Charlie Sohne and Tim Rosser discuss how co-writing differs from solo songwriting. Tim explains that changing even one measure in a co-written song ripples through the whole piece, making revision difficult. Charlie describes a BMI session where he and another songwriter built a hook together in real time, then refined it separately.
Chapters
I'm so jealous of people who like work in the room together, and we're— we almost—
we did that for, for a little thing, but we've done it a few times where we've tried to work in the room together. I personally don't tend to love my, uh, initial responses to things. I tend to like to have the opportunity to say, well, that's one idea, and a lot of times my first response to something is is really helpful because it forms my second response, which is the one that I want to end up using. Not all the time. Sometimes I write something and I'm like, "I love this! I want to use this how it is, exactly how it is." But that's super rare for me personally. So if I'm in a room with somebody and we're just throwing ideas out there, if I start a kernel of a song and then we write that whole song together, I'll go home and be like, I'm never gonna like that measure, and I can't just change that measure. I have to change those 8 bars, and if I change those 8 bars, that changes what we came up with. It's a different song. And there's probably a solution to this problem, but I have not yet discovered it.
I also know, but I agree too, because it's the same thing from the words side of things. I think there are people who are really facile with language in a way that allows them to I mean, we talk about this all the time. When I was at BMI and you sort of did this thing where they matched you up with different people, you were sort of on a rotation. This one kid, when I really loved his music and we met to work on a song and he said to bring along some ideas for a song and I was like, great, expecting sort of the kind of process that we ended up having where you talk about a song and you than write it down and go home and deal with it. And I remember he— I started pitching him ideas and he liked one and he goes, oh, I like that. So what's the hook for it? And I was like, I don't know, I guess it could be this. And then he starts playing something and he sings the hook and he goes, okay, great. Like, what's the next line?
But Charlie had already screamed and run out of the room. I literally had to—
I made up an excuse. I made up an excuse. I was like, oh, you know, I forgot. Like, I have this thing. I need to go now. It was so mortifying. To me to have to do that. And it's really just that, like, I think both of us are very similar in the way that we like to write something down and look at it and then, you know, go get lunch. Yeah, go for a walk.
Yeah, I do that constantly when I'm working alone in my house. I'll be like, I like this, I'm not sure I like it, I'm gonna walk around the, like, Astoria and sing it to myself. And by the time I'm done doing that, I have a new idea that I like better.
