Teamwork. Or not

[Zephyrus]

I think more than one person collaborating is good for a band, even if your the main songwriter you need a person you can trust to show the riffs, or full arrangement to, and get an honest opinion on whether it sucks or not.

That's how it works with my band.

 

[MasterOLightning]

Most of the stuff I really like is done by bands that are either one-man, or largely written by one guy.

I'm not thinking all that hard, but I'm not coming up with too many bands that are truly collaborative in terms of riff writing on almost all of the music. Then again, there are bands where you just can't be sure (Deathspell Omega). Surely drummers are just about always going to come up with their parts on their own almost all the time, and bassists probably do quite a bit of that as well.

 

[V.V.V.V.V.]

You can be pretty sure with DSO, Hasjarl writes everything afaik...Mikko doesn't usually write music (great noise artist though).

 

[MasterOLightning]

I thought there was another guy besides Hasjarl, but maybe not. I doubt Mikko really writes stuff like that also, it's just too far removed from the level of Clandestine Blaze and his other bands.

 

[cookiecutter]

Is it safe to say that the more technical the music is, there more it benefits from multiple songwriters?

I think this is true for the most part. For black metal especially I tend to like fewer songwriters. The only problem you get is when a skilled songwriter is not such a skilled musicians. Imperial of Krieg is a good example. A lot of his stuff tends towards bad when he does it himself, but when he hired session musicians (The Black House) something really good resulted.

 

[no country for old wainds]

FUCK DEMOCRACY

 

[Alter]

I think it works much better when all band members can work on a core song that is written by one-member and than build on that core so it develops into a full, and dynamic song.

 

[SouthernTrendkill]

I'll be honest and admit that I tend to marginalize the contributions of the other members in the band. My main focus is on the vocalist and lyricist. But I do think that one man with a vision is usually how the best stuff is made. You have a lot of strong partnerships, also, of someone heading the music and someone else heading the lyrics. But a lot of artists can lead both like Tom Petty, Neil Young, Phil Anselmo in Superjoint Ritual. But a lot of the time I don't actually know who is doing what, since unless it's only one person who is doing it, the credits rarely say who did what in the creative process.

Also, The Final Cut is my favorite Pink Floyd album.

I agree with Nirvana, I think they would have been even better if Kurt had just recorded all the instruments himself (as I mentioned once). But I can't say I understand why people think they ended metal's dominance unless they're talking about hair crud like Bon Jovi. Thrash was still in the charts after grunge blew up and Nirvana was far more metal than any hair band (except arguably on Nevermind which is my least favorite of their material, and except for hair bands when they later went metal like Skid Row). I guess maybe in a very roundabout way Nirvana eventually led to the pop-rock scene moving away from the heavy metallic edge, but it's back now what with bands like Atreyu so if anyone wants the pop metal back, we've got it...

 

[Alter]

What? You mange to over-analyze everything but still make it sound devoid of anything meaningful.

 

[SouthernTrendkill]

What? You mange to over-analyze everything but still make it sound devoid of anything meaningful.

Your lack of reading comprehension skills does not equate to me failing to say anything meaningful.

I assume you're wondering about my Nirvana statement because the other paragraph is far too straight-forward to be misunderstood. So I'll break down the Nirvana paragraph for you.

- People say Nirvana ended metal's reign (in the mainstream).
- This doesn't make sense to me, because...
- The only type of "metal" that Nirvana knocked out of popularity was hair metal like Bon Jovi and Cinderella. I don't consider that metal in the first place.
- Nirvana was heavier and more metallic than those pop bands, with their heavy plodding riffs and thrashy tunes. Bleach and Incesticide are pretty much stoner/sludge metal albums and their pre-Bleach material was even more metallic than that. Metal is one of Nirvana's biggest influences.
- Thrash was still in the charts after grunge became big, so you can't say Nirvana stopped thrash from being popular. Therefore, how did grunge stop metal from being popular?
- Since people complain about Nirvana taking metal out of the mainstream (and the only thing they took out of the mainstream was hair metal)... If people really care that much about fluff, pop metal being popular in the mainstream, they should be happy about the poppy mallcore and metalcore acts who are now popular. They're the modern equivelant of hair bands: a safe, fluff-based, pop-oriented version of "metal" that is popular with the mainstream crowd.

If you're still confused, my post was a reply to the original poster who mentioned Nirvana as a one-man-lead band but also mentioned how they had ended metal's reign in the mainstream.

 

[Alter]

What thrash was in the charts enough to show that it was archiving anything a significant of success beyond the basic bands like Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax, considering we are talking about the 90's when they had strayed away from a pure-thrash sound?

 

[SouthernTrendkill]

What thrash was in the charts enough to show that it was archiving anything a significant of success beyond the basic bands like Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax, considering we are talking about the 90's when they had strayed away from a pure-thrash sound?

Those same bands were still in the charts and were making some pretty thrashy music. Arguably there weren't really any other thrash bands that had the potential to dominate the charts at that period of time. It's not Nirvana's fault if Megadeth & etc. decided to make more commercail music after thrash got popular, Nirvana had nothing to do with that. There's also bands such as Pantera that were bringing a heavy "true metal" sound to the mainstream and were probably made more popular by grunge rather than less.

 

[Jreg]

More often than not, I think some degree of teamwork is necessary. Exactly how egalitarian the creative process should be is more ambiguous.

Most of the time, I'd say songwriting is most effective if treated as any other task or project, meaning there's one leader/visionary who steers the rest of the band in a particular direction while still incorporating ideas from the rest of the band. But that doesn't necessarily mean there has to be one leader for the band's entire output. Perhaps some songs are mainly written by one person and other mainly by another, or possibly yet a third or fourth for other tunes. It really just depends on the dynamics of each member. This is usually ideal for metal when considering that most bands tend to change about 50% of their lineup every few years, so you kind of need a holdout who puts his/her stamp of approval on everything and makes it clear that this is their band and their creation not to be tampered with too much by new blood...not initially, at least.

 

[Zephyrus]

One formula I find to work is when a band, such as Borknagar, has a song or two on each album written by band members who are not the main songwriter, while the majority of the songs are left to the leader's dictation.