Howdy friends…
So my good friend and, well, brother…Robert stopped by last week to work on a couple of new ideas for songs. Let me bring you up to speed for those of you that haven’t been following us since 2007…
Usually, up until now, this is how the songwriting process for our band works:
- Chris and/or Robert come up with an idea for a song.
- Chris and/or Robert complete the idea and present it to the band.
- We all get together and hammer out structure, transitions, solos, placement of sexy kicks, etc.
- Once the idea has been completed, Chris puts lyrics to it and well…then we’ve got ourselves a hit song now!!
Life changes though and while world domination for our band at this point is eminent and nearly within reach, the way that we are writing songs, has well…changed…dramatically.
Songwriting has become a team effort, a collaborative endeavor in which we are all pushing the limits of our comfort zones to see what kind of dog shit we can sprinkle a little BoTo upon to parlay into a song that will afford us new opportunities! Instead of waiting for someone else to show up with some new ideas, we’re all working on ideas. We’ll see where it takes us, but at press time, we’ve got about twelve brand-spanking new ideas that we’re cooking up. The songwriting collaborations are helping us to explore some new avenues that before, would have remain untouched. Cue inappropriate comparison photos…
We’ll keep you posted on the progress. As the title here would suggest, this process is a long one. Even longer than before as we all work on and share ideas. Rehearsals have been replaced by interweb videos being exchanged, phone calls and weekend get-togethers. We have also learned that we enjoy videotaping ourselves singing, dancing like idiots and sharing the occasionally funny picture, as seen below.
Stay tuned, share with your friends. And again, for those of you that haven’t been with us since the beginning, here’s an opportunity to get caught up…
Andrew
Borrowing Tomorrow One Day at a Time 
Collaborative songwriting, I’ve found, is such a hard thing to do, but sounds soooooo good when it happens successfully! This was a neat post. 🙂
Glad you liked it! We will see where it takes us!
Great post. Always interested to hear the different ways creatures approach their craft. Collaborative songwriting sounds the most rewarding, so long as egos are set aside (talkin’ to you, BT’s John Lennon ;-P) and you’re all working towards a similar goal, or have similar ideas about what the end product should sound like. I’m sure you all know what to expect from each other, though, so I doubt you’ll get into a ‘too many cooks’ situation. Good luck with it!
Thanks! We’ve got a lot of stuff that is in the cooker so to speak, so we’re looking forward to putting it together. More to come!
Music is a team sport (no matter how solo artist you try to go- with out the support of others you don’t get very far). I have found that collaborative writing helps with the ‘writers block’ of a melody. To keep a tune flowing and true to a bands ideal sound, it does wonders to hand it off. My bandmate and I do something very similar. When one of us comes up with an idea and have had our fill of an incomplete racket roaming around our head, we either record it and send it to the other person or show up at the others back door and plunk it out for them. Our best songs are the ones that have mutual involvement on them- rather then the ones individually written and just taught to the other person. Its a great way to write!
Couldn’t agree more – it’s been very interesting working in a manner that is different than what we’ve done for the past six years, but…sometimes evolution is required. We’ll let you be the judge as to how well it worked!