I Hate Mornings

Of the last ten songs I’ve written, recorded, blogged, YouTubed and/or played to people, the “Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall song”:http://5090.fawm.org/songs.php?id=556 has had the biggest response. About ten times the response of any other song. Why? I’ll give you a clue. It’s not because I’ve written and produced a masterpiece that will live on to inspire future generations. It’s because it has a story. It’s about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (whom everybody either acknowledges as a living legend or pretends to ignore ;o), and everybody can relate to that without actually having to listen to the song. The fact that I made a “video”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGIeSQ_PkBs means that another large slice of the audience pie were motivated to check it out.

This isn’t news. But it is interesting. And it’s not just me who thinks so. Nick Gill talked about it in a “review of the Bon Iver album”:http://www.themonroetransfer.co.uk/wordpress/?p=60 earlier in the week:

bq.. …the lesson for people like me is that people like stories; not just in their music & lyrics, but as related to the artist him/herself. Marketing people have known this for years, and have been extending and stretching the truth to sell more ever since they realised (see yesterday’s little rant about Lily Allen, Sandi Thom et al. for all the associated horseshit that that record-buying public was fed). People like us, making music unsolicited and undemanded, need to have actual, real stories behind our records.

And, importantly- stories are all in the telling. The story of How I Recorded My Album isn’t going to rival Ulysses but, told well enough, it might be enough to persuade people to listen to your creation. It worked for Bon Iver, it can work for us.

p. And Steve Lawson just wrote a post on “Telling Stories…”:http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/server.php?show=ConBlogEntry.147 at the Creative Choices blog yesterday:

bq.. What’s important to realise is that there’s always a story told - if you don’t tell it, someone else will. I had this conversation recently with some band-mates about a forthcoming album, explaining to them that they could frame the release of the album with their own story of how they got involved with the project, how the music came together, what it meant for them to be playing this kind of music (it’s an album of freely-improvised music that still sounds like well crafted songs…). The response from one of my fellow musos was that he wants to let the music speak for itself.

The problem here is that it never does get to speak for itself - there’s almost always a descriptive context in which people first hear music, or decide to watch a film, or visit a website - whether it be a review or a recommendation from a friend. For music especially, it can be a random encounter via radio or film, which provides a framework that may well be misleading, depending on what the DJ says about it on the radio, or the kind of images your music accompanies!

p. Wise words indeed. Check out both articles for more info and insight into the need for narrative.