Monday 25 April 2016

The Soundtrack of Your Life - Music and Moments

Many popular songs are designated as “the soundtrack to people’s lives.” Songs evoke a certain age or period in your life, from “Baby Beluga” to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” to “Uptown Funk.” When you hear a certain song, memories play across the movie screen of your mind and the song is the soundtrack - the music takes you back to those moments. Sometimes you can even catch the scent of the air and its temperature.

I wonder how this worked before film was created? In the 19th century, did memories flash like a movie across the mind’s eye when a childhood lullaby was heard? Was film invented to capture memories like this?

Paintings were historical records in the old days - renaissance portraits captured both the features and spirit of its subject (if the painting was good). Then, as society progressed and people had more wealth and leisure time, landscapes became more common. Then expressionism, modernism, post-modernism, etc. pushed creative boundaries further, moving images beyond historical documentation (since photography began to fill that role). Each artistic style built on the foundations that existing work had already laid. 

Photography was a more democratic way to capture what portrait paintings had always done - it was cheaper, and increasingly more accessible. When photographers started pointing their lenses at things other than posed subjects, they were capturing moments rather than subjects, which could be shared for posterity. These images too became part of the fabric of people’s lives, separate from their own reality, and photography stretched technical and creative limits to express even broader ideas.



When “moving pictures” finally arrived, they were entertainment at first, but entertainment is still significant in the arc of an individual’s life. The potential of still and motion photography evolved into documentary, historical, journalistic, and artistic use. Moments were not just captured, but increasingly created and shared. The individual taste of the person behind the camera could be presented for the consideration of others, threading its way into their lives and experiences too. Individual taste, I would argue, is the core of artistry, and at its peak, there are few artistic mediums that are as compelling as the tasteful framing of human moments through a camera lens.

Of course, music accompanied moving pictures before even speech entered the picture - the earliest cinemas at least had piano players, and the larger theatres even had pipe organs. Even in these earlier moving-picture moments, music established tones and moods - the soundtrack of the moment.

The “soundtrack of your life” is always evolving. Songs appear, and reappear in a present context as a gauzy memory, a song on the radio, or a melody hummed by a stranger. Memories, images, human touches, dreams - they all come rushing in again when that tune enters your brain. Music draws out emotions that make the memories even stronger, and more real. The power of music to set tones and context is somehow fundamental to human experience. Music, like a movie or a memory, is time-based - songs have a beginning, an end, and an internal rhythm that can map themselves to sequential moments. Songs tie everything together.

The lesson for filmmakers is to be careful with song selection. Music matters. It can be an essential storytelling tool. And at its worst, it can be horribly distracting. For advertisers, things can get even dicier. It’s tempting to appropriate a person’s pleasant musical memories for the product’s benefit, but then you get a woman cleaning her house to a bastardized version of a beloved Devo song, and nobody wins.



There are thousands of examples of bad stock music that ruin an otherwise straightforward business video - bad drum machines and 80s synthesizers may have been appropriate in 1983, but dropping those sounds today will murder any sense of modernity and relevance for a brand that is trying to exist in the present.



While we’re on the topic of synthesis, one of my favourite words is synesthesia. This refers to the stimulation of one cognitive pathway that leads to automatic, involuntary experience in a second cognitive pathway (thanks Wikipedia!). If I say “Let it Be,” you can see certain colours. If I say “Let’s Get it On,” you may feel physical warmth. If I hum a jingle for a cleaning spray, you may recall the scent of the product. If I say “Enter Sandman,” your shoulders may set in a little more tightly. If I say “bagpipes,” you’ll anticipate a certain set of expectations - maybe nostalgia, maybe rage. Even before recording technology existed, a mother’s lullaby would stick with people forever, and elderly sailors will hum “Nearer My God to Thee” in their fading years, and won’t even question why. These “soundtracks to your life” are like colour palettes or words on a page, and they are fundamental to being human, Music sparks all sorts of emotional and physical responses that have nothing to do with hearing.


Music is not throwaway - for filmmakers and advertisers, it demands as much attention as your script, your setting, and your on-screen talent. For music-makers, your key job is to be emotionally engaging and as truthful as possible. Your work doesn’t always have to be “high art,” but it’s at its best when it connects on a personal level as the soundtrack to someone else’s experience. There’s a lot going on in people’s brains, and the soundtrack is the foundation for the moment, marking the time.

Monday 4 April 2016

Understand Who You Are

I work a number of careers concurrently. At any given moment I’m a brand consultant, a business coach, a parent, a writer, and a folk-punk singer-songwriter and recording musician. The latter one seems like the wild card in this deck, but it’s actually closest to the core of my training for doing everything else. On top of the skills developed as a public performer, songwriting is the act of telling short, concise stories that are easy to remember. Great songs eliminate embellishment to share raw, compelling human emotions without adornment (that’s what novels are for). Great marketing messages need to be similarly straightforward – they must be truthful, unambiguous, and clear.

It takes a tonne of confidence to be a singer-songwriter. It requires unflinching belief in the value you are providing in your music - the belief that your song is absolutely worth listening to, that it is entertaining, life-changing, and/or indisputably beneficial for the listener. It’s a level of confidence that borders on arrogance - because how can one four-minute sequence of words and chords be that epic? A song can certainly become so, as every epic song out there proves, but those songs only became so once the impressions of their listeners are brought to bear upon them.

A big part of what makes a Beatles song monumental is the weight of the thousands of lives that have been enriched by that tune. “Hey Jude” is threaded into the soundtrack of thousands (if not millions) of lives, and those millions of experiences add weight and gravitas to the song itself. The song was born in the mind of one man as he was driving his car. It existed inside that car alone for a brief period before it was shared with a collective group of colleagues that were then known as “Beatles.” The team cultivated the inherent greatness within the song. They cemented its greatness onto a recording, and the rocket-fuel of their brand launched the song into the ears (and lives) of millions of people. Once shared broadly, it took on a life of its own within the context of those millions of personal experiences - but the song started its life alone, sung quietly to a steering wheel.

The initial brilliance of the core idea within every Beatles song was greatly enhanced by the circumstances they were launched into. Those conditions primed each song for success, and those conditions have grown over the years as the band’s influence has grown. Nobody would have expected the guys who recorded “Love Me Do” to produce The White Album, but their growing success fostered their inherent talents. The individuals grew into that level of skill, and the greatness of those songs also grew through the years as they threaded their way into more lives and more personal experiences.

So, back to confidence. It takes a mountain of belief for anyone to think that an original musical creation could become the soundtrack to a million lives, and it takes a truckload of vision to work through the rejection and effort required to simply present a song to new people. It takes talent for the song to be good, of course, but without hard work, talent is rarely rewarded - and it takes buckets of passion and determination to do that work without initial reward, or any guarantee of reward.

Most coaches will tell you that success is the result of hard work, and that there are no shortcuts to success - and coaches who tell you otherwise are lying. To be successful in anything, you have to be talented, you have to provide value, and you have to be confident in the value you provide. That’s why self-assessment if so essential - so you can acknowledge what’s working with your approach, while discarding what isn’t working. Arrogance is rarely appealing, but confidence is a more alluring asset - and it is best-gained by understanding who you are.

I never had the depth of confidence required to establish enduring “success” as a songwriter - if I had, you’d be listening to me rather than reading me. Perhaps if I had more confidence, I could have been as good as any other songwriter out there (unlikely), but without the added special sauce of arrogance and belief, talent will rarely come to light, let alone elevate itself into collective experiences. That’s why I don’t lose any sleep over my “lack of success” in this regard, because I recognized early on that I did not own that focus, and I understood that it would fundamentally limit widespread success. I therefore set my expectations accordingly. It’s still hard for me to conceive of any musical performance that is worthy of two hours of rapt attention in the absence of any context or a pre-existing relationship between the audience and the songs. Concerts by well-loved bands are often akin to religious ceremonies, and like churchgoers, concert-goers arrive with great expectations, pre-conceptions, and well-established beliefs that this concert “will be truly awesome.” Cover bands exist because audiences have a pre-existing relationship with those songs, and audiences approach the band’s performance with that baggage of expectations. Unknown original songwriters, by contrast, are propelling their music into a performance that is devoid of context or recognition, and the odds of connecting with an audience are significantly more unlikely in those circumstances. Recognizing this core belief allowed me to set attainable expectations, and songwriting has therefore remained a fulfilling avocation for me. My benchmarks for “success” were achievable - and have been achieved. 

Finding an audience for written words can be equally difficult, but if a writer presents non-fiction work that’s supported by evidence of its value, confidence is easier to maintain. If my ideas have proven to be repeatedly successful, it’s a lot easier to share them with conviction. I suppose the same could be said for a songwriter (if one song works for somebody, shouldn’t it work for everybody?) but it rarely works that way. The fact is that business principles are reasonably linear - the patterns are pretty consistent, as are the paths to engage with them. Songs speak to an individual on a different level, one that is usually personal and emotional. Each person’s emotions are different, and are engaged in unique ways. Nobody has cracked a universal access code to the entirety of human emotion - even The Beatles aren’t universally loved - but non-fiction writing, like the words you are reading now, are supported by those linear principles. It’s easier to know they will connect. These words are just one person’s opinion, and like assholes, everybody has an opinion, but I know from experience that the shit I’m producing is effective - which helps me to be confident in my output (sorry for the analogy, but my point is sound). 


In the absence of arrogance, confidence is essential for success in whatever you do. To be confident in your work, you must have a clear understanding of who you are. You need to understand what’s in your toolbox - which tools are available to you, and how to use them. If there are gaps in your toolset, acknowledge the gaps, assess your priorities, and fill those gaps if necessary. Understand your assets - the things that make you who you are - and use them often, and well. This is the point of “understanding your brand” - self-awareness is the key to success.