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[Music] hi this is Christopher Sutton founder of musical you and welcome back to beatles month today I'm joined by Matt blick who is the man behind Beatles songwriting academy a website dedicated to analyzing every single Beatle song to learn what makes them tick since founding the site in 2009 matt has written over 500 detailed posts on what he's learned from studying the songs of the Beatles and he's written over 300 songs himself you see unlike some song analysis websites you find Matt's site is particularly notable for being very practical in its focus although it is fascinating to read his posts purely for interest every one is written with the active songwriter in mind to inspire and guide them to better and easier songwriting inspired by the principles used by the Beatles themselves in this conversation we talked about how the Beatles could obey and break the conventional rules of songwriting so expertly if they never learned music theory we discuss some specific ways the Beatles modified common chord progressions to be more effective and distinctive in their songs Matt also shares what actually causes writer's block and how to fix it we also talked about the ways Matt has benefited from all his Beatles studies in his own songwriting including specific examples of songs he's written using principles he learned from the Fab Four my name is Christopher Sutton and you're tuned in to Beatles month at musical you welcome to the show Matt thank you for joining us today thank you for having me so I am just a huge fan of your Beatles songwriting Academy and it's been really interesting to kind of peek behind the curtain a little bit to learn more about map lick the man behind it so I'd love if you could to share that a little bit with our audience who are you as a musician and a songwriter how did you get started in music okay I been playing guitar since I was 14 I started in secondary school after brief flirtations with tuba believe it or not and then drums um I started playing in a band a rock band all immediately really playing kind of motley crue hair metal kind of stuff this was the 80s and continued with rock bands largely till the mid 90s along the way always seemed to get involved in lots of other kind of musical adventures I when I was 16 I played in a band that played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival the theatre festival the following year I was involved in writing the music for a show and went back to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival I played in a big jazz orchestra as well and then in the 90s I started attending a church and started doing the music in church writing music arranging music for church still continued with theatre stuff wrote for choirs while playing in heavy metal bands as well over the course of the years I got involved with helping refugees and that ended up with me playing in musical situations with refugees from Iran and Iraq I later went on to play in a Balkan gypsy wedding band as you do as you do chaotic eight-piece monster that was wonderful and terrible at the same time and had just been open to really any musical opportunity that's come my way and just shaped me through that and then at the same time also in the 90s while I was waiting for my rock career to take off I started teaching guitar and that was a very big catalyst as well for me learning a lot more because I honestly did it as a little bit of a scam at first I was on the enterprise allowance scheme and being an unemployed musician not not making loads of money the choice that the government gave me was get a job or will pay you 40 pound a week to start your own business and so I started my own guitar business teaching guitar and I had three pupils and as the year went on because they only supported you for a year and then you are on your own I start to get a few more pupils bought so I I really began to enjoy it and I began to realize that I was learning because I had to learn more not only new things but I had to understand how I did what I already did sort of instinctively now I had to break it down and be able to understand what I was doing and presented in bite-sized pieces to other people so teaching was a big influence and then probably in the last eight or nine years I've really focused on songwriting kind of to the exclusion of a lot of other musical opportunities both studying and teaching and play and doing it myself and that's where I am now I guess I'm a singer/songwriter but more songwriter than singer gotcha that is fascinating what a rich and varied musical background and what jumped out at me was that you talked both about kind of diving into all of these incredibly varied musical projects but also about having to kind of pause and reflect and learn more to be able to teach yeah and I think from the first bit people might think oh it just all came easily to him he was one of those musicians who could do anything but obviously that wasn't the case so could you talk a little bit about the learning process through that whole journey like how did you find learning music in general I was really really motivated to learn and one of the things that I'm really grateful for in hindsight is that I went to what I term quite a progressive secondary school we were allowed to call the teachers by their first names there was no uniform and I think when you're when you're a kid whatever you situation you're in you think it's normal so you know if you've got a horrible home life and whatever you just think that's the way it is and I didn't we're talking about education now but I just thought that was not as well and it's only now as I teach in other schools I realize how completely abnormal that was but we had three music teachers and they were all kind of working musicians they weren't people that just taught so and I'm gonna name check him because I think you have to honor where you came from so Steve Millward Jonathan trout and Leslie Lea so we used to have school plays but people in the school would write little play they would write all the music and then the kids would perform it and I always remember one time I wrote this little chord sequence and I was I was one of these kids that just liked to write music down write the dots down even though I couldn't really read it I had a rough idea of what I was doing and this piece that I wrote just a mounted to one chord sequence with some little variations happening but I showed my music teacher Jonathan Trey and he stopped the lesson the music lesson that was planned and he got everybody in the class to play my composition and he arranged it on the fly and said to the flute player you played the top notes of the chord and you do this and and and they played my piece of music and again it didn't make a big impact on me at the time because that's normal than just what happens in a music lesson your teacher just throws the lesson plan out the window and your jam on your tune but that was that was an atmosphere that I was in the one of the other teachers and she'd at lunchtime she set the piano play dr. Greider sod harness on by Debussy just jamming out just being a musician but that would that all soaked him to the thing so I don't think I'm really answering your question here but it didn't come easy no but I had I took every opportunity that I could so when my art teacher said I go to this Jazz Orchestra kind of night class do you want to come along I had no ability to play that kind of music but that didn't stop me saying yes I'll have a go I'll come along it sounds interesting and the same when two Kurdish refugees say we want to record an album can you find us a studio and I said yeah I can book you a studio and they said why don't you come and play on it and I said I know nothing about Kurdish music but I'll have a go and so I got to experience pop music with quarter tone intervals in it and triumph it in work with that so thank you kids say yes and and jump in the deep end and take some water up you knows there's so much that I want to dive into and cover with you but I do want to just pause for a second because it's not an easy attitude for a lot of people to take I mean the hearing you describe it it's kind of clear the benefit you get from it yeah were you nervous to say yes to everything were you just a fearless kid and not worried about failing or how were you able to take such a such a open and ambitious or yeah how were you able to take that attitude yeah is it to be honest it's hard for me to put myself back in the mindset cuz I was I was quite and I was quite a messed up kid and music was the only thing that I had that I really liked and I was a sort of kid that would have a hobby for two weeks and then have a completely different hobby and then music was the only thing that I stuck with but but in hindsight I think I think music or progressing in music and maybe life as well is all about failure you know if you're gonna do anything that you learn to do anything you are gonna fail a lot of times before you succeed and and so it's not it's not looking at failure as this is a sign telling you to stop it's just almost like if you said okay to get this bar chord the way to learn and bar chord is to fail to do a bar chord 200 times and then you'll do it because actually in reality that is how you learn to do bar chords you know I just put in an arbitrary number on there but you could you could say it in a different way but why not say just do it really badly 200 times and then you'll be able to do it and I think that's certainly true of songwriting you need to write a lot of bad songs so tell us that about your own journey of writing bad songs how did you come to focus on songwriting in the last eight or nine years the way you mentioned well the two things that happened at code coincided and I don't know which wanting influenced the other more no actually I do it was song so I was looking at my songwriting and I was realizing I was writing a very small amount of songs maybe about five or six a year I was averaging and I was laboring over them I was revising and revising and rewriting them playing them for people getting feedback rewriting them again songs would go through three or four completely different sets of music lyrics would be revised again and again and again and again and I just thought this is not working as they say because I did I didn't their songs were noticeably better one side finally you know revised them to death I felt sick of them mostly because I'd spent so long writing them and I I thought maybe I'm not going about this the right way so I set myself a goal - oh and what happened was as well I had an opportunity in the summer to use some office space to go and write everyday so school holidays six weeks and there was an empty office and I've got a big family and it was I can go there have some peace and quiet for a couple of hours and try and write everyday and it was really fruitful so I thought I'm gonna try and write everyday in 2011 I think it was or 2010 I'm gonna try and do something writing everyday and at the same time I realized that this song I was trying to write songs that were very accessible there were mainly songs designed for congregations to sing in church so they needed to be the sort of songs that people could pick up instantly and yeah I was very interested in music like Beethoven and very complex music and I thought I need to search study someone who is really accessible but still musically interesting and that's when where the Beatles came into the picture so I thought I'm gonna I'm gonna analyze all the Beatles songs in one year and it's gonna be really you know I'm and also as well I was I was wanted to find out are they really as good as everybody says you know I don't know so I so I started that one-year project nine years ago I think I've done about 90 songs out of 211 so far so I'm not even halfway it's interesting that you started with a bit of doubt there about the Beatles tell us how had you thought of them up till that point you know it sounds like you weren't a lifelong devoted Beatles advocate I think and I don't know who said this but I think the Beatles are both underrated and overrated at the same time so it's very because they were so culturally significant it's very hard to get past that - what was their music what was their musical influence on you know the pop music disease has it stood the test of time musically in songwriting and and does it have any if it are other people now doing what they did far better than they did you know it's like nobody's driving Model T Fords now you say well done Henry Ford for pioneering but other people have taken what you did and and expanded it and made it much better so so I didn't know and also I think you take them for granted their influence is so pervasive that you don't notice it everybody knows Beatles songs but then I realized when I thought about it I haven't even heard Abbey Road all the way through as an album I think I know it because I know lots of songs from it but so I thought I'm gonna go to the source and just find out for myself well and clearly that one year Beatles project turned into a longer project how was the one year writing project I wrote 47 songs in that year and one of the things that I did as well was I heard about this thing called February album writing month form F awm org which was a challenge in February to write 14 songs one song every two days and that would be an albums length of material you didn't have to actually record an album you could just demo it or even just post the lyrics but the idea was to create an albums worth of music solely in February so I thought wow I'll never do that but I'll never manage that now having written seven songs in 12 months I didn't think I could write 14 in one month but I thought it can't do any harm or sign up and it's a massive online community and I I wrote 24 songs in February and some of them were terrible but the biggest revelation was a song that I wrote and demoed from starts finishing an hour and a half was and still probably is one of my best songs to date and it was written all I had to start with was the title of a children's book that I'd seen in an in a library school which was called let's build an airport and so from that title I wrote a song from start to finish complete and I still play - this is the first track on on one of my EPS and it's it's one of my best songs and so that showed me actually it's not about the agonizing over didn't the material and trying to fine-tune it if you keep writing good ideas will come out you will get the skill your skill level increases and then you can write good songs doesn't mean every song is gonna be good it doesn't mean every song is gonna be a little bit better than the one before it's a weird up and down chart but the the overall level of your writing Rises and and again studying the Beatles this is something that's that's really clear because I'm do I'm even doing it in a chronological order so you have a song like something by George Harrison which is an incredible song it's an all-time and classic in my opinion and lots of others and it breaks so many rules of songwriting but it's an incredible song without and the next one that he did who was old brown shoe which is a b-side it's a terrible terrible song and so it's not like George Harrison got better at songwriting and then he was knockin it out the park he wrote a song it was amazing he wrote a song it was terrible he wrote another song it was okay but the overall quality if you think about George Harrison's songs on the first couple of albums to George Harrison songs on Abbey Road to George Harrison songs on all things must pass his first solo album there's a definite improvement so and that came from just writing the funny thing is old branch who breaks some of the exact same songwriting rules as something does so even that plan doesn't sort of you can't nail it down to specifics but I think the general lesson is write a lot the only way to get good at songwriting is right fascinating so I believe this is one of your be altitudes you're kind of not quite 10 commandments it's the Beatitudes but Beatle songwriting principles which was blessed are the prolific and another one that jumped out at me was blessed are the co writers so you alluded to George Harrison's songwriting there but I think you know for most people that would be Lennon and McCartney that they immediately think of if you say Beatles songwriting and there's this there's such a romantic aura about that you oh you know that that pair of names conjures up so many assumptions about as long as they wrote what's your own perspective on that yeah I mean you had a beatitude of blessed are the co writers so clearly it worked but why did it work do you think there's so many aspects to their partnership that made them the perfect partners for each other I've often thought about would it have worked with Lennon and Harrison or McCartney and Harrison or Lennon and McCartney in Harrison and I think there is a that's just like a marriage or a business partnership or anything there are good partnerships and not so good partnerships and and so finding someone to that clicks with you is is important that's not to say that someone in our position has to wait for mr. right or mrs. right it's it's good experience to co-write anyway but what they what they gave to each other I think to start with and maybe this is something that's really helpful to your listeners where they are is in the early days they functioned as song finishes for each of them and actually even late much later in the career so if you think about when you try to write a song there's the what people call the the the craft and the graft or the inspiration and the aspiration so you get you get inspired and maybe you get a chord sequence and a bit of a melody or maybe you get the first verse and the chorus and then you and then you get stuck it's it's you feel it's flowing through you you're channeling something and then you get stuck and and many songwriters will show you their folders of half-finished songs and so what Lennon and McCartney did a lot is they finished each other's songs so you so what you say and there's a few that everybody always gives examples to but we can work it out he's a Paul McCartney song try to see it my way very chirpy and happy and whatever and then John Lennon comes in in the minor the relative minor key life is very short and and it's the dour kind of alternative to the chipper McCartney verse and then actually George jumped in a little bit because it was his idea to do the three-four versing and fighting my one two three one two three one two three so that was his little contribution which was an important part of the song or a day in the life where the bridge and they woke up got out of bed was a McCartney it was even a little bit of a song that Paul McCartney had written that they just moved into there and the kind of wordless bridge that precedes that was a co-write so that took the pressure off them trying to as I say especially in the early days when they didn't have the skill to complete a song that the other one would chip in and and get it over the finish line so that's one thing a song finisher they were also massively inspired by each other so it's you often hear people characterize Lennon with this Lennon was political and Paul McCartney was romantic or Lennon wrote horizontal melodies that I am he as you are they are picture yourself and it doesn't move very much with Paul McCartney is the long and winding road easel up and down all over the place but those differences don't hold up because in meaning that McCartney did that was fresh and interesting John Lennon immediately stole and copied and anything that John Lennon did Paul McCartney immediately stole and copied so all through their career you see things like John Lennon writes a song that echoes is growing up in Liverpool's strawberry fields forever and the very next song that Paul McCartney writes is Penny Lane which is about growing up in Liverpool and you can see that happen with instruments with chord progressions with lyrical themes with structures that as soon as one guy gets hold of something the other guy takes it as well so there's that kind of influence exchange and there's lots of other things as well I don't know if there's any everything else you want to go in on that I could talk all day about that Tom very cool a I think one of the things I most liked about your site is its highly practical you know there are some academic researchers who do the kind of hardcore music reanalysis stuff but it's kind of hard to take that and do anything with it whereas us nice as always I guess because you are a songwriter yourself and you teach songwriting it's always you know here's what we can learn from this and I think what I love to hear your write-up of that be add to the altitude was you kind of ended it by saying you know which of these four or five roles could you do with a co-writer on I think one of the others that I remember was being an ideal reader where you're you know I think it was Stephen King you were saying has this notion of an ideal reader who's gonna check your work and give you the most honest and useful feedback and that's another co-writing role that someone can play for you yeah and it's important to say that that ideal reader is a real person because sometimes I think we can get derailed in our songwriting by imagining in order it's literally an or or you know oh this would be great if Beyonce heard this song and covered it or something like that I think that tends to derail your writing process but if you know you're gonna show your work to appear that you trust and and like John Lennon is gonna say that's dope then you know it's almost as you write you know I had this chord progressions not going to get past them they're gonna hate this though then it makes you even before you get the feedback it makes you deal with the parts of your song that you know aren't up to scratch you fix them before you even get the feedback so that's the that's the way they function they both had high standards and they they knew and and it worked as well because the other guy was capable of writing something better if you brought something shoddy they they were competing for a sides later in the career as the a side of the single Lennon wanted his song as the a side Paul wanted his song as the a side so they both needed to up their game to win that little competition really interesting and and hearing you talk about that having a high standard and you know pausing to ask yourself if the song is good enough how do you balance that with the being prolific and I guess another way to ask is having written 47 songs in 2011 are you writing 47 every year or how have you found that balance no i I've written more some years I've written a lot less this year because I've been working on my album but I think there's a it definitely feels like a critical mass where you have to get through all the stages of songwriting so often that none of them have any fear for you anymore so sometimes you'll be I can't finish a song or I'm stuck yeah I think you have to get to the point as well you realize writer's block is not a thing though there is no such thing as writer's block it's fear of writing something bad or writing something stupid or writing something cliched or derivative or you know you fill in the blanks and once you get over that fear but and the way to do is by writing something stupid or cliched or derivative and you know the world not anything that you you stop being afraid of it but the more important thing is that that all that judgement stuff has to come after you've written so you so if you try to evaluate too much while you're writing that is what causes the paralysis as well in a lot of writers that I work with they're over analyzing well they're analyzing is this any good before they've even written it and there's a quote in a song by Mike Biola which I love it's like the best songwriting advice but it's in the lyrics of a song and it goes that song song songs they pour out of me not all of them are worth finishing but you've got to finish them to see and you that is what I really learned by writing that song let's build an airport is it was just song number 13 or 14 in the list of things that I was trying to write but then after when people heard this collection of songs everybody zoned in on that one I played it at an open mic and before I got halfway through there was a drunk guy at the bar singing along with me on it yeah so you you you need to evaluate stuff but afterwards is another thing I don't know how far I'm getting off the topic here but another thing that I think is that if I played you one song and you and I said to you Christopher is this song any good you that is such a subjective question to ask you and whether you're commenting on my songs or you're commenting on the Beatles or you're commenting on your own songs but if you write 10 songs and I say Christopher which one is the best that's a very easy thing to to for you to do and also for you to articulate why is the best because these chords work better or the the lyrics are particularly good or the concept is strong but so I think that's why another reason that it's not just be prolific because it's good to you know for these songs in bulk but being prolific makes you a better songwriter and that is one of the ways it makes you a better songwriter is you can evaluate much more clearly is old brown shoe a good song people could argue but if you says old brown shoe better than something you gotta be crazy to say it's better you wouldn't you compare yeah interesting so as well as your be altitude on your site you have what you call tickets to write which is kind of more fine grained songwriting lessons that you've cleaned from this extensive analysis and you know there's umpteen different ways this can be useful and interesting to people to dive into but I think for me I really thought of it just now when you were talking about song writer's block because for me even as a non songwriter who's just dabbled a bit in the past as I read through that list I was like oh I want to try that oh I could write a song like that oh that's something interest you have to try exactly so I'd love if we could just share a few of those and maybe we can pick up some of the interesting musical ones and these are you know across the board from nitty gritty music theory to overarching songwriting principles and I think you began I don't know if these were chronological but the first one on the list anyway is using the flat 6 chord in a major key song yeah and that they are chronological that's why there's no rhyme or reason to the number so you have you know you have a ticket that is just like use this particular chord and then the next one is quite a or slightly esoteric lyrical concept and then there's something about arranging and then we're like two chords again it was definitely why it was the second or third Beatle song that they ever released is where this came from I can't even remember something but basically if you're in the key of a for example the three major chords would be a D and he and so a lot of simple pop songs would use those something like that and then nowadays we would go to this minus six and there's a whole industry built on the one five six four core signals but why the Beatles did sometimes wood or what the Beatles did most of the time which grew out of the sort of ignorance of music theory was used chords that didn't belong in the key so when I studied the whole collection of songs I found that out of something like a hundred and ninety or so songs that they'd written there were only about eleven that did not go out of key at some point so they all you you perceive the Beatles of being very melodic and but and not atonal you know or avant-garde particularly but out of all those songs there was a real tiny minority this purely stayed in key and that's quite amazing so one of the things they did was if you're in a they used the F chord which is borrowed from the a minor scale and sometimes they just used that on its own or sometimes they combine that with the G which is the flat and seven chord so you'd have a song that's kind of major [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and I was called that the Billy shears cord because at the end of I get by with a little help from my friends that goes [Music] and it sounds so happy because you've got that raising up which would normally go to the minor chord like you get that progression is stairway to heaven the end but this goes and you just get a major lift at the end so you'd get that in suffragette City by David Bowie same thing that's basically a hey there's the flat six so you've got that switch between major and minor happening constantly because of that f4 that flat 6 so that's as you said that is exactly how I this like discovered the tickets and how I use the tickets so I analyze the Beatles songs I say hey this is an interesting thing they're doing with this some they're using this chord now I'm going to try and use it so for me the big one was not the flat 6 but in a major key using the minor form so in the key of a that would be a D minor and they use that so many times but don't take chances but that was the cover that's with and so the interesting thing as well is because the Beatles recorded covers not only can you go oh this is an interesting song right an idea that they use but sometimes you can also see where they got it from so they're playing a cover and you get ah that's where you learn that idea and that's an interesting thing I think perhaps for your listeners is that they didn't come out of the womb fully formed as musicians even the most avant-garde and strange chord progressions and scales and ideas you can find the germs of earlier in their music and you can find the germs of in the music they grew up playing so they were influenced by by Broadway musicals and stuff like that that Paul McCartney's father and John Leonard's mother would sing so you get in here there and everywhere it has this strange little intro to lead a better life I need my love to be there and then the song starts that's so bizarre what is that well it's the same kind of a jazz standard would have where you're in a Broadway show this person's gonna randomly start singing in a minute and it's the lead-in to why I'm going to sing this song and they took that into pop music fascinating so there was another lovely chord progression one that stuck in my head which was about taking the 12 bar blues but doing something a bit different with it yeah could you talk about that a bit yeah because people the Beatles played a lot of 12 bar blues music as they were kind of serving their apprenticeship in Hamburg but what's really interesting is in their own compositions they very rarely played at totally straight 12 bar blues and but they still used the form so it's interesting to note that something like the fall on the hill which is not a 12 bar blues but our blues of any description but it has a 12 bar structure which is really unusual until you think that they grew up playing 12 bar blues songs so but a more straightforward one is can't buy me love which there is you you're on the one chord the singing and buy you a diamond ring a friend who made you feel alright so you've got four bars the one chord then you go to the four chord give you anything my friend the backs of one make you feel alright now normal tabla blues would go 5 4 1 4 5 so and that would be I don't care two works okay but they didn't do that they stayed on the five chord for an extra bar no sorry they stayed on the four chord for an extra bar so I don't care too much for money money can't buy me love so they delay going back to the one chord now you could say okay they just fiddled around with it and that's the lesson that just muck around with things for the sake of it but what's what's the song of that it doesn't go I don't care too much for money money can't but so when you do it like that when you do the regular 12 bar way the emphasis is on I don't care too much for money money can't so the emphasis is on money cap a middle of you're arriving back home on the word money but what I actually do is I don't care too much for money money can't buy me love and that's the point love so it's now with a lot of these ideas it was Paul McCartney thinking ah I want to emphasize look so if i delay by the course he wasn't but but the the reason why great artists sometimes get a little bit mystical I'm Paul McCartney's definitely guilty of this is that they've internalized the music so much they've internalized what feels right and what feels wrong that they don't know why they do what they do but it is for reasons like that why do you instinctively pick words that rhyme or words that chime that have similar vowel sounds or whatever because they feel better when you sing them but if you analyze it you could say oh gosh you're using the same vowel sounds all the time so and that's what I was saying to you about my journey as a teacher is that I to work out how I was doing the things that I was doing instinctively so yeah that's really cool I'm glad to hear you say that because there is this kind of traditional online debate about whether you need to know music theory and everyone always point sir McCartney and says well he didn't know music theory and he wrote some of the best songs and I don't know my perspective has always been well he didn't study music theory he didn't know the official terminology but he knew music theory like he had it in his hands you how it worked and I think it can be helpful to people to understand like it's not about knowing the official name for this that or the other it's about having that understanding of how it all fits together yeah it's certainly true I mean the Beatles as we said they didn't come from nowhere they didn't hatch out of an egg they they were a band that was obsessive about studying music they would they would go to names records they would put on b-sides in the little boos and listen to them over and over and over again they they played for six hours seven hours a night in Hamburg learning songs taking requests and they they knew every detail of hundreds of songs they were and so they when you say they did they didn't know any music theory you're completely right they knew tons and tons and tons of music theory they didn't know what things were called they didn't know the labels but they knew exactly which chord would produce this feeling or this sound and and and if you stopped them maybe they couldn't explain why they were doing what they were doing just the same way if you stopped Picasso and said why are you doing that big green and not read it just slip well if I sit down for an hour and think about it maybe I could give you an answer but it's just it feels the right thing to do but then the way you get there is by studying music and so I just think and you know sites like yours and and sites like betta songwriting academy just making it a little bit easier you know yes if I lock if I locked you up in a room with all the Beatles albums and I get to star you would discover everything that I'd figured out and that anybody else has figured out but you know why not make it a little bit easier for yourself absolutely speaking of making things easy I love that in your list and not just these slightly sophisticated songwriting ideas that connect music theory there are also kind of the broad things that we might overlook if we were just looking for those most distinctive and unusual things such as you have one which is repeating verse one but you talked a little bit about that yeah well I I felt as a writer the reason any of these tickets are there is because they made an impact on me or I thought you know if it's just if it's like buy a guitar and play some chords that's not really a somebody needed to tell myself you know but I felt that repeating a verse was cheating because it was showed you were too lazy to write another verse write a third verse so I won't say repeat verse one well the vetos often did was they had verse one verse to a bridge and then they repeat verse one again which again is another idea that pretty much comes from older standards but I realized that although sometimes they did say well we were running out of time so we just repeated verse one I also realized that the Beatles one of those contributing factors to them being so memorable is repetition and hooks and things like that so of course if you repeat a verse it's going to be more memorable than just having another verse and another thing that I had to get out of was the the need to write a bridge for every song because not every song needs a bridge and so sometimes we sort of subconsciously maybe picked up rules about songwriting there aren't helpful especially no I would say no some writing mood is helpful if you feel you've got to rigidly apply every single time you can break rules as I said with some the song something it's just not good to break every single rule every single song every single time but sometimes that little breaking of a rule can be the thing that makes the song stand out so in in the song that I mentioned already let's build an airport I had verse one verse one again a bridge verse two and then verse one again and that's probably how I could finish it so quickly but also that's what makes it so memorable and it was it was such an unusual concept to begin with that because the building an airport is a metaphor for it's a love song basically but you wouldn't think it from the title they bore repeating it wasn't like I love you you love me that's that's you know make family so yeah so repetition I think is one of the things that I've learned from the Beatles that I need growing up playing very complicated heavy-metal influenced by classical music and I needed to learn it's okay to repeat yourself there's the the beta's repeated lyrics in in other really creative ways as well which I can talk about as well if you want least um so they would sometimes repeating a verse outright doesn't work because you might be some kind of a story structure or something like that where it just doesn't make sense to go back to the beginning again but they often used lyrical structures and repeated those so if you think of the song a day in the life which is a brilliant brilliant song but it has no chorus there's no so although it's very memorable there isn't a traditional hook of a you know it's just another day in the life if that's not that you see why the Beatles our best bet something that doesn't work but what he does is he he has a structure so he says I I read the news today oh boy and then how does the next verse start I saw a film today oh boy and then he's got woke up got out of bed dragged a comb and there's there's lots of waking up and getting up and going and and so there's like little ideas that keep repeating although the news was rather sad although the film was rather I can't remember exactly but there's these phrases that keep coming back but with different words dropped in or in the song because genre it was because the wind is high it blows my mind because the world is round II you know it's because the the is that it makes me that and once you use structures like that it becomes memorable and it becomes very easy to finish because you just have to fit words in the slots and you can mix and match them until you get something interesting so they did that all the way through their career with with lyrics very cool so one thing I should mention is that Matt you're very good at you just off the top of your head coming up with some examples for each of these but I should mention the you know on your site when you describe these you list out like here are all the Beatles songs I found that do this and what I doubly love yes you also list out here are some other bands songs we can point to where they're doing the same thing which i think is just a really fascinating thing both for aspiring songwriters and music fans to just kind of take that on a listening journey it's really fun yeah well that's I think that's important again in a kind of permission way so just like I felt I needed permission to repeat verse one you can get an idea from the Beatles like a chord progression so like this if I say what what people call line cliche where you have a minor chord for instance so there's a note going down chromatically within a chord okay so that's Michelle so you think well okay if you liked that song there would be a lot of resistance to go and well I can't just take that chord progression because everybody will go you stole that off the Beatles and then you're it you know and especially if their lawyers say but then you realize that that Paul's progression in Michelle is the same as I don't want to leave her now you know I believe in her so you got in some something okay but then in the beginning of something you've got the same thing you've got in the major key and then you go to something like so John's using it in strawberry fields forever and then so you go okay the Beatles recycle recycle recycle whether is conscious or not but there was chord ideas that they used but then you find lots as you said lots of other artists using that same idea then it's almost like somebody giving you permission to say and you can use this well because if the Beatles used it and then this person used it and that person used it and that person used it there maybe it's yours as well absolutely and you know I think that goes both for the kind of nitty-gritty unusual things like the chord substitutions we were talking about before and for these things that you might kind of think we're too simple or too obvious to use in your own songwriting yeah but if it's good enough for the Beatles and all these other bands maybe it's good enough for you too yeah because I think what's obvious and simple in one genre is something that's never done in another genre so it might be something that the Beatles did a billion times but in the style of music that one of your listeners might be playing is something that's never done and then it's then it's afresh wow where did you get that unusual concept from and again that's something that the Beatles were great at because they were so influenced by obviously Indian music and jazz music and blues rhythm even Motown girl groups were a massive influence on the Beatles and so they kept sucking in all these different influences and and maybe they weren't the best at any of those styles but absorbing them made their music far richer terrific well I love that you know you're not finished this project but you've put in a good few years and clearly it hasn't discouraged you in any way you know I think some people would be nervous embarking on this to feel like maybe I'll just realize the Beatles were the best and I shouldn't bother effect on you it's been really inspiring so I'd love to hear where is your music now and and what's your current songwriting project so I have just finished recording an album called 55 stories down and it is an an album of just me singing and playing a baritone guitar tuned down to a so it's a super still six string you still fret the chords exactly the same way as a standard guitar but it's just seven frets lower so it kind of feels sometimes like you're playing a bass under guitar or just a bass or and what I did why I deliberately decided to go that route because my songwriting is very eclectic I write a punk song that's got a political message and then the next thing I'll write a Christmas song that's very romantic but it's got a kind of weird little twist to it and then I'll write a very heartfelt song about losing someone that I that I loved to Alzheimer's and then I'll write a just a stupid song that doesn't mean anything at all it's just about having a good time and and stylistically as well it's very varied so I felt like I needed some unifying principle to bring those different things together so I decided just to limit myself on what instrument and the way I recorded it so it's all it's almost all live and playing the guitar and singing at the same time I'm just capturing the kind of best versions that I could have that and so that would that was a really interesting project I think the the the whole thing of eliminations is their blessing in disguise I began I've written about that extensively on being a songwriting academy but yeah so that album is finished I'm just in the last stages of post-production and it will be out in January antastic well I certainly can't wait to hear that and I'm going away right after this interview to listen to let's build an airport which I believe is available on iTunes and Spotify and all the other good places yeah we'll have a direct link in the show notes to anyone else who is eager to hear that song Matt it's been such a pleasure talking to you tell the listeners where they can go to learn more about you as a musician learn more about your songwriting teaching and learn more about the Beatles on writing Academy well obviously be to a songwriting Academy you can find at Beatles songwriting calm you can find my personal website is www.miamikettlebell.com tacked me through those things be happy to say hi would you like to hear more enjoy more and understand more in every piece of music you listen to active listening holds the key and we're about to launch an exciting brand new way to learn active listening step-by-step with music of every genre and era including the Fab Four themselves for full details visit music Audi podcast.com slash hear more that's a music Audi podcast.com slash here more where you'll also get access to an exclusive time limited special offer to act fast and visit music howdy podcast.com slash here more today