You know the old saying, “You are what you eat” meaning that if you eat a lot of junk food you’re going to be sick and if you eat healthy you’re going to be healthy? Well, there is something to that. I used to eat terribly and wasn’t too well. I changed my diet and my health improved considerably. Take what you want from that.
Today, for some reason, this got me to thinking. If we are what we eat, are we also what we write musically?
Listen to your favorite artists. Might not be as true with groups because they’re made up of many personalities. But listen to people like John Denver, Harry Chapin and John Lennon. Why did I choose these threw? Well, for starters, they’ve all left us too soon. But more importantly, they’re remembered for being peace loving and generally good people. They all had their causes that they gave too and all believed in love and peace and not war. And that’s what they wrote about, more or less. Their music wasn’t filled with violence and hate.
I listen to a lot of the gangsta rap today and I really have to wonder what kind of people these artists are. Is it just an act? Are they really peace loving people? Or are they just a bunch of hoods? I’m not passing judgment but it does make me wonder.
Point is, everybody has a style. And each style highlights a particular personality trait. Some are warm and fuzzy and some are mean and nasty. Some, like Ray Stevens, are funny. And then the guy comes out with something like “Everything Is Beautiful” and totally blows away what I thought of the guy.
When Kiss came out with “Beth” it was like “huh?” I really had trouble wrapping my head around Kiss, a group that came out with songs like “Shout It Out Loud” and “Rock And Roll All Night” coming out with a love song like “Beth” which, by the way, is still my favorite Kiss song of all time.
But like I said, when you’re dealing with musical “groups” you’re dealing with multiple personalities so something like this might be easier to understand than a solo artist completely changing his style.
So the question I’m putting to you today is this. Is what you write really dictated by the kind of person you are? And if you try to write in different styles can you do it and still sound authentic? In other words, can musical “skill” override personality?
There are several ways to look at this. Let’s start with this way.
What if you don’t have a lot of musical skill? What if you can just about write anything? What if you don’t even know the difference between musical genres? What if all you did was just pound out chords on the keyboard and sometimes you’d do it slowly and sometimes more quickly? Maybe sometimes you’d hit major chords and other times hit minor chords. If you did this long enough, there’s a good chance that you’d come up with a number of musical styles, just by dumb luck. And if you were to play all these songs, assuming you’d ever get them finished, for people, they’d probably think you were either very talented to write so many different kinds of songs or psychotic.
True story. When I first started writing songs back in 1979, I really didn’t know much about music. I wrote in many different styles because I just did a lot of banging on the piano. And my lyrics, I tried to match the music. So I ended up doing ballads, prog rock, space music, experimental and even punk. You name it, I did it. My music wasn’t very good because I wasn’t trained yet and didn’t know what I was doing, but there is no question that my music was quite diverse.
Fast forward 35 years later. I’ve gotten musical training. But having been exposed to so much music over the years (I listen to everything from death metal to classical) I’ve reached a point where I can literally write anything. If somebody tried to determine my personality based on what I wrote, they couldn’t. They’d be guessing and I’d venture to say that they’d guess wrong. Very few people really know me. I prefer it that way.
So not having a lot of musical skills can actually be a catalyst for developing multiple styles as long as you allow your mind to wander free. Don’t censor yourself. Just go with it.
What about somebody who is trained from an early age? Are they going to adapt the personality of the music they’ve been exposed to? Or will they take their technical training and adapt it to what they are truly feeling inside? Or will they make a conscientious decision to write in a particular style because they think it will give them the best chance of being “successful?” And if so, what does that say about their personality?
I mean, think about this. You write songs about love and peace because it’s what happens to be popular at the time and you’re trying to cash in on the craze so you write songs about love and peace, just to make a buck. What does that say about you as a person? I admit that at one time I would have written anything just to make a buck. But not anymore. I do have my limits. I won’t write songs about drugs or violence. That’s where I draw the line. I’ll write songs about the horrors and sadness of war but I’ll never glamorize it.
So are you what you write? I can’t answer that for everybody. I can say that, to a degree, I’m not what I write because I write so many different styles and write on so many different subjects. However, because I do have my limits, I would also say that, to a degree, I am what I write because of those limits.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim