Feature Articles
The following is excerpted
from the Bergmans' guest spot at the ASCAP Extended
Songwriters' Workshop, held in November, 1996. It appears
in three installments.
"When we hear a melody,
we feel that there are words on the tips of those
notes,
and we have to find them."
Q: Did you ever write lyrics without
any music?
MB: Sure. We prefer not to, though.
We find that with lyrics, written first -- the rhythmic
patterns aren't that interesting, that we tend to write
in kind of predictable patterns. Composers come up with
much more interesting rhythmic structures and patterns
than we do by ourselves. Sometimes we'll write a lyric
to a melody, and then for one reason or another, the
lyric and the music will get a divorce [laughter]. We
will then have a lyric that we'll give to another composer
-- although we never play them the original -- and it's
an entirely different reading of the lyric. It's very
interesting.
Recently a songwriter said to me
that in your career, you can be a great songwriter or
you can be a hit songwriter. Do you feel that there
is a difference, and do you agree or disagree?
AB: There is a difference. I'm not
making any value judgments, but I think what he means
is, for the most part, hits today are often hits for
two weeks, and then you never hear them again. I think
a lot of people end up making a hit record
instead of a hit song; in that case, if you take the
technology out, what you're left with is the bare bones
of the music and the lyrics, and if that can stand on
its own, -- a standard, a song -- that can last. I'm
not accusing anybody in this room, but unfortunately,
many of the people who want to be songwriters today,
for some reason, don't have a sense of history. If you
talk to film students, they've seen and know films since
Edison invented the movie camera. That's true of artists,
novelists -- they understand their history. We find
that most songwriters don't know their history, are
not conversant with Johnny Mercer, Rodgers and Hammerstein,
Lerner and Lowe, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, and in
order to bridge the gap between pop and standards, you
have to know what happened before. I think that's very
important. We were lucky: when we were growing up, those
writers were our teachers. We used to go the theatre.
We couldn't afford it, Marilyn and I found out that
we used to do the same things when we were kids --
MB: We used to sneak in with the
intermission crowd and see the second act of every show.
Now we find that we sometimes leave after a lot of first
acts! [laughter] I also think there is a difference
between a hit record and a great song, and I think maybe
that's what was implied. There are certainly hit songwriters
who are great songwriters. And it's true, architects
still study the [Roman] Coliseum. There's an aesthetic
that still speaks to people thousands of years later.
How did the song "Windmills Of Your
Mind" come about?
MB: That was an assignment, for a
picture called The Thomas Crown Affair. It
was a picture about a very wealthy playboy who has been
everywhere and done everything, and for a thrill, plans
a very complicated bank heist. There was a scene in
which he is flying a glider for pleasure while he's
planning the bank heist, and the director shot six-
or seven-minutes of him circling in the glider -- which
is a dream for a songwriter: no dialogue, no
sound effects, just a little shoosh of wind. Norman
Jewison, the director, wanted a song that exposed no
character, that didn't tell any plot -- he just wanted
the restlessness and uneasiness of the character underlined.
Michel wrote six or seven full melodies, and when we
work with him, we write to his melodies, because
even though he expresses himself perfectly in English,
his French accent is such that things can come out sounding
a little like calypso songs! He played us these wonderful
melodies, and we agreed to sleep on it. The next morning
all three of us had independently chosen this oddball
melody, almost baroque in feel. It was the opposite
of what we had thought we would have chosen the night
before.
AB: I think we chose it because it's
kind of a ribbon, a circular melody that reflected the
flight of a glider very well.
MB: And it reminded us of those moments
when you're trying to fall asleep and you can't turn
your mind off. Anxiety is circular, actually.
Do you find that the restrictions
of writing for a film are another way of releasing creativity?
For 32-bar form, you have to write a great melody for
it to work.
MB: There are a lot of lousy songs with 32-bar form!
I'm not saying that you can't write a great
song in 32-bar form, but a lot of those old songs now
sound like miniatures to me, because we're so accustomed
to extended forms. We like the restraints that a movie
puts up, where you have to write for a particular character
or mood, and you have to begin at Frame A and be out
by Frame X, and you've got to be right in that slot,
and you don't want to repeat the images that are on
the screen, and you don't want to reinvent anything
that the screenwriter is saying, or that the camera
is showing you. Usually you come in after the picture
is shot, and you have to weave your way into the tapestry
of that film as if you were there from the beginning.
Those challenges are the ones that we love.
And when you don't have those challenges?
MB: It's tough.
Do you find that there are
certain subjects that keep coming back when you're writing
within those constraints?
AB: I don't know about subjects,
but there are images that we come back to. There was
a long period where -- we didn't realize it, but someone
asked, "Would you please write a song without a season
in it?" And we didn't realize that there were images
of seasons in a lot of our songs. But that's called
style, I guess. For us it's the melody. When we hear
a melody, we feel that there are words on the tips of
those notes, and we have to find them.
MB: It's like Michelangelo talked
about a block of marble -- he said, "The form is in
there, I just have to chip away at the stone until I
release it."
AB: And if you've ever seen unfinished
Michelangelo, the figures are just straining to come
out.
What are your main sources
of inspiration?
|
"When I'm really stuck and feeling
stupid, and feel that there are no more words
anymore, and everything has been said, and everything
has been said better -- I'll read. ... For every
word you write, read a thousand." |
MB: It's the film, usually. And when
we don't have that, sometimes it's very difficult. When
it's just a melody, even a melody that we adore, we'll
sit down and have a whole world of ideas to pick from,
but no particular direction.
AB: You have to be a reader in order
to be a writer, and we read a lot.
MB: When I'm really stuck and feeling
stupid, and feel that there are no more words anymore,
and everything has been said, and everything has been
said better -- I'll read.
AB: There's wonderful story about
writing. Richard Brooks is a wonderful director/writer
who wrote and directed Elmer Gantry, The Professionals,
In Cold Blood. We worked with him on a picture
called The Happy Ending -- we wrote "What Are
You Doing For The Rest Of Your Life" for that picture.
He was a product of the Depression, and when he was
15 or 16 years old, he went on the rails from city to
city, and he'd get off and try to write a story for
the local newspaper for five dollars, and then go on.
And one night he was in a typical hobo camp, sitting
around with a can of soup, and a man said, "Hey kid,
what do you do?" He said, "I'm a writer." The man said,
"Have you ever read Dostoyevsky? Tolstoy? Nietzsche?
Let me tell you something: for every word you write,
read a thousand." So we read a lot: it stimulates writing.
MB: Before anyone hired us, we used
to take a scene from a play or a book, or a story from
a newspaper, and make believe that it was an assignment.
We wrote a lot of songs as exercises, because it was
ten years before anybody would give us a movie. We wrote
a lot of childrens' songs during that period to pay
the rent. They were all exercises that came from reading
that proved very helpful later.
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