What makes a good song?
Many things, and taking it back to basics and delivering it
with one instrument and/or one voice is a good place to start. This isn’t my
idea, and I can’t remember who said it, but for me, the acid test for any song
is: If you strip it down and have one guitar or piano and one voice, do you
still have a good song?
This came up when I was talking to Dave from No Questions
Asked a few days ago. I’d posted on Facebook that I was practicing a Queen song
for my solo slot; Dave asked what it was and if I would like some
accompaniment. I told him privately that it is Who Wants To Live Forever, and
I’d rather see how it sounded with one guitar and one voice.[1]
That’s how I’ve been doing my acoustic show for years; only rarely do I have
someone else playing on stage with me. I try to capture the essence of the song
in this format; if it does, then I include it in my set. If not, I move it on.
I love the full-on rock production, but in most cases if you
stripped rock songs down to they would still be good. Some of my favourite
songs to cover are: Thick as Thieves by Kasabian, Closer To The Edge by 30
Seconds To Mars, A Little Respect by Erasure/Wheatus, and The Boys of Summer by
Don Henley. They all sound great in a stripped-down format. And it comes across
in my own songs. Bitterness would be a Crashpoint song if we hadn’t broken up soon
after I wrote it; originally it was a punk-style rock song and I remember Cj
doing a good job on the drums. Get Out Of My Head began in Perception, jamming
a Led Zepplin-style riff on my guitar with John on the drums. It didn’t sound
anything like how it eventually ended up – but I used the chord progressions
from what we jammed out.
I see it in other people’s covers as well. Steve who comes
to Sam Draisey’s open mic sometimes does a finger-picked acoustic rendition of
Sweet Child ‘o Mine. I think that, in many respects, his version works better
than the original. Granted, I will almost always say that about anyone who
sounds different to Axl Rose; (I can’t stand his voice,) but the lighter
finger-picking and the gently-delivered vocals capture the essence of that song
more than the rock song that everybody recognises. I love Slash’s guitar
playing, and the riff to Sweet Child ‘o Mine is fantastic. But Axl could have
been singing toothpaste; his voice would have sounded just as bad, and the
guitars just as good.
So what about bands where this doesn’t work? Two examples:
Pendulum and The Prodigy. The latter, as far as I know, haven’t written
anything resembling a ‘song’ in the usual sense. And Pendulum relies on the
drum and bass sound with the keyboard riffs; without that, the band wouldn’t
work. I’m not saying either of those bands bad. I enjoy listening to Pendulum,
and I wish I’d seen The Prodigy at Download Festival in 2006. But I will say
that those bands have a good sound – not necessarily good songs.
The problem, of course, is with those songs that are great
but have extra parts to them that I can’t strip away. I’ve only played
Motorcycle Emptiness by the Manic Street Preachers live once, and it functioned
– but without the lead guitar, it’s nowhere near as good. I’d love to play
Waterfall and This Is The One by the Stone Roses, and Marvellous by the
Lightning Seeds, but I think those songs lose something without their backing
vocals.
But I don’t think that with Who Wants To Live Forever,
despite the arrangement of the original. Taking it down to one guitar and one
voice – as long as both are properly managed – can make it as good as the huge
amount of production that went into the record. I’m hoping that comes across if
I play it at the gig.
What do you guys think? Is this a good benchmark for whether
a song is any good or not? Or is the way the record sounds more important? The
answer, I suspect, lies somewhere in between, depending on the context of the
band. Just remember, the vast majority of songs that we listened to when they
first came out and are still sounding good decades later could all be stripped
back to their rawest form, and sound every bit as good.
[1]
At the time of writing I haven’t actually done the gig yet so I have no idea
what’s going to happen when I do.
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