Paul Sonnenberg part 2
This is part two of a two-part interview with singer, guitarist, songwriter Paul Sonnenberg. The interview was conducted over several weeks in late January, early February 2010. (Part 1 is here.)Name three songs you wish you had written.
Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars (Corcovado), Vincent, and Dylan's Every Grain of Sand.
Vincent, I can understand. There is not a songwriter but who secretly wishes he had written Vincent. And Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars I can also see. It's been covered by everyone from Art Garfunkel to Queen Latifah.
But I wonder about Every Grain of Sand. It's not one of Dylan's better-known songs. What about it makes you wish you'd written it?
We've all tried writing a Dylan song. This (unbeknownst to him) is Dylan writing a Paul Sonnenberg song. Though I depart from this theme from time to time, the primary theme of my work from the very beginning has been a question: "How do we find the faith to go on living in the face of despair?" I don't believe that this theme has ever been more beautifully and profoundly expressed than it is in this song.
I heard Nana Mouskouri's version before I heard Dylan's (I am a closet Nana Mouskouri freak... literally: I have about 40 lps by her in my closet, all of which have been lovingly transferred to CD, couched in handmade (by me) miniature replicas of the original album covers, and placed in a very special little box). There's a mystical quality to everything she sings, and I think that her performance of this song is her masterpiece.
click on the triangular play button to hear Paul sing Every Grain of Sand.
One of the songs of yours I wish I'd written is Vignette. In the liner notes, you said two things that caught my attention. One: "This song really got to me. Writing it felt like I was intruding in some actual people’s lives." The other, about the number of take before you got a recording you were satisfied with: "By the time I got it done, I was as emotionally drained as if I had lived it."
I think that sums up the three ingredients of a great song: it makes you wish you'd written it (You did!), just listening to it makes you feel like you're intruding, and it leaves you drained (or exhilarated or reverent or perturbed or whatever) as if you'd lived it.
Your thoughts on this?
My model in writing that song was She's Leaving Home by the Beatles. It presents two differing views of an unsatisfying relationship, views communicated to the listener, but not to the other party in the relationship. Those notes describe my experience of the song very well. I began with elements that would be familiar, however fleetingly, to anyone who's been in a long term relationship, and then extrapolated those feelings into a fictional scenario in which those feelings were the dominant ones. But in order to sing the song in a meaningful way, I had to experience life if just for an afternoon from these character's perspectives, and that was a deeply sad and draining experience.
All songs with lyrics present a voice. I want to be drawn in by that voice, to "meet" the person who's speaking, even if the presence of a 'character' isn't explicit. I want them to have an interesting perspective, and a way with words. I want there to be nuance, wit and insight in what they have to say. If there's a depth to their perspective, all the better. If they're addressing feelings I can relate to, that's the jackpot.
Listen to Vignette:
Songwriting is not something you have recently taken up. You have been at it since you were at least 17. How has your writing changed over the years? Have there been "major periods" that you have gone through?
At first, my songwriting was very much connected to my religious activities and search, though my songs never overtly reflected this. When I abandoned that life, I felt for a long time that I no longer had anything to say as a songwriter. As I've taken up the craft again over the last 10 years, I find that I tend to deal with the same themes, but from a more mature point of view. But I also feel freer to write songs that aren't necessarily going to change the world. To write songs for the sheer pleasure of it, to experiment, to try different genres and points of view, to be funny, dark, etc. etc. etc.
A question that songwriters are often asked is which comes first, music or lyrics? From reading the liner notes for your CD, "10 Songs by Sunday," it seems you can work from either direction. Is there one that you prefer? Or do words and music tend to come at the same time?
Every song is different. Most start with a verbal phrase or idea, which suggests a melody, which suggests chords. Otherwise, it's that process in reverse: Chords suggest a melody, which suggest lyrics. But if a lyric doesn't flow, I don't have a song, as far as I'm concerned.
Are you very organized as a songwriter? I mean, do you write down music and lyric ideas, say, in a notebook, and draw from them later on?
I'm a very spontaneous song writer. If a song isn't done in a day or two, it will inevitably be abandoned. And once I record it, I often don't necessarily even intend to ever play it again. Also, I tend not to write my songs down. I write down the lyrics so I have something to sing from, but not necessarily even the chords. YouTube is my primary organizational tool. If, in the unlikely event I ever want to play a song I've written again, I watch the video and figure out the chords from there.
10 Songs by Sunday shows that, if you set your mind to it, you can write very quickly. Is that typical of your songwriting, or do songs usually take a while to be born?
That actual writing of a song proceeds quickly or not at all. But, unless I'm pushing myself, as I was in that project, it's usually several weeks after I've written a song before I'm inspired to do so again.
Do you tinker with songs after they are supposedly finished, or do you let them alone and focus on new songs?
Any tinkering I do with my own songs I do in the course of learning the song for recording. Usually changes are made if something lyrically doesn't 'sing right'. Those changes are usually made out loud while driving and singing. My translations, however, get tinkered with endlessly. Often over the course of years. Sadly, that leaves out-of-date versions up on YouTube, but I can't bear to take something down once it's up.
Because you know a lot of songs with complex chords, chord progressions, and melodic structure - I'm talking bossa nova, here - you have, as a songwriter, broad musical palette to work from. Yet you are able to set that aside at times and write simply - and beautifully, I might add - in such songs as your E.E. Cummings adaptation, Sweet Spring, and your creepy and very Leonard Cohenish You Murder Me.
I had a long history of playing and writing simpler songs before I learned to play bossa nova, so that's very much still available to me. They're two very distinct 'worlds' of song for me. I'm either in one mode or the other. Also, while my 'playing vocabulary' in bossa nova has grown quite a bit over the six years or so I've been playing it, my 'composing vocabulary' is still pretty minimal. I hope over the coming years to use my study of the playing vocabulary I've built to expand my compositions.
Here's Paul's adaptation of a poem, Sweet Spring, by E.E.Cummings:
I was very moved by your song and your video, "Down on the Floodplain." The footage of you singing has a deep red tint, and this is interspersed with black and white footage of a flood in the 1930s. There is little doubt, either visually or aurally, that a man's emotional state and a flooded community are being compared.
Songs and videos - any work of art, for that matter - that don't hide, but make obvious their layers of meaning often don't succeed because of their very lack of subtlety. Any idea why Down on the Floodplain, as well as its video, does work and works so well?
I'm glad you think it works well. That song was the first I wrote after many years of not writing, and it meant a lot to me. I wish more people would hear it. The song has an honest voice, and it offers a perspective on manhood that I haven't heard elsewhere. It tells a story, has a strong narrative voice, and a good central metaphor. I also like that the vintage of the video footage gives the narrative voice some credibility in an odd way. Grants the narrator's perspective a timelessness. As for the red color, I was, again, a bit sick of looking at my ugly mug and so distorted the image this way. By happy accident, that also adds to the ambiance.
What advice would you give young songwriters?
My first thought is something I heard attributed to Dylan: "The last thing the world needs is another song". And frankly, I'm not sure what motivates other people to write songs. I write them because I love to write them, and because they make me feel better. So if writing a song would make you feel better, keep writing till you do.
How did your long-distance collaboration with Emilinha come about? Perhaps only slightly more odd than a Texan who sings bossa nova is a woman in Japan who sings bossa nova.
Actually, Japan is quite the bossa nova hotbed. And, in fact, to make things even more colorful Emilinha, though living in Japan, was born and raised in Australia, and is of Chinese descent.
Emilinha and I admired each others work for a while before it occurred to us to collaborate. After I had written the song "Sigh Heart, Don't Break," it occurred to me that Em's soft, smoky vocal approach was just what the song needed, so I asked her to sing on the track. That flowed so easily that we've been working together on and off ever since. I have a secret dream that one day Emilinha will be discovered by a major label for the marvelous singer that she is and that the label will then fly me to Japan to do a proper album of duets with her.
She has a wonderful voice that compliments and is complemented by your voice. How do the two of you work out arrangements? Have you ever met in person?
Emilinha has a very brilliant, very natural way with vocal arrangements. I tend to count on her to come up with something wonderful when we collaborate. The amazing vocal arrangement on our version of Bim Bom was almost entirely her doing. I liked it so much that the Trio based our version of that song on Em's arrangement.
Over the last two weeks she and I have been working on a song that I just wrote especially to sing with her. It's called And Then I Hear You Sing. It's about two singers who are also a troubled couple. Alternating complaints are aired, but then forgotten when the 'complainer' hears his/her beloved sing. The idea was that, after my complaints, Em would sing a line from a song upon which she collaborated with our friend Rafael Gazzi; and after her complaints I would sing from a song I recorded with him.
It would be a tribute to his songs and to our mutual admiration for each other's singing, and would ultimately end in a round of those snippets, which would magically fit together. (Amazingly, the first two snippets I chose DID fit together!). True to form, Emilinha improved upon my melodic idea, choosing to sing in unison where I had intended harmony (unison is much more common in Brazilian music), and she even added snippets of Girl from Ipanema and Chega de Saudade as the song faded out. Those touches made a good song a great song. (It should be up on YouTube in a week or so, after she mixes the video. I'm very excited about how it turned out).
No, we have never met in person. I will probably fall down and have a heart attack from sheer bliss the day we do. I'm a huge fan.
How long did you gig with Shirley Fraser [flute], and Lynn Turner [percussion]?
We played together for almost a solid year, and gigged for most of that year. Hanging out with those wonderful women made for one of the happiest years of my life (though that might surprise them to hear given how much I complained when it was time to pack up and go play.) The decision to stop playing together was a tough one, but the right one given my increasing reluctance to gig.
What a pleasant bossa nova trio. How did the three of you meet and how did you decide to team up?
Shirley and I met through Craigslist and worked out a bunch of arrangements. Then I met Lynn while walking my dog (she lives 10 houses down from me). She plays with an incredible African drum troop here in Austin called the Djembabes, and I convinced her to try a new style. Happily, her living room was also available for rehearsals.
Who else have you collaborated with?
Em is by far my most frequent collaborator. But I have worked on several songs with Rafael Gazzi (a very talented Brazilian living in Switzerland), and three of those (along with work he did with Emilinha) were included on his CD Rafael Gazzi and Friends.
There have been a few others (see the playlist on my YouTube page), and there even also been some that did not end well at all, musically or otherwise. For that reason, I'm a little more cautious about accepting every invitation to collaborate that comes my way.
Anything else about your writing or performing that would you'd like to say?
I really did in many ways enjoy performing live. it was challenging and rewarding, and I'll probably return to it one day. But ultimately I don't believe the general public really appreciates live music very much any more. There were always a few smiles that made my night, but they were the exception rather than the rule. It may just be that my introverted nature is incompatible with that scene.
You are no longer gigging, but I see you have posted some new videos recently [February 2010]. Will you continue to write and to record?
I absolutely will. I still am unclear what direction my work will take, but doubt a single week will go by without a least a song or two being posted. I plan to take more time with my multitrack arrangements, delve more deeply into performing Brazilian songs authentically, and to keep writing songs when the spirit moves me.
Paul Sonnenberg's website is gnomenclaturestudios.com.
His You Tube channel can be found at here.
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