I recently had the ridiculously amazing opportunity to work with Paul Simon at Berklee. Here's a little reflection on the experience:


When I found out that I’d been chosen to work with Paul Simon I, well first, cried a little bit and called my parents… then, I wrote about a page and a half of questions. I think a great testament to Mr. Simon’s generosity and passion for songwriting is that I ended up asking only one of them. While listening intently and critiquing our songs, he emphasized the importance of listening, the listener, and editing. I’ll do my best to relay what stood out to me and hopefully my colleagues can fill in the blanks.

On Listening
    “The practice of getting your ear to really listen is really, really valuable. The whole thing of taking whatever it is you’re writing now and taking it up a notch…is magnified by learning to listen at a level that you haven’t been listening.”

Paul said that specifically about tuning your guitar by ear, but this point came up again and again. The idea that we often let inferior writing slip by simply because we aren’t listening as closely as we could be, seemed to float over the entire session. I’d play a part of a song and Paul would ask me to try something else and then he’d ask me if I liked it. And the more this cycle repeated the more I found myself making more acute judgments about what I was hearing. Do you really like it? Or is it just different? Kind of like when the eye doctor asks you whether the letters are clearer or just darker. Maybe just different or just darker is what you need, but the point is we have to ask ourselves these questions, so we can make conscious decisions about our music. Seems obvious, but I know I don’t do it all that often.
Another thing to listen for, he said, are your mistakes. Be tuned in to what you’re doing all the time, because your mistakes are a treasure trove. 

On The Listener
    “Attention span is a thing that I think about a lot… people leave in their minds because they’re bored or they’re tired or whatever. But, it’s kind of an interesting game to stay ahead of the attention span.”

    I love being reminded that I want people to listen to my music. For some reason, I think it’s easy to get caught up in my own emotions or the game of writing something clever (by a writer’s standard). People want to tap their feet, Paul explained, we want to move people and we can’t move them unless they’re listening. Furthermore, he said, they aren’t trained to listen, so they won’t unless you give them something attractive and interesting to listen to.
    One thing that’s essential to attracting a listener is the opening line. For example, the song I played for him started with the line “It was the year you stopped believing.” When I was finished playing he asked the other two students in the room if they could remember the first line and neither of them, nor Mr. Simon could remember. Point taken. The line started with a cliché and was set in such a way that sort of ignored the important, more interesting part of the line. We need to draw the listeners in, give them reason to care about what we’re saying.
On the other hand, it’s not that listeners don’t try and that they’re a bunch of idiots who need shiny playthings in every line to keep them around. If they’re listening, they’re constantly making their own assumptions about what’s going on in the song. Those assumptions can be used to our advantage. If we let the listener fill in the blanks, and we know what they’re going to fill them in with, we can spend less time trying to announce what’s happening and more time crafting an appealing story. At the same time we can keep ourselves from being bored to tears by writing these conversations that follow our instincts about what’s fascinating instead of the topic sentence.
“There’s a danger when you write that you actually lose your voice,” Paul said, “and you just continue along with the momentum of what it is that you wrote. If you can return to being an audience to your own stuff at the same time that you’re the writer, you can say, ‘I’m bored. I’m really interested in that…’”
So, suddenly, by becoming your own listener you might write something that someone else will actually listen to!


On Editing
“When you can get yourself into editing mode, life becomes so much easier.”

Editing will not only improve your songs, but your thinking. The more you edit, the more writing will become instinctual. The practice of knowing what you do, how you do it and if you like it will being you closer to your own voice. You’ll start to become yourself instead of an echo of your role models.
A lot of it goes back to listening; hearing something and making a quick decision about it before it slips by into oblivion. If there’s an argument for or against something you’re writing, hear it. Let that discussion with yourself happen and whether or not you end up agreeing with it, that’s editing, that’s writing.
Change one or two things you don’t like, the song gets a little better. Change four or five things, and it begins to rise, he said. When the song has become a solid, well-crafted thing, other parts of the performance or arrangement to improve become apparent and more accessible to you, the editor.

    Finally, two more things about songwriting I thought were great. First, think of the song as two conversations, one that the music’s having and another that the lyrics are having. Sometimes they’re in sync, but if they aren’t, we have to make sure they’re saying the things we want them to. If the main message of your song is “I know you’re down, but it’s gonna be alright.” And you don’t get to the “It’s gonna be alright” part until later in the lyrics, you can hint at it with the music. Keep the main message of the song running under everything. Secondly, how we surround important lines in a song is just as vital as what the line actually is. If you have a great line sandwiched between two really flashy lines or dense language, the important line might be lost. Musically as well, the most important line deserves the best, or most interesting music in the song. You wouldn’t put your life savings in a shoebox, you’d put it in a safe.

Also, he recommended reading, lots of it.
   
    “Songwriting… is a vehicle to finding out who you are as a person,” he said. And we do it for all these different reasons all day long, but in the end we have an obligation to express our hearts and to touch people. “Say a thing in a way that allows people to feel.” We live in a culture that cuts off feeling, that’s why it’s such a relief to feel something so deeply as we do when we hear a great song. And Paul Simon would know about great songs.