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davidgerard

The key bit? Those songs were number two-hundred-and-something and number four-hundred-and-something.

There's a lot of value to doing one of something every day.

I'm busy working on terrible music. If I do a few hundred, I might suck less too.

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I just listened to the song and it is quite remarkable he put that together so quickly.

Rivers Cuomo from Weezer has claimed to have a very prolific songwriting approach as well, apparently at least for periods of time doing a song per day.

Apparently during the first couple years of The Beatles' songwriting career John and Paul would knock out songs very fast, within hours - they actually 'scheduled' time to work together in a time-boxed fashion, so they could fit in songwriting time around their otherwise hectic schedule. Now they didn't produce that many throwaways, but in a period prior to this over several years they learned ~500 songs by ear. They learned these songs well enough live and used them as tools to figure out how to light up a crowd, and more or less had a foundational vocabulary from which they moved forward with.

Rivers also methodically analyzed many songs, including all of Nirvana's songs to help him with his songwriting. He writes about his songwriting process in the liner notes for "Alone II", an album of his home recordings. The liner notes are amazing. He goes through each song on the album and explains the back story, often mentioning what kind of methods he used to write that particular song.

I dug up an old Rolling Stone article where he talks about his "Encyclopedia of Pop". They also mention him writing several hundred songs in 1999:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080228012507/http://www.rollin...

The names he gives some of his methods are pretty excellent. Some examples:

* Intellectually acquired emotionally volatile concept: http://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Intellectual...

* Incipit-Melody-Guitar-Develop-Tea : http://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Incipit-Melo...

* Arbitrary-Progression-Distortion-open-Strum-Intro-Melody-Arrange: http://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Arbitrary-Pr...

Wow. This is pure gold, thank you much!

Agreed, this is fantastic, thanks for the share. Weezer's continued success and variance in pop-style is no surprise having read this.

In songwriting circles, the two most common pieces of advice are "write tons of songs even if they're not great" and "finish all your songs, even the ones that aren't great." It's very similar to common advice in computer programming circles, and presumably any creative discipline.

True, but I think that extra lesson from The Beatles - learn thoroughly/attempt to recreate the work of those you wish to emulate, is a good, perhaps even more important one.

You have to have the ability to finish your work. But to steadily improve you must push yourself in deliberate ways. You need both the discipline and the vocabulary.

Brian Wilson carried this out to an almost healthy extreme in his attempt to break down Phil Specter's wall of sound technique:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Worry_Baby

"Brian Wilson cited the song as his attempt to capture the essence of his all-time favorite record, "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes, who would later cover this song. At one time, Wilson listened to his 45 record of the song he "could never do" up to 100 times a day."

Not so hard if you have your (digital) equipment setup right. A lot of bands used to do almost everything in one recording. And now that is before the digital age.

Stephen King gave the same advice as well "Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer." (quote from wiki)

Holds true for many things. Our photography teacher told us on the first day that the secret of good photographers is that they take a ton of photos, every day.

That's why I try to write some code (or at least read about it) every day, even if just for a little bit. I'm not sure where I'd be, skill-wise, without it.

That sounds like the lead in to a joke, "Every day I write some code ... if I'm feeling lucky I try to compile it."

I agree though that it is insanely amazing what happens if you do a bit each day.

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