On a daily basis, I get automated mails whenever someone follows me on Twitter. Those mails includes their avatar (square image), their short bio, and their stats (how many tweets they’ve tweeted, how many they follow, and how many follow them). If what I see there piques my curiosity, I’ll frequently click through to learn a little more about the person, and along the way form an opinion on whether I’d like to follow them back. Someone can lose or gain a follower based on those first few seconds of an initial impression.

So let me be your A&R for the remainder of this article and tell you what grabs my attention and makes the best impression.

1. Design a good avatar and profile picture, and write a compelling short bio, including a link. Humor is great, originality is even better. Information is king. Leaving it blank is the worst possible thing you can do. If you have a web site, put it in here. It’ll appear as an active hyperlink, making it very easy to click on if I want more information about you.

Important note: Twitter also features a “web site” field you can fill in. Put your web site in BOTH the “web site” field as well as the “bio” field. In automated Twitter e-mails (and other places) Twitter will send the bio but not the web site.

Make sure that whatever link you give will take me straight to your music. If you want to send me to your Facebook page, but then I have to click through your Facebook page to find your music, you’re taking a big chance that I’ll be determined enough to dig that deep to find it, and you’ll likely lose me. Here’s a look at mine, which tells you a lot even at a glance, and provides a very clear link if you want to dig deeper in learning about me:

2. A custom background that communicates something about you is nice to have (though not essential). I likely won’t see this background after the first time I click on your profile, so it’s a part of the first impressions. Though you can’t include directly clickable links, the design can include photos, artwork, or if you prefer the abstract, interesting colors or textures. The ideal background is one that says something about you. In my case, I’ve chosen to use my logo as well as a few recent projects I worked on:

For further reading, here’s an excellent article from Smashing Magazine featuring practical ideas and specs for designing Twitter backgrounds.

3. Make sure your Twitter link (http://twitter.com/yourtwittername) is widely available, including mentions in other social networking profiles, in your e-mail signature, business card, liner notes, and anywhere else you can put it. If you’re going to take Twitter seriously as part of your strategy, you might as well make sure people never miss a chance to get on board with you, otherwise your efforts aren’t being maximized.

4. Now tweet. Regularly. And consider buffering using BufferApp or similar. There’s an entire science devoted to how often you should tweet, at what times of day, and so on. You can read up on those if you like (1, 2, 3), but I’m a firm believer that quality is far more important than quantity (and quantity can cause people to stop following you if quality is lacking).

Who are you and what do you want people to know about you? Are you funny? Use humor, a proven personality magnet. Are you busy? Tweet about what you’re doing (but make sure it’s interesting — tweets that tell the world you ate a peanut butter sandwich aren’t going to further your career, unless there’s something very unusual about that peanut butter sandwich). Tweet about your career, about interesting projects, connections, conversations, happenings, events, concerts, releases, achievements.

Tweet regularly. I’ve become a huge fan of BufferApp.com, a free service that lets you schedule tweets. You set up your own schedule and quantity, and can then add tweets into your buffer at any time, and BufferApp will publish them at the specified times. This is a great way to prevent you from tweeting ten times on one eventful day, then being silent or too busy to tweet for a week. Constant communication with your audience is a much more effective use of Twitter than sporadic communication, and it helps you build stronger relationships.

If you use Buffer, think carefully about the schedule. As mentioned above, there are studies that purport to tell you the optimal times of day to tweet to give you the best chance of being read. Either take their advice, or just use some common sense and save your important tweets for the daylight hours in your primary target country (and take time zones into account; American west coast tweets sent at 11pm are less likely to get read by east coast followers).

5. Interact with others. Find friends, causes, collaborators, people you admire, and make a point to comment on their tweets or retweet them if you particularly like what they say. Retweets are a currency in the Twitter community. Don’t misunderstand this: I’m not advising you to fill space with hot air. This is a constructive reminder to engage and interact, and not just wait for the party to come to you.

6. Respond in such a way that it’s retweetable, and always include mentions of related people as @names. This is a simple truth that many novice Twitter users never think about. Let’s say my friend, @Mike, tweets something particularly interesting or memorable. If I respond to his tweet with:

@Mike That’s unreal!

I communicate congratulations to him, but don’t necessarily further his or my cause. Instead, if I respond:

@Mike Can’t believe you got to work with @PaulMcCartney and @JustinBieber at the same time! Who smelled better?

This type of response has two major advantages that the first response didn’t have:

1) Mike is more likely to retweet this message to his followers, expanding your reach beyond your own readership and now into his. You re-mentioned something he did while simultaneously heralding his achievement, and he probably won’t mind reminding his followers that he worked with Paul McCartney.

2) This tweet will show up in the accounts of Paul McCartney and Justin Bieber. While you might think the chances of them noticing, then commenting or retweeting, are remote (and they are), you never know. I’ve had tweets unexpectedly retweeted by very large accounts, especially when humor is involved.

The bottom line is: take a moment to think about how your tweets look to the person receiving them.

Use the “dot trick” if appropriate. A tweet that begins with @Mike will only be seen by Mike and by people who follow both you and Mike (and also by anyone visiting your Twitter page directly). A tweet that begins with .@Mike (note the period) will be seen by all of your Twitter followers. Most tweets, including the example above, don’t need the dot trick because they are directed at Mike. But this next one, for example, deserves the dot, because all your readers deserve to hear you say:

.@Mike’s show last night was the second most amazing show I’ve ever been to in my life, after @WilliamShatner’s of course.

7. Strategically use Twitter to accomplish your goals. Do you have people you’re trying to reach? Collaborators? Promoters? Managers? Labels? Make a limited list of people you’d like to get closer to. Follow them on Twitter. Without stalking them or encroaching on their private territory, feel free to reply whenever you have something valuable to say. Use tip #6 to make your tweets as engaging and meaningful as possible. Build a relationship. Over the course of weeks and months, it’s a great tool — the 21st century equivalent of running into them at a party — to become known to them. It’s an easy way to leverage the social community of Twitter, where it’s entirely acceptable to throw in replies to people you don’t know. Also, ask questions (just be sure the questions are answerable within a tweet; no deep philosophy).

Tip #7 potentially works in tandem with tip #1: give a worthy response to a tweet, and the receiver may wonder, “Who is this?” and then, one click later, be checking out your own Twitter profile.

Effective use of Twitter is more than any one article could ever comprehensively cover. Here’s a few more articles that I’ve particularly enjoyed:

• Top 10 Twitter Tips for Bands, By Bands (thanks @michaelsb)
• Twitter for Musicians and Artists (an official article from Twitter)
• Twitter Tips for the Music Industry

If you need more help, the following Twitter feeds will provide a university course’s worth of wisdom to help you stay abreast of new social media trends:

• @MichaelSB (Michael Brandvold)
• @ThornyBleeder (Brian Thompson)
• @ReverbNation
• @MadalynSklar
• @HypeBot (Bruce Houghton)
• @CDBaby
• @CyberPR (Ariel Hyatt)
• @MusicThinkTank
• @BandZoogle
• @MusicCoaching (Rick Goetz)

Check out these related projects:

   Kontakt Tutorial Videos

   Vinyl record samples for free download

   Kontakt 2 Power book published

Troy is a singer/songwriter and professional guitarist (T.A.T.U., Wilson Phillips, etc.) The two concerts took place on back-to-back nights on April 5-6, 2011. Both concerts were fairly similar, and both were recorded in multitrack, which made the process of producing the live album much easier, as there was a lot of material to choose from. We had a wonderful band, including Danish drummer Jesper Kristensen, bassist Al Slavick, and the string quartet Thread.

This is the first live concert I’ve ever had the opportunity to mix, and it required a very different approach than regular studio mixing, with the emphasis not so much on every musical detail fitting in perfectly, but more in capturing the vibe, ambience, and spontaneity of the live music. The string quartet was a challenge to blend, because its overhead mics ended up capturing too much room ambience and not enough strings, so we had to rely mostly on the direct pickups from the strings (which produce a dry, direct sound, without any blend from the other instruments).

The finished album was mastered in high-definition (24-bit, 96kHz). We’re currently looking into distribution possibilities for the high resolution audio as well as considering a possible surround mix of the concert.

Click here to download the liner notes to the album as a PDF. Preview or purchase the entire album at iTunes and Amazon MP3 and also as an audio CD at Amazon.

Check out these related projects:

   John Chisum: A Table in the Wilderness

   Aaron Lazar: Caruso

   String Arranging and MD’ing with Troy MacCubbin

Your ears are king; there’s no one recipe to a great drum sound. Different drums, mics, mic placements, rooms, and musical styles/mixes play an enormous part in making perfect harmony, so this is presented as one technique that can help shape drums into whatever they need to be for a given song.

I use the MOTU Masterworks EQ plug-in, an emulation of classic British console EQ’s (and one of my top two EQ plug-ins, alongside the Universal Audio Neve 1073) in this demonstration, but similar results can be achieved with many other good EQ plug-ins as long as they have freely selectable frequency ranges (as opposed to predetermined frequency notches).

If these techniques are helpful to you, please tweet, buffer, G+, or Facebook it on to your friends! Special thanks to my friends at MOTU and Blue Microphones for the Yeti microphone used to make this tutorial.

Check out these related projects:

   Kontakt Tutorial Videos

   Vinyl record samples for free download

   Kontakt 2 Power book published

Click here to download the files.

To use it, load the multi up in Kontakt 5.0.2. If it alerts you to missing sample files, point it to the Kontakt 5 factory library, then the full instrument will load.

To play it, hit the C0 key to start and stop the drum loop (which will automatically sync to your host or MasterKontrol tempo). Keys from F2 and below will play an upright bass, and keys from F#2 and above will play a layered combination of acoustic piano, string section, and tenor saxophone. For a demonstration, see the video below. It’s not intended to be the greatest, detailed high-quality instrument ever designed, but it’s functional and useful as quick inspiration for a demo or for songwriting sketches.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Check out these related projects:

   Kontakt Tutorial Videos

   Vinyl record samples for free download

   Kontakt 2 Power book published

This article isn’t meant to be a primer on WordPress. If you’re new to the platform, you may want to visit the home pages at WordPress.org and WordPress.com (the former is for those who’d like to host it themselves, the latter for those who would like it hosted for them; further advice here). But if you’re already up and running with WordPress, there’s a nice group of plug-ins that are of special interest to musicians, bands, and artists. All the plug-ins mentioned on this page are free.

MANAGING TOUR DATES

ArtistDataPress: For users of Sonicbids’ ArtistData, ArtistDataPress displays your ArtistData feed on a page, post, or as a sidebar widget.

Event Organiser: Create and maintain events, including complex reoccurring patterns, venue management (with Google maps), calendars and customisable event lists.

Events Manager: Fully featured event registration management including recurring events, locations management, calendar, Google map integration, and booking management.

Gigs Calendar: This plugin is geared toward bands and musicians to manage and display a calendar of their gigs within WordPress. It’s meant to be as easy as possible for both the musician and the fan. It even manages venue data complete with mapping and ticket links.

GigPress: GigPress is a powerful live performance listing and management plugin designed for musicians and other performers. Manage all of your upcoming and past performances right from within the WordPress admin, and display them on your site using simple shortcodes, PHP template tags, or the GigPress widget on your WordPress-powered website.

PLAYING MUSIC ON THE SITE

Degradeable HTML5 Audio and Video: Shortcodes for HTML5 video and audio, with auto-inserted links to alternative file types, and fallback options. (I highly recommend using an HTML5-compatible audio and video player.)

GrooveShark for WordPress: The Grooveshark plugin allows you to insert music links or Grooveshark Widgets into your site.

ReverbNation Widgets: This plugin lets you embed music players, video players, tunewidgets, email collectors and other ReverbNation widgets on your WordPress blog.

SoundCloud Shortcode: The SoundCloud Shortcode plugin allows you to integrate a player widget from SoundCloud into your WordPress Blog by using a WordPress short codes.

Stratus: The SoundCloud Stratus is a jQuery powered SoundCloud player that lives at the bottom (or top) of your website or blog.

StreamPad: Streampad gives you everything you need to play back the music you post. Any ‘.mp3′ file you link to or any link with class ‘spmp3′, will automatically show up in the Streampad player at the bottom of your page. The Streampad player will sit at the bottom of your page as a bottom bar.

Here’s a link to 14 Free Music Player Plugins for WordPress. I would personally recommend sticking to HTML5 players and not Flash ones, in order to insure maximum compatibility and accessibility.

PHOTO GALLERIES

NextGen Gallery: NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option.

WordPress Flickr Gallery: If you use Flickr to host your photos already, this plug-in handles integrating your Flickr collection into a WordPress site.

PhotoBucket Widget: PhotoBucket Widget works as a widget, making very easy for you to embed in sidebars from your PhotoBucket account.

FotoBook: Fotobook is a WordPress plugin that will link to your Facebook account(s) and import all of your photo albums for use in your WordPress site.

SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION

It goes without saying that it’s wise to have Facebook Like buttons, Tweet This buttons, and Google Plus icons on each page of unique content of the site. Numerous plug-ins already offer that in various configurations. Beyond that, here’s some plug-ins that offer unique additional capabilities:

Facebook Comments for WordPress: Allows your visitors to comment on posts using their Facebook profile. (You can see this plug-in in action at the bottom of this page.)

LifeStream: Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.

Official Topspin WordPress Plugin: Quickly and easily integrate your Topspin Offers into customized, sortable and dynamically generated Store Pages.

Here’s a very helpful and definitive article from Smashing Magazine on How to Integrate Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ in WordPress.

PODCASTING

Blubrry: Blubrry PowerPress brings the essential features for podcasting to WordPress including full iTunes support, web audio/video media players and more.

PodPress: PodPress lets you host audio files, then output a podcast feed and manage the stream from the WordPress admin area.

OTHER

Chords and Lyrics: This plugin assists in the creation of staffless lead sheets, also called chord sheets.

Easyfileshop: If you’d like to sell files directly (for example, offering a ZIP file of your album), this is one of the very easiest ways to do it. It lets visitors buy using PayPal and receive an instant download link to the file they’ve purchased.

Instant Band Site by Nimbit: Easily create a complete artist-band website with fan signup, gig listings, storefront and more.

Music Affiliate Pro: Search and insert affiliate links for music in seconds. Works with major digital music outlets like iTunes, Amazon MP3, Spotify, and eMusic.

Musopress Discography: Created for Bandcamp users, this plug-in creates a Discography Custom Post Type and allows you to import your albums from Bandcamp.

WP Bandcamp: Embed the Bandcamp Player into your website pages using a widget or the post editor short code.

WP Vibedeck: For Vibedeck users: Play and sell your music online for free. Embed the VibeDeck audio player and store using a simple shortcode or widget.

NON-MUSIC PLUG-INS THAT EVERYONE SHOULD USE

Finally, here’s a quick list of plug-ins that, while not music-specific, I highly recommended for all WordPress sites: Broken Link Checker (automatically scans your site periodically and e-mails you if any links are broken), Google XML Sitemaps (lets Google know about everything on your site), W3 Total Cache (speeds up your entire site by caching it), WP-DBManager (manages your database and allows you to back it up), and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (intelligently chooses related posts to display at the bottom of the current post – always give your visitors something else to read if the current page hasn’t whetted their appetite!).

MORE RESOURCES

There are uncountable numbers of WordPress resources on the web, but just to list a few of my favorites, visit Smashing Magazine’s WordPress section, SixRevisions’ WordPress section, and Webdesigner Depot’s WordPress section. If you’d like to delve deeper into WordPress for musicians via a webinar, check out the Music Marketing Webinar hosted by my friends Michael Brandvold and Brian Thompson. Also check out my article The Entrepreneurial Guide to Being a Musician in the 21st Century, which contains numerous ideas on promotions, marketing, and more.

I haven’t touched on WordPress themes in this article. There are hundreds of WordPress theme developers out there and the quality of design, browser compatibility, and support varies widely. I did, however, come across an interesting developer named Foxhound that has three interesting premium themes specifically for bands.

Check out these related projects:

   Kontakt Tutorial Videos

   Vinyl record samples for free download

   Kontakt 2 Power book published

I’m a firm believer that Billy Joel is one of the finest craftsmen in the history of pop songwriting. As a musician, pianist, melodist, and lyricist, he has constantly brought an impeccable originality and mastery at creating three- to four-minute masterpieces. He’s also incredibly diverse. If you’ve seen him in concert, you’ve seen his ability to morph like a chameleon between musical styles, absorbing legends like Ray Charles (“Baby Grand“), Joe Cocker, 50′s doo-wop (the entire An Innocent Man album), Franki Valli and the Four Seasons (“Uptown Girl“), The Rolling Stones (“You May Be Right“), The Beatles (in countless instances), Beethoven (“This Night“), the Russian Romantic tradition (“Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)” and others, especially the Storm Front album), and more. If I had the time, I could write dozens of Songblogs that traverse his almost four decades making records, and each one would be completely unique. Billy’s genius lies in his innate ability to assimilate a wide variety of influences, and turn them around into new original songs that pay homage to the past but are their own unique and valuable creations that bear the stamp of his unique personality.

In today’s Songblog, I’ll look at one of his relatively early ballads, “She’s Always A Woman,” taken from the 1977 album The Stranger, which won multiple Grammy awards and which many consider to be among the best pop albums of all time.

Billy’s primary instrument is the piano, and this song is a very simple piano-vocal ballad. Billy has said that this song was somewhat influenced by Gordon Lightfoot. The song opens with a very simple chord sequence that lays the foundation of the entire song:

After the first verse is played and sung so simply, the piano begins an arpeggiated pattern (0:29 in the YouTube video above) that serves to propel the song forward, and once we’ve heard two verses (which stay very simple harmonically), we hit the first chorus (0:56), which forms a beautiful contrast as it cycles through several chord worlds before taking us back neatly to the simple verse. The chorus is in two halves, the second half (1:13) pivoting to a surprise minor i chord which gives the structure so much strength and sense of journey.

Especially in the verse, you get the sense that the accompaniment is following the vocal. The beginning of the song feels like a 6/8 waltz, but then the time signature patterns start breaking up and being grouped into twos, threes, and fours, depending on how much extra breathing room a given vocal line needs.

The lyrics, taken by themselves, are beautiful poetry, and need no interpretation as their meaning is crystal clear. He’s extolling the beauty of his woman, and mesmerized by her despite her flaws.

She can kill with a smile
She can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child,
But she’s always a woman to me

Billy is frequently asked about his writing process, and whether the music or the lyrics comes first. For him, the answer is always the music first:

I write the music first and then if I like the music I write lyrics. I think every piece of music has something apparent in it lyrically. For me it’s like fate knocking on the door. Beethoven’s symphonies were written when, if you look at the time period, there was some awesome stuff going on. And you think that’s what he must have been writing about. But maybe it was something as banal as what’s with the rent? It’s like Michelangelo sculpting marble. Inside that marble is the sculpture, he’s just got to find it. That’s how I write lyrics. I write music and then ask, “What does this music say to me?” I wrote a song called James, and the guy’s name was not James. But had I said Fred it wouldn’t have worked.

An illuminating early demo version of this song exists, in which you can hear Billy halfway through writing the song. All of the music is there, most of the melody is there, but most of the lyrics are not, except for a couple of words which he begins to hang on the melody:

I love hearing this demo, realizing that he really worked on the music and melody exclusively until he felt they were as solid as they could be, before he began to approach the lyrics.

If you’re new to Billy Joel, I highly recommend the recently-released documentary/concert Last Play At Shea, which documents Billy’s historic 2008 concerts that were the last concerts played at Shea Stadium in New York before the complex was torn down. The film is a blended documentary which interweaves Billy’s history with the history of New York and the Mets.

Billy is also an eloquent speaker about his craft. Simply searching YouTube for “billy joel questions and answers” reveals many search results of live audiences interviewing Billy about his life and work, and there’s a gold mine of insight there.

What is it about this song that makes it a great song to you? Leave a thought in the comments below.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, and don’t already have it, support the artist by buying the album (iTunes/Amazon) or single (iTunes/Amazon).

This post is part of the Songblog series, a series of essays dissecting a selection of popular songs from a songwriting and production perspective. Please contribute to the discussion by leaving comments below. If you have suggestions for a future Songblog article, please leave it in the comments or mention it via Twitter or the contact page. I can’t respond to every comment, but will try to incorporate ideas into future articles. Subscribe to future Songblogs by subscribing to this RSS feed or following me on Twitter.

Check out these related projects:

   Songblog: Al Jarreau / Mornin’

   Songblog: Brian McKnight / Anytime

   Ginny Owens: The Sessions for Get In, I’m Driving

I’ve been working with Chicago-born soul singer-songwriter and BMG/Radar/Bug artist Dylan Lloyd recently. One of our songs, “Thankful,” has just been released. Stream the entire song above, or own it by hopping over to iTunes!

“Thankful” is a co-write between me and Dylan. Over a few writing sessions, we came up with the haunting persistent vibe set up by an incessantly four-on-the-floor drum pattern augmented by a simple electric guitar part and a Rhodes. Dylan crafted much of the lyrical content around the topic of healing from depression and on gratefulness as an antidote to hopelessness:

The tears of a cloud formed an ocean of pain
I forgot how the sun felt on my face
You were too hard to reach, I was losing control
Till your light cast the dark from the seat of my soul

See the signs
Let it open up your eyes
Love your life
And be thankful for this time
The fall was a long way down but
I had to reach for something to believe in
You always believed in me

It was tearing me down from the inside out
Every wall that I built trapped in the sound
I was losing the fight and the will to survive
I let the sky unfold and show me the light

See the signs
Let it open up your eyes
Love your life
And be thankful for this time
The fall was a long way down but
I had to reach for something to believe in
You always believed in me

Words and Music by David Das and Dylan Lloyd
©2011 Das Bunk Music (BMI) / Radar/Bug/BMG Music (ASCAP). All rights reserved.

Stream the entire song above, and buy it on iTunes or Amazon!

I’ve previously worked with Dylan as he represented the USA in the international 2011 Crimea Music Festival, singing another of his songs along with a cover version of Elton John’s “Sacrifice” which I produced for him. “Sacrifice” is also available on iTunes and Amazon.

Check out these related projects:

   A song on Virtue’s new album, Free

   Producing the new Shunna Jones project

   Writing and Producing Amy Krebs’s New Single

Written in concerto style, this piece is for a cappella choir with a soprano soloist. I was captivated by the text, which begins and ends with these heartbreaking bookends:

Weep not, weep not,
She is not dead;
She’s resting in the bosom of Jesus.
Heart-broken husband–weep no more;
Grief-stricken son–weep no more;
Left-lonesome daughter –weep no more;
She only just gone home.

In between the bookends, a beautiful narrative spins, a story of God dealing with a grief-stricken woman (partially excerpted here):

Day before yesterday morning,
God was looking down from his great, high heaven,
Looking down on all his children,
And his eye fell of Sister Caroline.

Then off to the races with an adventure:

Call Death!–Call Death!
And the echo sounded down the streets of heaven
Till it reached away back to that shadowy place,
Where Death waits with his pale, white horses.

And Death heard the summons,
And he leaped on his fastest horse,
Pale as a sheet in the moonlight.
Up the golden street Death galloped,

This piece, which has not yet been performed, follows the form of the original poem exactly, with a somewhat dissonant reflective introduction, and then a series of episodes at medium and fast tempos as the story unfolds, concluding with a return to the introduction to cap off the piece. In the faster adventure sections, I spent a lot of time writing the highly rhythmic inner lines to create minimalistic pulsing textures to propel the movement.

The score of this composition is available for purchase for $9.99, which includes unlimited reproduction rights for one choir/conductor/director to perform the piece in a season. The first page of the score to Go Down, Death can be previewed for free by clicking the thumbnail to the right. If you are a choral director who would like to peruse the score for evaluation, please use the Contact page.

Check out these related projects:

   Two Poems of Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.

   I Shall Know Why: a choral setting of Emily Dickinson

   Vocal arranging for NBC’s The Sing-Off

“Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey is probably in the top tier of 80′s torch songs. Released in 1981 on Journey’s Escape album, it’s very much a part of pop culture, having been covered by numerous artists, featured in numerous movies and TV shows (The Wedding Singer, Family Guy, The Sopranos, Scrubs), and included as the climax of the premiere episode of Glee. It was written by Journey bandmates Jonathan Cain, Steve Perry, and Neil Schon. We’ll take a look at a few aspects of it that make it such a compelling song.

First, it’s extremely simple. That brings to mind what Lionel Richie once said: that simple and iconic is what he aims for as a songwriter.

“Can you write a song that people can name in four notes? If you can do that, you, my friend, have done the hardest thing in the world: you’ve written a simple song (laughs). If I sing, ‘You’re once…” and stop right there, you know the song ['Three Times a Lady']. You never heard a chord, a drum beat, or a cymbal crash, but you know where we’re going.”

-Lionel Richie, Performing Songwriter magazine, January/February 2009

Back to “Don’t Stop Believin’.” This song keeps it simple and memorable right from the beginning with a signature piano riff (called “one of the best opening keyboard riffs in rock” by AllMusic) and a simple I-V-vi-IV chord pattern (which has been used thousands of times before — see the Axis of Awesome demonstrate this in their famous YouTube video):

The compactness of the lyrics is focused. “Just a small-town girl,” reads the first line. Five notes, five simple words, as casual as they are evocative. Not “She was just a small-town girl,” not “Hailing from the quiet part of town.” Just a small-town girl. That concise, compact trend is found throughout this song — no unnecessarily extra words. The same thing happens with “just a city boy”: simple and natural. Like the Lionel Richie reference above, I could play or sing just those five notes on the piano without words, and that would be enough to identify the song, because their simplicity has become so iconic in pop culture.

The lyrics may be sparse, but there’s just enough detail to spin the story. Take a look at this verse:

Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere
Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit
He took the midnight train goin’ anywhere

The lyrics give us an outline of a scene — two lonely people with different backgrounds, hopping on a train going “anywhere” (what a poignant way to express their desire for change) — but enough is left to the imagination that, like a great novel, we’re left to paint our own visual picture of the scene, or where they might be going, or what their dissatisfaction might be.

There’s something very interesting about the structure too. The first verse is a double verse and is pretty extended — by 0:49 we haven’t heard anything more than the intro and the verse. That’s a long time in a four-minute pop song to not offer any contrasts or given the listener something new musically. The same piano riff continues, so there’s clearly some musical tension building while the remainder of the scene is painted by the lyrics. The ear is wondering: when is this buildup and repetition going to break open into something new?

Following that is a prechorus (based on the IV chord, beginning at 1:22), but it leads back to another verse (a single verse this time), which means the tension build continues, since we haven’t reached the payoff moment — the emotional release that we expect by the arrival of the chorus. The second verse is no more intense than the first, but in the second prechorus there’s a little more drive from the band. Still, after the second verse and prechorus, it leads to a instrumental section, then, unbelievably, back for a third verse and prechorus and instrumental chorus, which gives us the chorus melody for the first time (3:06). Finally, after the instrumental — 3:21 into the song — we hear the chorus for the first time and we feel the emotional payoff of that very long build. That must be some kind of record.

A special note about something I love about the drum pattern throughout the song: I appreciate that it’s not a stock beat with the kick on 1 and 3 and the snare on 2 and 4. Instead, drummer Steve Smith plays a low tom on beat 4 throughout, giving the overall feel of the song a slight hiccup as it moves forward then takes a step back. It never quite blossoms into a full-fledged standard groove; it’s always one snare short of that. It’s a refreshing touch that adds a timelessness to it. Even by the end of the song, when the chorus is repeated, that stop-go feel continues the sense of build and tension; we’re never relaxing into a traditional kick-1-3 and snare-2-4 groove.

The tone of the bass guitar is unusual. It’s definitely played with a pick (listen for the very clear attacks), sounds like a fretless bass (unusual in rock), and has a heavy dose of a chorus/flanger on it (not atypical for 80′s music). Yet these quirks give it the character that doesn’t distract from the song, but has become part of the signature sound of the song.

Great guitar tones, great vocal performance, great memorable keyboard, guitar, and drum riffs. It’s a classic all-round.

For further reading, producer and author Bobby Owsinski offers some additional thoughts on this song on his blog.

What is it about this song that makes it a great song to you? Leave a thought in the comments below.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, and don’t already have it, support the artist by buying the album (iTunes/Amazon) or single (iTunes/Amazon).

Check out these related projects:

   Songblog: Al Jarreau / Mornin’

   Songblog: Peter Gabriel / In Your Eyes

   Songblog: Brian McKnight / Anytime