The 1981 Foreigner song that the band “literally had no control over”
Most bands within the world of rock, blues, folk and whatever other style of music you can think of, will try to write songs which are an honest reflection of the time when written.
Graham Nash spoke about this idea in an interview with Far Out, when he highlighted the importance of the present within music. “I really still think every day about a quote by Nina Simone,” he recalled, “Who said ‘Every artist, whether you’re a songwriter or a piano player or a sculptor or a painter, you have to reflect the times in which we live’.”
There is a common misconception that writing music which is rooted in the present means writing music which is a reflection of politics or society, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. A lot of love songs, songs about loss, joyous tracks, party anthems, are also rooted in the present, so long as they’re penned during a very specific moment in the writer’s life.
Tom Petty has previously said that a lot of his songs were done in one fell swoop, as he would essentially tap into a specific emotion and then write whatever songs came out of it. So many of his hits, which have gone down as the greatest songs ever written, were penned in moments because of how much he wanted them to be a reflection of a very specific period in time. It’s pretty incredible to listen to, and the way he recounts writing songs almost sounds made up, given how easy it comes across.
Take him talking about ‘Wildflowers’ for instance, a fan favourite. “I just took a deep breath, and it came out. The whole song. Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it,” he said, “I mean, I just played it into a tape recorder, and I played the whole song, and I never played it again. I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song.”
Petty wasn’t the only person who could write songs like this, though. Foreigner is a great example of a band who didn’t really touch upon social commentary, but did still write songs that were a reflection of a specific moment because of how rich they were in emotion. The music you listen to from that band is always going to be pretty raw and honest, purely because of the means by which it was written.
Their track ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You’ is a great example of this. When talking about the song, Mick Jones said that he didn’t feel as though he had any kind of control over it, purely because of how easily all of these different emotions came flooding out of him. It was such an authentic experience that sometimes he had to leave the room when they were recording.
“There’s a song called ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You’, which I literally had no control over, it just came out,” he said, “I had no idea what it meant, but it got to the point where I couldn’t even be in the studio when we were recording it sometimes, it left such a deep impression on me. But it ended up being a song that brought a lot of people together. I hear these days that it’s a song that a lot of people play at their weddings. It’s the kind of song that the pen does the writing, and you don’t even know where it came from.”
It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing about politics or love, so long as your words and music are the true reflection of a very specific moment in time, you’ll create something that resonates with people. Often, that means giving up control of a song and letting it do its own thing. However, as Foreigner will tell you, that’s not always a bad move.
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