SCALA President and song competition co-organizer, Robert Childs,
with some inside information.
Most competitions have a very uneven standard of entry from many points of view.
There are absolute beginners, rubbing shoulders with people who have had
many years of songwriting experience.
There are earnest people who try hard every year with not much success competing
against people who study the techniques and structures of songs and songwriting.
There are people who write great songs who can’t perform them and people who are
excellent performers with banal and clichéd songs. There are good lyricists let down
by their tunes and people with inventive tunes who fall down on their lyrics - sometimes
I want to introduce these groups to each other. This unevenness cannot always be
solved by classifications like amateur and professional
So how do judges sift through all these apparent disparities in performance, experience
and (let’s face it) ability? In general terms judges are looking for ORIGINALITY
(well we are talking original music aren’t we?).
Most judges avoid clichéd songs. The clichés can be both in the lyrics and the music.
Some people may find it surprising that judges will find
music clichéd but I’ve noticed it more and more over the years.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to write a song within a genre to catch judges’
attention especially if the song’s lyrics, imagery
and melody/chording are not exploring new areas. I’ve heard many
well crafted songs that stay safely within a blues, jazz, rock or folk genre.
Often they’re beautiful examples of their type but … frankly, they’ve already been
written many thousand times before!
This is not to say that judges want songs that follow extremely different melody, rhythm,
or chord lines or that are lyrically bizarre (and perhaps ignore all rules of meter,
structure or sense). There has to be enough in a song that’s familiar to an
audience that it can identify with. The trick is to include the unfamiliar - those elements
of a song that "engage the heart and mind of the listener". This can be original
subject matter or original treatment of familiar subject matter, musical
innovation in the rhythm, melody or chording or in a number of other subtle measures.
You should realize that to adequately explore the ‘unfamiliar’ you have to have an
understanding of the ‘familiar’. That means you need to understand song structure,
you need to have a love of language and so on (Good spelling and grammar is
also a definite advantage!). If you’re going to break the rules you need to know what
the rules are in the first place. That probably means writing a lot of stuff that is not
original, that has been written thousands of times before, that is banal, trite and clichéd.
That’s what I consider serving your apprenticeship in songwriting.
You’re learning about the craft, you’re copying or deriving using your
favorite role model songwriters or genres.
The trick is to know when it’s time to extend yourself. Some people practice
"safe songwriting" for so long and have received approval of audiences for so long
that they forget to be truly creative by being original. Maybe that’s the real
value of song competitions. Perhaps it will lead some songwriters to seek to
learn more about songwriting (and especially lyric writing).
© Copyright Robert Childs 1998
SONGWRITING CONTESTS
Click on each name for more information
John Lennon Songwriting Contest
International Songwriting Competition
American Songwriter Magazine Lyric Contest