Apologies for this listing twice - browser issue at my end.

I trust you can remove one of them; hell, you may remove both!

Also I hope my argument is not misconstrued as an ad hominem attack on DH, as that was not my intention. I simply get annoyed at glib absolutes eg Bono & U2 are awful - but that's another argument ...

Re: Brian Wilson - the songs may well have turned up unannounced, but the recording of them is a different matter altogether. In terms of tweaks and retweaks while writing (and something possibly closer to Mr. Hepworth's heart) I'd suggest the gestation of some of the songs on Born To Run as being great examples of songs that have been crafted, worked on over time, and have come out as utterly exciting and epochal and the best they can as a result of all that turd polishing. It so happens that I was browsing my singles today and came across a production line song called "I'll Never Get Over You Getting Over Me" which, for my sins, I consider one of the great lost standards of our time, that's my choice, but that came out of the great Diane Warren nine to five operation and, I'm guessing, didnt drop out of the ether unannounced. Another take of mine is that "I Trained Her To Love Me" is a pillowcaseful of awful songwriting, whatever the perceived effort that went into it. Again, that's my opinion to hold as I see fit. I guess it comes down to whether you hold that (Sammy Cahn's?) "What comes first - the music or the lyrics - well, it's the cheque" or "It came to me in a moment" is the prevailing opinion to hold. And I suggest that initially Mr. Hepworth will probably take issue with the both of us for presuming to suggest what he's casually suggesting. And the Ur-Beatles song is "And Your Bird Can Sing" incidentally. Nice use of 'ad hominem' by the way. Lordy, is that the time?

ps - I'm sure the video would have been better, but at the time the usual stunt sax player was researching a feature on Manta Rays in the Maldives. Their loss.

David's latest blog entry touches on this as well, where he marvels that Handel composed The Messiah in three weeks.
I suspect his thinking is something like Malcolm Gladwell's in Blink, where he says that the best judgements are those that are made instantly, even if that instant judgement is made on the basis of years of experience. There. I've saved you the trouble of reading what I thought was a seriously flawed book.
Of course, if David meant something entirely different he knows where to find us and say so.

I've always assumed that a song (or poem for that matter) was a combination of inspiration and solid work. The first rush of creativity hits as a hook or couplet or something drops into the writer's head (what must that be like? I'm bloody envious); after that it's a matter of sitting down and making the damn thing work: chord change here, kick back to the main riff there, making the lyric work and finding that elusive rhyme for "elusive".

So the basic starting bit comes from somewhere else (inspiration), and the finished product is the work bit (skill). And I know someone from the Massive will actually tell me what's involved - please do. I love hearing how this stuff works.

to say his theory is bollocks, glib, ridiculous, etc? There are less harsh ways of saying you disagree with him, surely?

...also claims that the most successful characters - he cites Bill Gates among others - put in at least 10,000 hours of sheer hard work. His theory (and I'm paraphrasing and depending on an admittedly faulty memory) also depends on being born in the right era. These bubbles of pop philosophy seems to emerge from the Gladwell think tank from time to time and are written with one eye on the corporate market which grasps these straws in gratitude after the latest meltdown.

In any case, we're not comparing like with like here. Lowe's mildly entertaining songs probably won't stand the test of time in the same way as the Beatles or the songwriters of the pre-and postwar era

we wouldn't be arguing. I'd have thought the 3 weeks Handel may have taken (haven't checked, but a deadline is a wonderful thing, as I'm sure DH would agree) are surely interest on a long lifetime's investment-with many parallels across all forms of music-as diverse as the HJH in Hamburg and [insert your fave here].

I fear Gladwell is basically right with his 10000 hrs-in science the "magic" genius of Feynman was illuminated for me somewhat by Dyson's comment that the young Feynman worked harder than anyone he ever knew-and this is from someone who taught himself differential equations in his teens as he feared [*] he wouldn't live long enough (WW2) to do them at university ...

I also remember an old tutor's quoting of "I like lucky generals", with the implication that preparation rather improved luck ...

[*Disturbing the Universe, p.14]

(edit: to be honest what impresses me most about Messiah is that it was written when he was 57, 5 years after a stroke. I imagine that the process of writing pieces like this

, done 2 years after Messiah [Wikipedia], keeps one's hand in ;-) )

I think you can work on arrangements and structure and whatnot, but you can't force inspiration. It comes from somewhere beyond the mind.

Wilson may have grafted to knock Pet Sounds into shape, but I'm betting he didn't sit and sweat over the original melodies.

There are indeed many ways to bake a cake. I don't think David was trying to say that only the songs that arrive complete are the best songs written. What I think that sentiment refers to is akin to 'love at first sight' it's really a romantic notion that true love is 'love at first sight' and all other ways of falling in love are not as good. But in the real world it hardly ever is and the net result is exactly the same really. It's just a nice thought that a song can simply appear from 'nowhere' perfect.
Shane McGowan(I think it was him)once said that songs just come up from the ground like bubbles and if you don't grab them they continue up where someone like Paul Simon then gets them (that was the jist ,sorry if I've missquoted him). Again it just adds to the mystique and romance of songwriting. The poor chap who's job it is to score advertising music day in day out may not think the process is quite the same. Sometimes a song needs no work at all, just like a first take in recording studio sometimes it happens other times it takes a hundred takes cut up and pasted together. It's whether the song works and people enjoy it that matters.

disprove the OP's contention as contrary to the prevailing opinion the best Beachboys songs are their greatest hits singles "Help Me Rhonda" etc that weren't laboured over. It's hard to swallow but the Beachboys got an awful lot worse once they started spending months on end over their tunes.

W B Yeats said it:

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught."

...but this I will say with some certainty. All LP records since Sgt Pepper - which at the time took an unprecedented 700 hours to make - get worse the longer they take to make.

If you've ever done anything which required a certain amount of inspiration - I won't say creativity - you'll know that when you're inspired the stuff just rushes out of you and when you're not inspired you spend hours tinkering in order to fool yourself into believing you're doing something worthwhile.

Most musical careers consist of a journey from inspiration to tinkering. Nick Lowe, whether you like him or not, has travelled in the opposite direction.

23 minutes; it was written over 23 years. It had the appearance of spontaneity, but it was really the cumulation of a life time of experience and cultural absorption, ten years of songwriting aspiration and application, and probably about three to four hundred dry runs, a handful of which we know. Read same for Handel's Messiah, read same for Nick Lowe.

When you've become married to your craft in that way, only then you can fully experience the illusion of immediacy as described by DH. If you put your money in the creative vending machine, you'll find that the goods don't always come out straight away. If you don't put any money in, then it's a lot less likely that anything will come out unless you're extremely fortunate.

If ever you decide to pay a half-decent artist to immortalise yourself or your offspring on canvas, this will be the bulk of what you pay for; not what the artist has done with paint, canvas and brushes, but the forty-plus years that got them to the point where their craftmanship, their mistakes, and their seemingly preternatural ability to read their sitter begin to make the artist's work appear effortless, both to themselves and to you.

I am but a humble software salesman.

I think you'll find Nick Lowe spends a lot of time crafting and refining his songs. Most songs start with great inspiration but become great through work and craft.

In my experience, David Hepworth is absolutely correct on this. I don't think your Pet Sounds example works, adding harmonies to a song is what you do after it's written.

That's Entertainment is one of my favourite Weller songs, in fact I bet a lot of Weller fans and non fans rate it pretty highly. And Weller has always claimed it was knocked off in ten minutes after he came home from the pub.

My own experiences of writing songs - solo and with other people - has been that we would indeed knock off the meat and potatoes of the tune in a very short space of time. They would just flow.

Then the spicing things up - the arrangements and the riffs (unless it started with a good riff) and the like could take weeks or months or sometimes a single session in the studio to sort out.

One of the best things I was ever involved with took the writer a hour to write. But he has spent most of the past decade working on it, through three bands and five singers!

The Handelian trademark was speed. He wrote Rinaldo in two weeks (Messiah thirty years later took him not much longer)

--- James Naughtie, "The Making of Music"

Myself, I can relate better to those slowcoaches Gustav Mahler, Gerald Finzi and Stanley Kubrick (I am sure his obit in one paper referred to a "slim body" [sic] of work).

Painters are an interesting example. Artists like Frank Auerbach and Howard Hodgkin re-work paintings over years, putting them away to forget about them as they become over familiar. They scrape them down and start again striving to produce a result that seems fresh and spontaneous but is highly considered, mistrusting the initial facile outcome. They may need the intervention of another to take the work away so it is finished. Even then they have an impulse to have a painting back when they see it on a wall in a gallery, to change something.

Reading about The Beatles, Lennon needed someone to stop him reworking his own songs and he often seems dissatisfied with a finished one wishing it had been re-done. The artist doesn't always know best and can be so self-critical as to end up destroying good work. Then again in the early days he seemed happy enough to knock them out until as a band they had more and more time and resources and started to think of their work as 'art'. But both ways of working produced outstanding results so there's no right way really.

So I guess the answer is - it may be best to leave well alone but interesting results can come from a process of re-working that may be worth it, tortuous though the process is.

this w/e-Radio 3 feature (included here):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p6690

on a new recording of Messiah-listen to the Amen at the end-blew me away

and Macca's Times interview

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/...

A lot of artists, I say, and intellectuals, too, seem to have this burst of creativity very young . . ? “I can believe it. Because I do the [Beatles] songs now, so many of them, I look back and think ‘clever kid!’ Bloody hell, writing songs like a 90-year-old would sing, at what age? 24.” McCartney breaks into Yesterday in a parody of a shaky old man’s voice. He giggles. “Yes, it was quite a mature perspective.”

Now, he says, he likes writing songs so much that “it’s like an addiction. And occasionally I’ll come up with something and I’ll think, ‘Oh, that’s good’. It’s not harder, it’s maybe more difficult to come up with something as original when you’ve done loads and loads of stuff.”

Does he think his Beatles songs were better than his current output, or just different? I fully expect him to say different. But no. “Oh, some of the songs from then were better. As you say, there’s this spurt, you don’t even know that you’re doing it until you look back later and think, ‘Bloody hell’.”

Every last scrap from his early life in Liverpool, you would have thought, has been picked over so often, in his own lyrics, in other people’s books and films and PhD theses no doubt, that he’d have no energy for or interest in going back over it again. Yet he does, voluntarily, as if he’s talking about it for the first time.

“I was always wandering around Liverpool, looking at old buildings, seeing people at bus stops, drinking it all in. There was this old lady lived near us, and I would go round, not as a goody-goody thing, but because it was interesting, and I’d say: ‘I’m going to the shops, do you want anything?’ And she was a fascinating old lady, I remember seeing a crystal radio set she had, and then I’d get her a pound of potatoes or whatever. All those little visits, the lonely old lady thing, that found its way into Eleanor Rigby. That’s hard to re-create. I haven’t helped any little old ladies with their shopping recently. Maybe I should.”