Collaborative Songwriting
Over the course of the 2023/24 academic year, I have begun to work outside the realms of purely instrumental, classical based music. I was eager to reconnect with my pop routes, as I took a pop music performance course at college prior to my studies at the Guildhall. This delve into creating pop music is an ongoing collaboration between myself and singer/poet Lilly Hill, who studies singing and songwriting at the Waterbear College of Music in Sheffield.
As of the time of submission, we have recorded professional quality acoustic renditions of two songs. These are titled All A Lie and Later On. We took a different approach to writing both songs that you may find interesting.
All a Lie.wav
All A Lie
The composition for All a Lie was one of ease and fluidity. It began in the studio, with Lilly handing me a set of lyrics she had written. We had a quick discussion on what the tone of the music should be, and how the chords would develop in C minor (Lilly had noted at the top of the lyric sheet she wanted the song to be in C minor). She then began to hum a short vocal phrase, which became the opening two lines of the verse. The rest of the verse and the pre-chorus was written through improvisation and came very naturally to the both of us. For the chorus I thought it was to use an ascending chord progression to contrast the verse. I also use a Db major chord in this section. I wrote this to give the song a sense of subtle unpredictability, since everything else in the song is soley in C minor. The rest of the composition was completely improvisational and effortlessly presented itself to us as we played.
Later On mix.wav
Later On
The composition of Later On dramaticly contrasts the composition of All A Lie. Whilst the latter was very improvisational, with the music coming after the lyrics, Later On was written as music first, and we took the songwriting one step at a time. Began playing a few chords (which became the A section) and sang a melody on top of it. The A section melody is very intentionally written, with phrases that repeat but with contrasting endings to keep movement. Whilst the A section displays quite a wide reaching melody, we both wanted the vocal line to really soar through the B section. I wrote a section that had slightly more dissonance and a lot more vocal versatility and I believe it really shows off Lilly's voice. Once these two ideas were written musically, Lilly went about writing a set of lyrics. We decided we didn't need anymore musical material, so the rest of the song is comprised of various arrangements of the A section. A nice contrapuntal moment after the end of the second B section makes way for a dramatic key change, ushering in an intrumental solo. If we were to fully produce this, this would mark the entrance of a melodramatic string orchestra romantically flying with the melody. I wrote another key change to get us a semi tone above the opening of the song, and we repeat the A section once more, but with more of a sense of triumph than before. This is helped by the change of chord progression from I, iii, ii, to I, iii, VI.
Collab songwriting clip 1.mp4collab sonwriting clip 2.mp4