Last week, a good music pal of mine asked, “what songwriters influenced you the most, and/or who would you most like to emulate”? This is a great exercise. After careful thinking (and lots of follow-up discussion), I came out with some surprising (and perhaps some not so surprising) answers. I hear “you sound a lot like Dylan” quite a bit. To be totally honest though – it’s just us reading this, right? – Dylan isn’t really much of an influence (gasp!). Aside from a fondness for wordy, hard-to-sing lyrics, I’d argue that my real similarity to Dylan is more the result of a couple of bad vocal habits I’m trying to shake.
So who inspires me? John Mellencamp and John Hiatt. Great storytellers, and they’re very centric to the kind of small-town America tales I often shoot for. I particularly love anything Hiatt does. Even his quirky vocal delivery. I also get a lot of rhythmic ideas from putting Hiatt on shuffle mode when the iPod’s in play.
Who else? Early Warren Zevon (no surprise). Jackson Browne. Louden WainWright III. Do you see a late-seventies singer/songwriter thread emerging? I did, too. And not just for writing, but for vocal style and clarity. Speaking of, we can’t forget Graham Parker. Best known for tunes like “Local Girls” and “Passion Is No Ordinary Word”, Parker’s still cranking out brilliant work some thirty years into his career. I’ve been a fan forever. And when I wrap it back to the “what and who inspires me” motif, I love Parker’s sense of humor and attention to detail (same reason I’m a huge Zevon fan).
Graham Parker’s “Imaginary Television”
Parker was approached a year or two back by a big company who wanted him to write songs for TV shows. Not the greatest of experiences, it turns out, but it resulted in his latest release, “Imaginary Television”, an album of theme songs he wrote to nonexistent television shows. The album even includes synopses to the fake shows. In this interview in Entertainment Weekly, Parker chronicles the whole process in trying to write for television. I particularly appreciated (and somewhat related to) this statement on songwriting:
“I’m usually writing bits of songs and getting nowhere, and finally I have a song in front of me, and it’s like a breakthrough moment, and then I will write another song, maybe, if I’m lucky. And then I’ll drag the whole process out for like six months because I’m scared to pick up the guitar and see if I can actually finish the job off. I’ve been doing this for years. And somehow people call me prolific.”
Time for a little more inspiration. Think I’ll put Parker on shuffle mode this time.