#40 Pat Pattison
I'm so honoured to be featuring Pat Pattison on today’s podcast. He is a professor at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches lyric writing and poetry.
In addition to his four books—Songwriting without Boundaries, Writing Better Lyrics, The Essential Guide to Lyric Form and Structure, and The Essential Guide to Rhyming, —Pattison has developed five online courses for Berklee Online: three on lyric writing, one on poetry, and one on creative writing, all available through Berklee’s online college.
He’s worked with hundreds of Grammy award winning songwriters including Gillian Welch and John Mayer with a passion for music and philosophy he has a lot of deep and insightful thoughts around music and songwriting. If your wanting to work on your songwriting at any level this podcast has something for everyone.
In this podcast he blesses the listeners with a special gift... make sure you get your blessing on Songwriting and listen now! :)
Featured topics from this podcast:
Berklee College - Pat Pattison
Passenger | Let Her Go (Official Video)
John Mayer - Your Body Is A Wonderland
The Unanswered Question 1973b YouTube
Berklee College - Songwriting Course
Connect with Pat:
Pat's Store (books and more)
Transcript
Rae Leigh: Welcome to a songwriter tryst with Pat Patterson, author and educator for over 45 years, Berkeley College of Music in Boston. Thank you so much for joining me. How are you?
Pat Patterson: It is my pleasure, Rae. I'm great.
Rae Leigh: I've had so many people that I've talked to about songwriting and just about every single one of them have mentioned you in some way. Whether it's workshops or your books or your online courses I feel like you're just the most influential person in songwriting at the moment and I don't know how you've done it.
You're everywhere.
Pat Patterson: Teaching, teaching at Berkeley is is pretty much a leg up, in so many ways. First of all the students there are really quite remarkable.
And when you have remarkable students and you are supposed to be helping them,
you'd better, you better lift your game. And so that's been really quite useful.
It's allowed me to to develop all sorts of techniques little tools to make a song better. There, there are various levels in the songwriting major, which by the way at Berkeley was the first songwriting major since the dinosaurs. And I was one of the architects of that, probably the main architect of that, at least at first. And it's been running, up and running for quite some time. I've been teaching there, yes. I am now in my 46th year teaching there,
but I've taught other places. I,
Rae Leigh: I know you've been everywhere.
Pat Patterson: I taught no, it's before I started teaching at Berkeley, I actually taught at the University of Notre Dame. I taught philosophy there philosophy and logic. And I also taught at Indiana University as a TA before that.
So my, my my background is, has very little to do with songwriting, although it has,
Rae Leigh: I felt like that was a big jump, actually, from philosophy to songwriting, but maybe not so much.
Pat Patterson: Actually I feel like I, I could not be what I've done without, the the education I got in philosophy, and also I did a an outside master while I was at Indiana doing doctoral work
in philosophy. I did an outside master's degree in literary criticism. And the philosophy I've been doing is basically working through people like Wittgenstein primarily, and Russell Frege,
Moore, Austin as the sort of linguistic philosophers. So that my focus has been on analysis of language one way or another for quite some time. And
Rae Leigh: Yeah, wow.
Pat Patterson: so when I I started teaching at Berkeley. I was actually hired as an English teacher, having never taught English, but I had,
I'd been on the road with my band and missed teaching and found out there was a a job open teaching English. And so I applied for it and I got it. And they wanted it was fairly early on in Berkeley's accreditation. So they needed electives. So I taught the first philosophy electives there. And then I
decided, yeah, I just don't want to teach philosophy anymore. And I'd had, I'd been touring with my band.
My my commitment really was to I decided when I was 35 that I wanna stop being a Dante and, I want to just dig into something and what am I most interested in? And the answer was, I'm interested in that crack between between words and music. And so the whole just opened my eyes. But I decided
I would teach a course in literary criticism, and I figured nobody would take it. So I called it the Analysis of Song Lyrics, and people just flocked to the course. And so what I
was basically doing was teaching literary criticism through a kind of analytical philosophy of language And I used Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon and Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell and Dylan as a fodder for this literary criticism course.
By the way, I never told anybody it was a literary criticism course. And
Rae Leigh: I love
Pat Patterson: It turned out to be a very popular thing, and I started I started learning a great deal. The tools of analytic philosophy and lit crit, I started looking at these lyrics and said, oh my God, that's how they work.
Oh, I
see. And so I started digging in and making a lot of mistakes. I'm grateful to my early students that they didn't lynch me.
Became the songwriting major. It was so popular that general education or liberal arts class was so popular that the president of the college said, Hey, do you think people can make money as songwriters? I lied and said, yes. And so he said let's talk about having a songwriting major and at that point I opened my briefcase and handed him the 13 course outline that I had made and then we went in, he said, I wish all of my requests were met with such alacrity.
Rae Leigh: You're
Pat Patterson: I was prepared.
So that's been going on and now we have. a huge songwriting department with
people coming out of it that are doing amazing things.
Rae Leigh: Yeah, you've had a lot of students who have had Grammy awards and lots of recognition. Got the golden touch, it seems.
Pat Patterson: I'd like to think that it's all my doing but some of them have worked pretty hard. And,
Rae Leigh: I bet they have. It takes teamwork,
Pat Patterson: It?
really does. And, again being, being so fortunate to be at Berkeley. Because the students that come in there want to be there. And, they walk into your class and you can hear the buzzing, the energy. They just want
to, they just want to know. And man, when that happens, when they're already good writers, again I really have to lift my game to be helpful. And,
Rae Leigh: That's amazing. I love what you said about them wanting to be there too. I remember when I was in high school, someone told me, a teacher told me I should be a teacher and the thought of trying to teach someone who didn't want to be in the class just sent shivers down my spine. But if I was in a room with people who wanted to learn, that just would be exciting.
Pat Patterson: It's a whole different thing. At Notre Dame, I taught symbolic logic, among other
And talk about people who weren't motivated to be in a Symbolic Logic course. Ha. Been there, done that. Ha.
Rae Leigh: It's something soul crushing, I think about, yeah the idea of that. Anyway, I want to go back to earlier, Pat Patterson, when you were younger and when you, maybe you first, you wrote your first song or when you first decided that this was a path or even a hobby before you started saying that was what you really loved, where does songwriting begin with
Pat Patterson: That moment at 35 I, I had I had a band for many years. I started a band in 1971 and kept it for 15 years.
But I I realized that I am a teacher who writes, not a writer who teaches. And I realized that if I never wrote another song in my life, I'd be just fine, but if I never taught again, I would not be just fine. And that was that was during a period where I was on the road without teaching, when I was on the road with my band. And so I don't really with all the songs I've written, I really don't consider myself, first and foremost, a songwriter. I've never really had a a drive, like many of my students have, but I've never really had a drive to write songs. When I first put my band together when I was teaching at Notre Dame, actually in 67 we were doing all sorts of really interesting things. It was a folk band, three guitars couple of co two guys and two and two women. We were doing interesting
things. We were doing, arrangements of Karl Orff's Carmina Burana with guitars, folk guitars. We were doing, all sorts of really interesting stuff. And I thought this was pretty good stuff. Of course, naivety is the master of of invention. So I thought we were pretty good. So I started sending tapes out to various record companies. I wrote to A& M and The the guy there wrote a nice letter back and said, we really love what you're doing, but we only we only sign people who are writing original music. And I thought. How hard can that be? I liked playing with the band. So I thought okay, I'll start writing some songs. But it
wasn't the other way around. It wasn't, oh my God, I've been writing songs ever since I was six years old and I've just got to keep
doing it. It's in my blood. I thought, oh yeah, that'd be fun.
Again I don't really consider myself at my core as songwriter. But I do I do live to take things apart and see how they work and and turn them into tools for my students and and try them out. It's not that I don't write. I wrote in Nashville for many years but most of my writing in Nashville was simply fodder for what I did in my classes, I wrote with some really good writers and part of me was watching what they did. And how they thought. And it was really helpful. So the,
Rae Leigh: you're a bit of a people watcher, aren't you?
Pat Patterson: yeah, so there so the early Pat Pattison was was not a songwriter but always interested in language. I've always been interested in language. I wrote my first poem when I was, I think five years old. And and so the, and in, in that way, the the move into the analysis of the. word side of the songwriting game really started making sense. But Part of the approach that I got from analytic philosophy in terms of metaphysics trying to come up with some things that that no matter what will always be true. And when I started actually thinking about tools that were available for songwriters or for lyricists I
started looking for those things that would always be true. And, the fundamental things are absolutely bor are pretty boring.
But I realized that in writing a song, every section that you ever write in your life will have. Some number of lines or other.
Yeah. And I can be even more specific than that. Every section you ever write will have either an even number of lines or an odd number of lines. an even number of lines tends to feel even, tends to feel odd. Balanced tends to feel
complete, tends to feel, my word, stable whereas an odd number of lines will feel odd, will feel incomplete, will feel
unresolved, will feel unstable. So that the number of lines by themselves, I discovered
the number of lines by themselves, regardless of anything else, the number of lines by themselves will create a feeling and so that if. If you are writing a section in which you are talking about a sense of longing that you feel or how how sad or how lonely or how much I'm missing you if you say that with an odd number of lines, that odd number of lines, because it by itself creates that feeling, will act like a film score. underneath what you're saying and give you even more impact. And whereas if I'm telling you how thrilled I am to be chatting with you today and I really mean it if I say that in three, in a three line sequence, it's probably going to feel disingenuous. Whereas if I say it in a balanced way, if I say I really like it, as opposed to, yeah, I really like it then the number of lines itself, excuse me, is going to make it make it feel
like I mean it,
Rae Leigh: It's the body language of the
Pat Patterson: the body language of the song. I I've got a thing queued up and I'm going to play it. If this is Peaking your meters but
Rae Leigh: I'll let you
Pat Patterson: this is a hit song by Passenger, which was a hit a few years ago, that that really I said, Oh my God, what's going on here? Let me just play the first couple of verses. So the feeling there, at least as far as I can tell is, Oh my God the three line sequence there just leaves you hanging. It's so much different I of course put that in GarageBand and did an edit, or made a loop out of it.
Rae Leigh: I'm just going to let you know that I couldn't actually hear anything coming through. Sorry. I was waiting for it, but I can, if you let me know what sequence it is or you can email it to me, I can insert that
Pat Patterson: oh so that none of that was recording.
Rae Leigh: No, I couldn't hear anything on my
Pat Patterson: Okay
Rae Leigh: Yeah, sorry, but you can share as if we have, because I will just get that off you and I'll put it in that section. That's fine.
Pat Patterson: Okay that's fine, alright. So at least now we know that that I cannot play live
music.
Rae Leigh: work.
Pat Patterson: But the lyric is you only need the light when it's burning low. Only miss the sun when it starts to snow. Only know you love her
when you let her go, which is
completely different than well, you only need the light when it's burning low. Only miss the sun when it starts to snow. Only hate the road when you're missing home. Only know you love her when you let her go. And now it
becomes a series of facts,
So that that very simple parameter of every section has either an odd or even number of lines becomes a tool for supporting your idea, becomes a tool for supporting your ideas. Again, it's like a film score. That the music behind the film tells you how to feel about the images that you're seeing. And in the same
way, the structure, in this case the number of lines in a sequence, is telling you how to feel about what's being said.
In this passenger song, the fact that he's dealing with three line sequences makes a huge difference. The same is true of your body is a wonderland. Your body is a wonderland. Your body is a wonderland three times. And it says, I want more. Give me more. That was one thing. What are the things that are always constant? What are the things that every lyricist, every songwriter has to remember? Passed to face every time they write a song. And so number of lines was one. Line length, which I think is a huge a huge decision. Is another one. That when you have two equal length lines that match you have stability. It feels like you mean it. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a tiger by the toe. You're done. Even though there's four more, two more lines in that nursery rhyme. But if you say, Mary had a little lamb, Lisa's white as snow, so two unequal length lines creates motion. And every line you write will have some length. And that, that becomes a tool. Every line you write will have some kind of rhythm. And there's a whole bunch of different things that I talk about in terms of rhythm. Every sequence that you write. We'll have some rhyme scheme or other, including none. And if it's none, then there's no motion created, but your rhyme schemes can create motion. So I was just dealing with with those kinds of things that are always going to be true. And each one of them turned out to be something that you can be intentional about. Once, That an odd number of lines creates a feeling of longing, and an even
number of lines creates a feeling of of being resolved once you know that, then you actually have to start thinking about how many lines you're using, rather than just letting
it happen, so that I want my students to always be as intentional as possible.
Yeah,
Rae Leigh: I was going to ask you that, what your main core message that you wanted your audience to connect to, or your students,
Pat Patterson: You've got control whether you use
the control or not, if your if your mode of operation as a songwriter is, man, it's just so like organic, man, I just, I want it to be natural and just come up, that's how it came out, man, because I just opened my subconscious, and there it is and, good for them.
Yeah. I don't want to become too disparaging of that but,
The way that the way that I think about it is, wow, that just happened in 20 minutes. Fabulous. Now I've
got something to work on, but in order to
work on, in order to work on it, you need tools. You need to know
what kind of stuff you're dealing with, since our, I think our main job as songwriters is to create feelings. And so what things do you have to work with that create? One of them is your rhyme scheme, and all of this, by the way translates perfectly into the area of chord progressions and melodies. Stable and unstable tones, stable and unstable
Rae Leigh: Yeah.
Pat Patterson: and so that the whole curriculum at Berkeley has as
its primary focus, this whole thing of prosody. How do you support an idea with your harmony, with your melody, with your lyric structure, with your images, with your metaphors, all of that stuff?
Rae Leigh: There is so much to consider when writing a song and all these tools that you have. That you teach and that are available sometimes do happen subconsciously, but even if you look at them, like for people that say that they might come naturally, everything you're talking about is still present within a song.
And I think it's incredible the power that can be in such a short period of time, like almost an entire movie's worth of ideas and messages and feeling. In, three minutes and 15 or 19 seconds. And I like what you said about it being the crack between words and music. There's something in that very short space of time that is spiritual or, a lot of religion use music as a way of connecting to their spirituality.
And I'm a scientist myself and I think that it is all about asking the right questions. And I think that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. But it's like what is it about that crack for you that you described or that of connection between words and music? What is it for you that what does that do for you?
And what does that feel for you?
Pat Patterson: Question.
There's a there's a power that happens when the right idea, actually say the right series of words join a kind of a melody, and then there's some kind of harmony underneath it. You've got You've got three, three elements, all of which independently create some kind of feeling. That so that there's, you can call it spiritual, you can call it a power that that happens when those things line up perfectly. And, I'm fond of saying. As a perfect to, to provoke people that music means nothing. And I watched the hackles go up. It's really fun. Because music means nothing. Music only feels. Music feels and that's all it can do. What has meaning are words. Words mean something. Notes don't mean anything in that sense of denoting an idea. And although it is certainly true that if I hear a particular kind of melody it might remind me, might create a feeling in me. That reminds me of a time in my life, which I, et cetera, et cetera. But that doesn't mean that the music has meaning. What that means is that the music created a feeling that for me had an association. But the music itself doesn't mean anything. It's feeling. And so our job as songwriters is to take the feeling that music creates. And put it together with the meaning that language creates and create a more feeling series of ideas. Which is not to say that language does not create feelings, obviously it does. But to but to give that a triple whammy you have the ideas plus
the melody plus the plus the chords. All of which are. stacking to create some power. When you do it badly, it's it doesn't move you. Yeah, you don't
Rae Leigh: can feel it.
There's a lot of feeling behind music and songs. And I think that's what I've been looking for is. Where is the feeling? What's, and I feel like that's probably what's missing from my society and community of what I grew up in, was the lack of feeling.
And music was the one place that, that it was, and I've just, I feel, I think I was so starved of it, of emotion and feeling for so long that. It was the one thing that kept me sane is what I live for, and I think it does that for a lot of people, a
Pat Patterson: yeah, that's certainly true
that particularly don't know if it's really true that songwriters are weird people.
Rae Leigh: I've been called crazy.
Pat Patterson: way, emotional cripples or whatever we are. That's, it, it it certainly there's an introspectiveness and a sense of a sense of being the other when you're in your high school and you're very musical or very feeling oriented and so there you are in isolation and music becomes sometimes your only friend and, the ability to sit down and at age 11 and write a song that you will be embarrassed about when you're 15 but that at 11 it just speaks to you and calms everything down, it's a wonderful thing.
And that, that, of course, is true of all art. All art speaks to
feeling in that way.
Rae Leigh: Yeah. And it's a form of expression and art, I think for me is an honest way of being able to express ourselves and in society often we have to maybe not be completely honest because that can be uncomfortable, but I feel in art we can have a sense of honesty and acceptance for who we are, which is beautiful, I believe.
I wanted to ask you about co writing. Do you have advice for how to approach or best approach a co writing
Pat Patterson: Yeah I just actually this week, my, advanced lyric writing classes. Two, this this year or this semester, my advanced
lyric writing classes turned in their lyrics and turned in their co-writes. And I put them through a bit of a bit of a exercise before they get to do thaT. and I'll describe the Two things that work, I think, famously in co write situations. The first thing, which is also, by the way, available as the appendix of my book Writing Better Lyrics, is called the
No, N O, the No Free Zone. Co writing is a place where you can't say no. This
is the this is the best to do, this is not my advice. This is Advice that I got when I first
When I first was actually brought to Nashville by csac to do some writing.
I hadn't been co-writing much except for some with some of my students. I didn't really know anything about it. So the VP at csac set me up with a, I'm a hit songwriter by the name of Stan Webb and
So this is my first professional co write and I was sitting in the in the writing room waiting for him and I was having my doubts and I was thinking, Oh my God maybe I should fake food poisoning or something because he's going
to be able to detect the fraud that I really am. And none of my ideas are any good. And I just think, no I just think I'm in the right, and then the door opens and in comes Stan Webb wearing bib overalls and a big old boots, not cowboy boots, but work boots looking like he had just come off a farm, which he had, by the way, it was a farm that he bought from the royalties that
from writing for George Jones and so he closed the door really tight pushed on it, opened it again, closed it again. I thought, what's going on? And they did it one more time, and then he sat down and he said he said Pat, Tom has said to me that you haven't, you ain't done much co writing, so he asked me if I'd talk to you a little bit about how we do that. And
I said, okay, he said first thing I want to say to you is that it's our job here to say everything that comes to your head, everything that comes to your head, you say it. I don't care how stupid it is. If you, if it comes to your head, you got to say it. You got to say everything and, that door closed? I said yeah, he said good, because if you do your job right, and I do my job we're going to say some of the stupidest things that we've ever heard. And if that door is closed, nobody needs to know how stupid we are. Cause I won't tell if you don't. And he said, the other thing
is I'm never going to say no to you, we're supposed to be just spilling stuff out as fast as we can. And so I'm not ever going to say
no to you. If you suggest something and I don't say, and I'm quiet, then that's the signal to just keep going. The only time that we're going to stop it at all is when one of us says, oh yeah, I like that. And so it'll never be a situation where you make a suggestion. I say, no, I don't like that. And then you say come up with something better. And no matter what I say, you're going to shoot it down because I just shot you down.
Now we're not co writing, now we're combating. So, the no free
zone guarantees That we're going to actually get the best out of each other. And we're only going to be dealing with ideas that we both like. And so I have my students read that chapter. And have the co writing room be a no free zone. Where all we say is yes. So that's the first thing. The other thing is I
have them play something that I call a title game. Some of my best ideas, by the way, are ideas that I got from somebody else. Yeah, true
Rae Leigh: True
Pat Patterson: There's a guy who owns Seagale Music in Nashville. Seagale is is an independent publishing company, and I think the most successful independent publishing company, at least in Nashville. Chris Dubois, who's
my buddy there, owns it with Brad Paisley.
And Chris writes only lyrics. I think the count right now is that he's got something like 18 number one songs. The thing
that got Chris and I together when I first had an appointment with him in Nashville, I walked into his office and I saw. His entire office covered with Red Sox paraphernalia, the Red Sox baseball team paraphernalia bats and jerseys and all that stuff. And I knew right then and there, since the Red Sox stadium is is about three blocks from Berkeley, I knew I knew right then and there that Chris Dubois was mine. And I don't know, he was born in Oklahoma. He said that at age six, something happened and he became a Red Sox fan. So I will occasionally call Chris and say, Hey, Chris, I've got tickets for the Red Sox Yankees game and we'll be sitting up on the green
Do you want to come? And of course he always does. And the price that I extract from him is that he has to talk to my classes. So a couple of, a few years ago,
He came in and he taught my class. The title game the title game is something that his dad, Tim Dubois, who's the head of Universal Music, is also a massive hit songwriter taught him, and
he plays it every single session that he that he does. So that briefly, the title game is very simple. There are three of us writing three co writers in the room, and we will start. With each of us will have our a, sheet of paper yellow notepad or something, and we will take some title or other, let's just say, Join the Conversation. Okay, so that's that, that's, we'll all three write that down on the top of our page. And then for the next 10 minutes, each of us independently is going to, without much thought, Write down a bunch of titles and we're going to have to move from title to title by using one word from the previous title to make up the new title. So join the conversation.
If that was what we had at the top of our page,
we could do conversations in the dark, or we could do maybe join the good guys. Or we could even take za and say the best is yet to come, whatever. So we're all going to be
spending ten minutes just writing basically as fast as we can. And not giving too much thought, but just coming up with title after title with one word in the previous title being the thing that stimulates the next one. Okay, so we've all done that. The ten minute timer goes off. And now we trade. And so I look at your at your list of titles and it's my job now to put a check mark by any of the things that you have as titles there that I think Oh, I like that.
I had, I got something for that. So I'm going to be making a check mark on, maybe you came up with 40 titles and maybe I make a check mark on something like 12 of them, ones that I know that, Oh, I'd like that.
And the other, you're doing that to the other persons and so on. Now we trade again. And I've got now a page from the third person that has checked one check Mark on several of the things. Now, my job is simply to look at only the ones that have a checkpoint and see if I have anything to offer for that. And I may have some for some, for a few of them.
I may have, not have something for some of them. So any of them that I go, Oh yeah, I got that too.
Yeah, that's good. I'll put a checkmark. And so everybody else is
And now we pass again. And now I've got my own back. And I can, I wasn't particularly committed to any of my titles. I was just writing as fast as I could. So now everybody looks at the ones with two checkmarks, And so now, really, have you got something for that?
Eh, not so much for that. Ooh, but that, yeah. And now let's say at the end our third member has six with three check marks. Say you, you on your paper have seven with three check marks and I have five. So we have eighteen titles that we all think we could work with to start talking about what And so now we're going to have to cut those titles down. Okay. How about this one? What would this one do? Okay, let's move on. What would this one do? Oh, wow. That's interesting. Okay, hang on to that. What about this one? And so we're going to be eliminating, maybe we'll, ultimately we're probably going to eliminate probably 14 of those 18 titles. And then those four, we're really going to take a little bit of a run at each one of those, until we finally decide, okay, this is the one. And so two things have now happened. Number one, our brains are on fire. We’ve already been trying to figure stuff out. We haven't written yet, but boy, we're getting ready. And we're guaranteed that we have someplace to start. That all three of us are excited about. The other benefit is that, those seven titles that you had. We didn't pick any of those. I'm really sorry. But those seven that you thought were pretty cool. Put those in your title file for your next writing appointment. So you're building your title file at the same time as you are talking to each other getting really excited about some ideas. And my students yesterday who played the title game, some of them for the first time, said that they could not believe how quickly the song spun out after they did that. That it was the easiest session they've ever done. And that's typical. And in all of my classes for co write situations, the first thing they do is play the title game. And my students are addicted to it now.
It really is.
Rae Leigh: like a fun exercise.
Pat Patterson: and so in co
writing, the two big keys for me are number one the no free zone and number two, the title game.
Rae Leigh: Yeah. That's good. And I really like the no free zone because I've talked to a lot of people and insecurities about sounding stupid in a co write is a big one that keeps
Pat Patterson: Yeah.
Rae Leigh: and I think it's important to be able to say what you want to
Pat Patterson: thing by the way that I love writing, I love about writing in Nashville was that if I'm in a room with you and one other
person, there is no question at all what the splits are. The splits are even three ways. And that's always in Nashville.
Nobody ever talks about splits. Because if you really like an idea and you want to fight for it, I don't want to think that you're fighting for a percentage. I want to think that you're fighting for the best song possible.
Rae Leigh: No.
Yeah, I agree. I, whether it's two people or one person, it's, for me, it's always even and it's just the easiest way. It's just fair. And yeah, I've seen people spend way too much energy on breaking down the lines and working out who
Pat Patterson: Yeah,
Rae Leigh: what the splits are. And I'd rather spend my time considering the song not the other stuff.
Thing. They do the split breakdown a lot there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Pat Patterson: splits? And that's becoming more and more common now because of the top lining top lining culture that's been developing where we are no longer writing songs, we're writing records. And now producers are considered songwriters, which I think is just silly.
Rae Leigh: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You get 12, 12 songwriters to one
Pat Patterson: who programmed the drum sound is a songwriter. Woo hoo.
Rae Leigh: Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's everyone wanting to get their cut and recognition for their performance.
Pat Patterson: It used to be called
Rae Leigh: comes out as something different, but yeah. Yeah, and performers should be recognized as well. I think there's two different co copyrights and I think they just need to be clearly talked about before the song gets released, otherwise it gets messy, I think.
What about, you've already shared some amazing advice of your own and from other people that have given it to you. And this may be a hard question because you've probably got a lot of advice, but can you tell me what you think the best advice is that you've ever been given?
Pat Patterson: Well, that's, that, that is a really hard question because as I said earlier, I don't really consider myself a songwriter first. I I consider myself a teacher first and foremost. And so I've gotten some fabulous advice as a teacher. That has colored everything that I
do as a songwriter, maybe it's maybe it was Stan Webb with
Rae Leigh: please share.
Pat Patterson: No Free Zone and yeah I guess that's probably right Other than that there's so much to be done with maybe here's one, maybe here's one that
One of this, one of the most potent tools you have as a songwriter is the use of sense bound language that stimulates your listener's senses. That if I start a song
with turn down the lights, turn down the bed, turn down these voices inside my head you already
know what color the bedspread is. Because I just stimulated your senses. You probably know what room you're in. You probably know where the light source is. When I say turn down the lights, turn down the bed, turn down these voices inside. So that Mike Reed and Alan Shamblin's words are full of your stuff, so that the song is about you.
Rae Leigh: Yeah.
Pat Patterson: And in terms of being able to pull a to pull a a listener into your song, there's a tool that, that that tool will grab them by their eyebrows and pull their faces into a plate of spaghetti.
So there's a, there's an image for you.
Rae Leigh: Yeah. I like that. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. What about absolute beginners? What advice do you give to people who are just beginning songwriting?
Pat Patterson: Have fun. Have fun. Some really simple things you can do. And, if it it depends on what you mean by an absolute beginner as a songwriter. Is this an absolute beginner who plays no instrument
and has never been conversant with music? Or is this somebody who's a fairly good musician but has never written any songs? It's
If it's a rank beginner that, that hasn't
hasn't learned a bunch of songs, isn't able to play and hasn't learned a bunch of songs, then find a song that you really like. And Get a karaoke version of it and write different words to the melody. Write different words to the melody. And after you've finished writing different words to the melody then write a different melody to the words that you now have. And
and you will start learning what makes songs work. One of the ways obviously that Most people learned to write songs. Wasn't from books, wasn't from seminars, wasn't from YouTube wasn't from
my Coursera course. It was learning to play songs by learning to play learning to write songs by learning to play songs. Learn 30 Beatles songs,
Rae Leigh: Yeah.
I love that. I actually, I think I did that naturally as a kid because my parents are pastors and very religious home. And we weren't allowed to listen to a lot of the popular secular music because it would be a bad influence on our child minds. And my way around that was to take the songs that had the melodies that I really liked that I wasn't allowed to like, and then I would rewrite the words in some sort of religious or Christian manner that would be acceptable to my parents.
Pat Patterson: and absolutely
Rae Leigh: But that was my way around it. And yeah, and it wasn't, I always wanted to be able to write songs. Like I heard on the radio and I just didn't think it was a possibility. Like I thought you had to be some sort of magical alien to be able to create that. But it was definitely a fun exercise and I used to love doing that.
And the more I learn and speak to people like yourself, I realized that those things that I did as a child, really helped me develop it as a songwriter is probably where a lot of it comes from. And it is, I think it's a great exercise to rewrite other songs that you already like, and then yeah, take it from there.
Yeah, I think I'm still, I think she's coming out a little bit, but it's it's fun adventure. This is my last question, but feel free to share whatever you'd like to share. But if you could co write with anyone dead or alive, who would it be? And why
Pat Patterson: Might be Cole Porter,
Rae Leigh: the philosophical one?
Pat Patterson: Because he is so smart not only smart and linguistically and melodically really sophisticated, but he also could talk about what he was doing and what, so that his writing is really intentional. There's a, there, there are a couple of recommendations that, that I have. And one, one of them is is a book called The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, and that's written by Philip Fury, F-U-R-I-A. And what he does is he talks about all of the all of the lyricists from the tin pan, alley air, Irving Berlin IRA Gershwin. Cole Porter Johnny Mandel, Dorothy Fields, all those folks and he doesn't talk about their lives, he doesn't,
it's not a gossip thing he just talks about their lyrics
and how they work, and the
Cole Porter section is really quite wonderful but it's all really good and also a primer of the Great American Songbook all of those standards. So that as you're going through the book, I highly recommend that you listen to the songs on YouTube or wherever you can find them. And that, that's going to be a real learning thing. Of course I do have to recommend my MOOC, my massive open online course, which is either free or nearly free, depending on how you sign up. But it's a 6, it's a 6 week, I think maybe even going to 4 weeks now, they want to edit it down, but it's a online video based course that at this point, I think over 2 million people have taken it. And it's I
left very few arrows in my quiver. In that in that course as a place for. A novice to go to have or, frankly, anybody to go to get a a process, a series of concepts that would be a good place. My, my favorite, so I've been doing seminars in Australia for 15 or 16 years now usually coming up, usually coming over twice a
Rae Leigh: I know.
Pat Patterson: Yeah, not this
year.
Rae Leigh: Not this
Pat Patterson: But my favorite population in a seminar is having somebody in there who has written hit records which has happened many times for me and in Australia. So they're the hit record folks.
And then there's the folks who have maybe never written a song and want to write one. And so we've got this real disparity in terms of. Who the folks in the seminar in terms of their experience and yet because all I talk about is tools and techniques when I finish the novice will say, Oh, my God, that was so helpful. And the hit writer in my Barbie dream world. They hit my, the hit writer says, wow.
I've been doing that stuff, but I never really knew what I was doing. And now that I've got a name to it, I can use it as a tool. So that it'll help
both the experienced writer and the inexperienced writer. And I think that the Coursera MOOC through Coursera, C O U R S E R A dot org that MOOC songwriting, writing the lyrics I think you will find it very helpful.
Thank you.
Rae Leigh: Amazing. I will pull all of the links and the book recommendations on all the socials and in the description of the podcast. And there's a blog on the website as well that we, that will be dedicated to just your podcast. There'll be easy links for people to go and find the books and the
Pat Patterson: And I have one more.
Rae Leigh: that you're
Pat Patterson: The thing that changed my life forever and forever is a six lecture series by
Leonard Bernstein that he gave in 1971 at Harvard called The Unanswered Question that when I saw just by accident turned on the television in 1973. And saw a rerun. Of his 6th lecture on Schoenberg and Stravinsky. I sat there for 2 hours in front of that cheap little TV. Perched on a milk crate in in my apartment that had almost no furniture. And I picked it after 2 and a half hours. I just picked my jaw up from the floor. And when it went out and got the went down to the Boston Public Library. And listened to the Listen to the discs the LPs of that lecture series, looked at the book, and it's now on YouTube. The unanswered question all those videos are on YouTube, but with it without that 2. 5 hours changed everything for me, and I've been recommending that to my students and the students who go through it really benefit from it. I have to say that I've watched that that series every five to 10 years since I first saw it. And every time I see it usually costs me two or three years of my life. Because I get an idea that that I want to chase down something that I missed the last time I saw it. So it's pretty revelatory.
Rae Leigh: Amazing. Thank you. I really, I'm a big believer that the greatest ideas and the greatest songs that we've ever heard haven't even been written yet. I believe that's out there in the minds of people like you and I and artists who are out there just needing a little bit of encouragement or inspiration by people like that.
And, I just can't wait to see what happens, but I want to inspire and encourage and educate myself and everyone who's listening to this podcast that, yeah, like you said, there's no bad ideas and you've just got to give it a go and try and then share it. Cause I was a songwriter in my bedroom privately for 30 years and I didn't share any of my songs with anyone because I was too scared of, social rejection and being the misfit and being too incorrect, and I think music is all about connecting with each other and life is all about connecting with each other and with our emotions and who we are and relationship. So yeah, I'm really excited to go away and now do all the homework for all of the things that I need to read and watch that you've given.
Thank you so much. I think, I knew that you had so much information and so much to be able to share that people can now and go do more research if they want to. If you, do you have anything else that you would like to share with myself or the listeners before we finish off this podcast?
Pat Patterson: song. Okay, you've done that and take it as far as you can, but don't spend too much time trying to use that song to make you famous. Just let it go and write another song because the best song that you will ever write is still out there in front of you. Go get it. Go
Rae Leigh: I love that.
Pat Patterson: Oh Yeah. there's, I, did not say this. I,
Rae Leigh: I think the more
Pat Patterson: all, all of you listeners, I want you to now adopt a sort of formal position as though you were in church and I'm about to give you the blessing, and here it is. I hereby grant you permission to write crap because crap is the best fertilizer and the more crap you write. The more likely it is, you will grow something magnificent. 90% of everything you write is not your best 10%. I find that really comforting. It's true of Shakespeare. 90% of everything you write is not your best
10%. Your job as a songwriter is to fill your 90% because the more 90% you have, the better your 10% gets. Amen.
Rae Leigh: It's amazing. Amen. That's a great way to leave it. so much for joining me on a songwriter, Tris, the amazing Pat Patterson. We're very blessed to have your words of wisdom and yeah. Thank you again. We're very blessed to have your words of wisdom.
