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badnewswhatsleft · 3 months

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really interesting section from a podcast with patrick and sean o'keefe talking about the importance of harmonic structure in songwriting

choppy transcript below cut (patrick's sentences are unclosed loops with like 40% filler words ok /affectionate forgive me)

EL = Eyal Levi (host) SO = Sean O’Keefe PS = Patrick Stump

(Story of recording harmony vocals for Knockout at 14 years old)

[00:28:50]

PS: […] And the thing is too - for me that was like the coolest thing, because all I wanted was to have some capacity to influence the harmonic structure of music. Like, I was never - I never wanted to be the lead guitar player, I never wanted to be the star of a thing, but when I was playing drums, I didn’t get to be any… Like a bass player can change it from the root to a suspension, right, and that’s so much power that a bass player has! A drummer, you can change a lot, but you never really impact the harmony, the harmonic structure - and that was like the coolest thing for me, like someone was finally letting me do that, and I was like, “Sure, I’ll stay here all night!” I think my mom was like, “Where are you?!”

EL: Interesting. I just wanted to say, you’ve been talking about harmonic structure a lot, one of the things I wanted to talk about, just in my notes, was about melody writing, and obviously without great harmonic movement and structure and getting that right, there’s not gonna be a good melody that can come of it. So was that the goal?

PS: Oh, yeah! And it’s so funny, because - I know you know this, I know we all know this, because we all work in music and it’s like beating your head against the wall - no one even on the periphery ever gets that! It’s always like, melody melody melody, and you’re like, the melody is the least important thing, really! I mean at the end of the day, and I know that sounds ridiculous, but the melody is entirely dependent on what’s happening around it. And even what’s implied, so even if you have a - I was thinking of that Zombies song where it starts off, and it’s just a lead vocal solo - so much of what makes that vocal work, even though it’s a solo vocal, is the implied harmonics of what’s happening, what you’re being led to believe the chord structure is - is what moves it. So without the harmony, the melody means nothing to me. And that’s always one of the things that I get really frustrated with - it’s one of the reasons why I kinda quit the songwriter-for-hire thing, because when you’re in a songwriting session, you’re with somebody else, and I’m like, what are the hard things to do? I think the hardest thing is to find the lyric because, especially in pop songs, that’s the thing everyone walks away remembering. That’s the hard part really. Um, the groove? That’s, like, the other thing - there are songs, terrible songs, that have a good lyric and a good groove and everything else is awful—

EL & SO: [sounds of agreement]

PS:—that work! Very successful songs that have a great groove and a really solid lyric and garbage everything else, right? So you’re already most of the way there. But every time people would be like, melody, melody, and they start humming, or something, and I’m like, don’t do that! Don’t even be tempted to do that! Figure out the rest of it first, and then it’s like… It’s almost like writing dialogue. I read a screenwriting book one time, and they talked about like - dialogue = the fun part, do that last, because that’s the hard part, you have to earn that, kind of. When you’re working on it, you know you can write the dialogue, you have to build the story first, you have to build the - whatever - you have to build the framework of what your characters are gonna be interacting in. And that’s how I think about melody; melody is the fun part, get to that last, because if you don’t have the backbone of the song, your melody doesn’t matter at all, you know?

SO: That’s awesome.

EL: And you can just - not to trivialise great melodies, but that’s the part you can improvise, and emote, and (PS: Yeah!) get inspired over, but you’re right, without setting the stage for it, it’s nothing. And it’s the same not just with vocals, but with great guitar solos. Like that Hotel California solo (PS: Yeah!!) would not be what it is without that harmonic movement.

PS: No, no question, and I think that’s one of the things - I also think it’s a problem as a singer, with vocals, is that people don’t really tend to think of vocals as an instrument, they don’t tend to think of it in terms of what it’s doing melodically within a harmonic structure. Even I, when I started, I found myself - I was on a record with Neal Avron, who produced us after we worked with Sean; and I was in the booth for something. And there was a passing note - I can’t remember - it was just in between two notes, I had this little run. And he was like, “Well what note is that? What note are you trying to hit there?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.” And he’s like, “You should know.” [laughs] You should have a plan for every thing your voice is doing, should be a note. Even if you’re doing some sort of portamento thing, you should still know exactly where you’re starting and where you’re ending.

SO: It’s interesting how a lot of singers sometimes don’t know that. And I don’t mean it in a bad way, but like—

EL: They really don’t.

SO: Yeah, it’s interesting, sometimes if I’ll be in a studio where the singer’s having a hard time, I’ll ask, “Can you play that on the piano? Do you know that melody?” And sometimes it’ll take them a while to find it. But it’s cool, at least I’ve seen times when they do find it, and they make some connection, and it’s like, “Oh holy cow, these are just like…”

PS: No, I mean it’s a huge part of it. In fact, on Take This To Your Grave, there’s a moment - maybe it’s on Where Is Your Boy? I would love for it to be on Where Is Your Boy, ‘cause that was such a landmark song for us in recording. But, there was a harmony that I was working on, and I kept kinda singing it out, and you were like - it was a three part harmony, and my first part layered really well. But then my second part, I kept going into… This kind of rubby 7th, or something, or a unison somewhere - I can’t remember what it was. And you said, “Patrick, go figure it out in triads.”

SO: Oh really?

EL: By “rubby”, do you mean that it kinda just hit you the wrong way? Something doesn’t jive?

PS: Yeah, it was just rubbing wrong, it was just sounding wrong together, and you were like, “Go sit at the piano and figure it out in triads. What are you playing in all the vocal parts?” And I was like, “Ohh, oh, this—” It was something like that, where it was a 7th or a 9th that - when you sang it as a melody, because I was thinking of it as a lead part, when you sang it as a melody it sounded really cool against the chord structure, but with what’s already happening in the, you know… You know what it was? I do remember this, whatever it was, it created a minor 2nd in something the guitar was doing.

SO: Yeah, is that right?

PS: Yeah, so it was like, well just don’t do that.

SO: Let’s just not do that one. [laughs]

PS: Let’s just not do that. [laughs]

EL: So you said you were untrained, but obviously you’re… not untrained… Where did you pick that up?

PS: Um, just kind of watching and listening. And I have kind of studied a lot, especially since I’ve been doing the scoring thing, you kind of can’t… Even though I know a lot of guys who get away with it, just with, “Well, I wrote it in Logic and this is what the thing is.” You still - you know, you hire strings, and they have questions that—

EL: Yes, they do.

PS:—that you can’t really answer if you don’t really know what you’re talking about. So I have had to study a lot. I probably learned more about the terminology for music theory in the past three years than I did the entire time I was working on records, you know. But it��s one of those things too, where a lot of it makes sense. That’s the thing, I think, that’s scary for a lot of people about music theory, is that it sounds so strange and scary, but then you’re like, no, no no. It’s like Howard Hanson’s concept of dissonants and consonants, where it’s like, dissonants are just the ones that sound funny next to each other, that’s all it is. And sometimes you want that, sometimes you don’t, that’s all it is. And you know that implicitly, everyone knows that, even if you don’t really understand music, you know — like the Twilight Zone theme, you know that those notes are rubbing against each other. That’s the intended effect, that’s what it sounds like.

#patrick stump #fall out boy #srry it starts and ends in odd places.. i was trying to focus on the interesting parts about harmonies/melodies #but also the convo kept segueing into cool stuff loll #i looooooooove hearing him talk music theory though<3<3<3 #also anyone who works in subtitling and transcribing and stuff deserves one milllion dollars every day. motherfucker. like that shit sucked #mailing letters #media blitz #read the charts #<- not rlly a scan but i put a lot of work into transcribing this and also everyone shld listen to patrick talk about music theory >:(

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