Re: [microsound] Re: soundalikes

[chthonic <chthonic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>interestingly, I recently heard an old interview with John Lennon 
where he
>said that for a while early in his career, his songwriting mo was to 
make
>up new lyrics to a song he liked. Same melody, same feel, same 
chord
>changes, everything. Then when it came time to record, he would 
try to
>think of a few things he could change to make it different without
>changing the overall feel. He didn't give any specific examples
>unfortunately.

this is starting to get a bit o/t i guess, but the example i know of is 
the beatles song "run for your life:

"Lennon had said that it was one of those songs he just "knocked 
off just for the sake of writing a song." Lennon got the idea of the 
first line from an Elvis Presley song from 1955 titled, "Baby, Let's 
Play House," with Lennon referring to this as an old Presley song, 
but it's origin dates back to 1954, when it was written in Nashville 
by Arthur Gunter." 

the lines he swiped or paraphrased were, "I'd rather see you dead, 
little girl, than to be with another man"


>Which probably isn't so much different than what people like 
Woody Guthrie
>did, except they didn't bother to change anything. They just kept 
the old
>melody with the new words.

a practice continued in simon and garfunkel's "scarborough fair".  
but here, the source is a "traditional", meaning it's so old no one 
knows the author, and predates US copyright laws anyway.  i think 
that's certainly more "stealing" than taking a one-bar drum loop 
and stretching it to fit a new song.  but we are no less enriched by 
its renewed existence.

d.

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