Different bands, artists and songwriters have widely different methods and patterns of behaviour when writing an album. Sometimes it’s a solo effort produced en masse after a huge emotional life-event. Sometimes it’s just a mish-mash of the best songs they’ve written since they recorded their last album. Sometimes the record label uses outsourced songs from different songwriters that they like. And sometimes it’s a short-term collaborative effort, the band basically locking themselves in an apartment, recording studio, or (in the case of Australian band, Regurgitator, and US band, Cartel) a giant glass bubble on the street for three weeks.
I myself have taken several different approaches over the years. One album, that I still think might even have been my best in terms of consistent overall quality and catchiness (or perhaps just most meaningful to me), was an almost 3-year effort that spanned a relationship. I took what I considered to be the best songs I’d written during that time-period that I thought really captured the journey of the relationship and found that I had an album.
By the time I sat down to record everything, I wrote one more song, the final and “title” track, drawing upon as many lyrical hints, melodic fragments and similar harmonic elements from the others as I could in an attempt to really tie everything together in a satisfying way. I wanted the experience of listening to the whole album in one sitting to be a relationship journey with joy and heartache and beauty and pain and yet some reason to hope for the future. I can’t speak for anyone else’s response to the album, but it means all of those things to me, and that’s honestly enough.
For another album, years apart, I wanted a similar relationship arc to be the focus of the album, except this time I had nothing already written or recorded and a deadline less than six weeks away. So I planned out each song by stage in the relationship story I wanted to tell (looking for love, meet-cute, honeymoon phase, what-are-we-talk, a more stable love, love song with some mixed signals, where-are-we-going-wrong, the break-up, despair, light at the end of the tunnel, etc.) and went to work, completing my goal within five weeks—though I’m sure I could have done it quicker if I’d needed to. I didn’t write them in album order, just whatever song I felt most in-tune-with when I sat down to write. I also manipulated myself musically by going on these 2-to-3-day music binges of a dozen different bands to adequately vary my influences during the creative process, so none of the songs sounded too similar (to each other at least).
Another time, the project was an album of cover songs that needed to be modified and modernized in a really substantial way in a specific genre. There were some significant musical adjustments to underlying harmonies that needed to happen and the songs didn’t follow a specific story arc in the same way. What I ended up doing was strategically placing songs as the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th songs that had very similar lyrical messages or motifs, and then alternating the songs in between sort of happy-sad, surprising-familiar or upbeat-ballad dichotomies, with obviously natural variances in key and tempo to create a feeling of randomness amongst a consistent framework.
The differences between a song and an album are akin to the differences between a short story and a novel. As a songwriter, it’s important to not only understand what makes a good song, but what elements and variations makes a good album and how to intersperse them across your songs. So here’s some of my top suggestions for things to remember when writing an album.
1) Have an overall journey/story arc.
The thing that makes someone invest their time in a good novel is generally the way the story pulls them along. You introduce them to interesting characters, make them care about those characters, and then put them in situations of escalating peril and conflict until some sort of resolution is reached at the end.
Well, even though an album doesn’t require the same upfront time commitment as a novel, if you do your job right, your listenership will invest just as much (or more) time in it than the novel. Your main character is the proverbial “I” in the song, so the listener themselves will insert themselves straight in, and if you take them on a hell of an emotional journey, they’ll listen to your album over and over again, because they enjoyed the experience of it.
The journey needs to be more than just lyrical though. It needs to be thematic. It needs to be harmonic. It needs to be rhythmic. It needs to be melodic. The contour of all these disparate threads across the whole album ought to be taken into account in order to convey a sense of movement and progression and build towards the end.
And I’m certainly not saying that every album needs to be a concept album either, but if we’ve learned anything from YouTube it’s that the soundbite model of cable television is actually failing big-time, and that people will gladly watch a 15-, 25-, 45-, 60-minute, 2-hour, 3-hour long video if they’re interested. Having an overarching story to your album builds and maintains interest in the listener beyond the regular aesthetics of sound and will keep them coming back over and over again.
2) No inferior songs.
I distinctly remember several albums in the 90s/00s where all the best “single-material” songs were loaded onto the front end of the album. The listening experience would go distinctly downhill after the first 4 or 5 songs. This always perplexed me as a production strategy, because, especially in this digital age of only buying the songs you want, your album is only really as good as its worst song. And a great album is always better than a mediocre album with a few great songs. What’s more, the more you create that natural sense of progression from great to “even greater” to “this is awesome” throughout your album, the more your audience will buy into you and your songs.
Now, you’re probably thinking, that’s great and all, but how you can you possibly write an album with no inferior songs; where all the songs are equally good?
Yes, some songs are obviously going to be more well-received than others, but in this pay-per-song world, your job in crafting an album is to create something where every song is hit-quality. Because plays pay. Seriously. Not knowing which songs to release as singles because they’re ALL so good is an awesome first-world problem to have. And as best-selling author, Brandon Sanderson, puts it: always err on the side of awesome.
Collaboration is one of the best guarantors of this level of consistency in an album, but only if all the songs are being worked on together equally. When you have a Beatlesian situation with multiple songwriters each doing their own thing and the rest of the band just following along, you run the risk of a situation in which either one songwriter is markedly better than the other(s), thus bringing down the quality of your album, OR each songwriter being distinct enough in sound that your album basically becomes a mish-mash of two-different LPs with fans falling into different, possibly warring factions, with everyone disliking at least half of your album. Thus, you really needed the singular vision of either a good, balanced songwriting team, or a single-minded individual with the creative diversity to fill out the whole album.
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3) Know what your motifs are and use them.
A specific, broader compositional technique that most songwriters tend to be ignorant of (because they tend of focus on the creation of many individual 3-to-4-minute moments of musical feeling) is the motif. In musical terms, a motif is a melodic fragment of between 2 and 9 notes that serves as a recurring theme, often providing a groundwork for multiple longer pieces.
For centuries, plays, operas, musicals, and even now film and television have made use of this technique, introducing melodic cues for different characters and telling us, whether subtly or overtly, how we are to feel about them. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is the probably one of the most well-known examples of this, actually designed in part to teach children how to listen for such motifs in music. The Imperial March a.k.a. Darth Vader’s Theme in Empire Strikes Back is a more recent example from film, playing every time we see Darth Vader from then onwards.
Composers of longer-form musics such as musicals, film scores, etc. understand the importance of these type of recurring melodic themes throughout the entire work. It helps the audience focus on key elements of the journey, grounding them in the whole experience of it. Hamilton composer, Lin Manuel Miranda, does this expertly in his projects.
But we, as songwriters, often neglect this type of cohesion in albums, thinking we’re writing a short-story collection and not a novel. That sort of thinking, however, begets albums that feel like random collections of songs. They immediately fail to do what people are wanting in an album. Anyone can make their own assorted playlists. What they actually want from you is a reason not to. They want more than just some good songs. They want an experience. They want to live your relationship with you. They want to be swept away into another world, into someone else’s story, for more than just a few minutes. They want something the length of a movie, or an episode of their favorite show.
So, how do we actually do it though? Well, that partly depends on our process for writing the album. If we haven’t written anything yet, we want to find ways to include echoes of popular hooks in other songs as we write them. For example, we might take a catchy chorus hook and use the melody as a basis for a guitar solo in a different song, and then again on bass or piano in a modified fashion in yet another.
If we already have all the songs written for the album, we might consider doing what Josh Ramsay from Marianas Trench did with Ever After (2011). He specially wrote an epic album opener and closer built upon a single unifying motif and drawing upon key elements and lyrics from songs in the rest of the line-up. He even found a few opportunities in the recording process to thread that motif into (or at the end of) 2 or 3 other songs along the way, thus creating this powerful feeling of tight-knit cohesion in the album. In fact, Ever After is probably one of the best examples of using this technique in any album of the last decade. Definitely worth a listen to, if for no other reason than to learn.
4) Unity out of diversity.
Surprising though I’m sure it might be to some of you, the word university doesn’t actually come from the word universe; it’s not a space metaphor for being out in the real world, and it’s not because that’s where you go to study astrophysics. It’s actually a portmanteau (or linguistic mash-up) of the words unity and diversity. A university was meant to be the place you’d go to hear all the different arguments about the world, discuss and reason out all the different angles of philosophy, politics, history, anthropology, legal theory, etc., and have everyone be able to come to their own conclusions in a fair and open-minded fashion, unified (if in nothing else) by their respect to the pursuit of truth.
While that doesn’t seem to be so much the case anymore, the principle is an admirable one, and vital to our concept of an album. An album is like a neighborhood. A bunch of different houses all lined up together, each with different people and voices and opinions inside, but with one big thing in common; the street on which they sit. Now, if all the houses look identical, it’s boring and nobody wants to visit, but conversely, if every building is so different than ever other as to defy all logic and reason, you might get you visitors, yes, but they’re gawkers. They’re not going to come back and they certainly don’t want to live there.
A nice neighborhood balances the familiar and the strange. Each house is unique in its own ways, inside and out, but there’s a general sense of uniformity. People getting the same letter-boxes as their neighbors. Everyone mowing their lawns all in the same week. Having a collective enthusiasm (or lack thereof) for the holidays, or neighborhood watch, or even each other.
The point is, that a neighborhood is a microcosm of society in the much the same way that an album is a microcosm of a broader genre of music. The artist/band will bring its own particular flavor to the genre, but within the familiar tenets and trademarks of sound (besides those key repeated motifs and lyrics we mentioned earlier), you want as much diversity as possible. You don’t want two songs about exactly the same depressive episode unless they are extremely different musically and lyrically. Every song needs to bring something (or ideally, multiple things) new to the table. Your album will be all the richer for it.
Final Thoughts
It might require some mental gymnastics and habit-shifting to successfully transition from being a songwriter to being an album-writer, but as you hopefully now see, the rewards are very much worth it. Not only does it make you a much more well-rounded composer, but delivering a higher calibre product like this generally always leads to an increase in your perceived value in both the eyes of the record company and your audience, leading both parties to then invest more in you in return, thus allowing you to make more money doing what you love. So, go out there and win.
