cake decorations - many people don't think of them as art. But why do we decorate cakes? Why are they unnecessarily elaborate? Everybody seems to have a taste for making things that don't need to exist, or listening/watching things that don't need to exist. Theodor Adorno said (quote may be incorrect) that making a piece of art is like making a little piece of the future and bringing it back into the present. [Laura Ashley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Ashley), an interior designer I like makes stuff that's full of flowers - compare that to the Bauhaus. Those are two worlds you can live in. Listen to yourself and decide what kind of world you'd like to live in. Mentions the book he co-wrote with Bette A that's coming out soon: ["What Art Does."](https://www.enoshop.co.uk/product/what-art-does-hardback) Why do we like art? People answer: "Because it's nice." Well, why is it nice? Why do we care about some set of string quartets and not others? Why do we have preferences? What don't I care about every single painting? You brought up a very big question. *Brian opens the student chat for the first time. "Jeeeesus!" --- *If you enjoyed reading these notes, please [consider buying me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/ivanzoloto)*