Note by Note

Scottish songwriter and lecturer Davie Scott, writes about his Note by Note live concert as part of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's Alive with Music Weekend.

Here’s something I bet most of you will be able to relate to. When I was a kid starting to fall in love with music the first thing I noticed was that within moments of putting the needle on the record – yes, it was the Seventies – I had the distinct feeling of being transported…somewhere else. Whether that was sitting behind Leonard Cohen in his garret on Clinton Street, NYC, as he put pen to paper to write the letter that became Famous Blue Raincoat or looking on in a candlelit room where the unnamed female protagonist hands Dylan a book written by ‘an Italian poet from the fifteenth century’ (Tangled Up In Blue). I also remember a largely unloved McCartney piece, London Town where something of the specific, odd imagery embodied by lines like ‘I was arrested by a rozzer, wearing a pink balloon around his foot’ combined with the chiming width of a Fender Rhodes piano and the entry of a jagged, Bo-Diddley style instrumental section provided a rich picture of the great metropolis. In my mind’s eye/ear that picture was taken on a Sunday, around 10.30 a.m., up near St Pauls, the rain had just stopped and there were families arguing on their way to Church. Actually the song specified that it was afternoon, a purple afternoon at that, but you get my drift. Where the first two examples are clearly about the art of the lyricist in carving out believable spaces both in and in-between the lines, the latter is as much about harmony and melody, and the ways we react to the gaps between the notes. One of the reasons I started MA: Songwriting & Performance at UWS was to help people explore those spaces both in terms of writing and listening.

Many of my favourite songs are examples of the songwriter using melodic and harmonic ideas to paint very specific pictures. The jaunty rhythm of the top line melody of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Girl From Ipanema seems perfectly descriptive of the girl we see trotting down towards the morning shimmer of Copacabana beach while the narrow 2-note nee-naw tune of Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars sums up the sleepy end of the same day. Some of Jobim’s collaborators went so far as developing lyrics as a concurrent observation of melody, One Note Samba being a famously droll example. Chanteuse-du-Jour Adele Adkins is a powerful and economic melodist; her Chasing Pavements, built on the image of an empty Oxford Street in London at 5 a.m. following one of the tiffs that resulted in the multi-million selling album 19, paints a convincing picture of mazy roads and internalised conversation, swooping up and down through most of the notes of one full octave in the verse before changing mood in defiant, positive style with a chorus that hardly strays from 3 repeated notes. But arrangement and production ideas are also the ally of the impressionist-songwriter; Jimmy Webb’s classic Wichita Lineman started with the image of a labourer, rigged high on a telegraph pole against the backdrop of the American landscape and developed that lonely image not just in terms of the melody and chording but also in sonic representations of the ‘whine’ of the wires and the dot-dot-dash of the anonymous messages passing through them. In the Glen Campbell recording the effect is intoxicating and transporting, built on a mixture of the cream of LA’s studio musicians, the sure hand of producer Al De Lory and the gurgling undercurrent of an organ transplanted from Webb’s demo. Those visual impressions were woven into the fabric of the song from inception.

Read more from Davie Scott and the Pearlfishers on his website.