The songs Phil Collins considered the hardest to write: “It doesn’t come naturally”
It wasn’t hard for a lot of people to turn their brains off whenever Phil Collins wrote a song back in the day. There are many opportunities where people could have easily made fun of him for being too lightweight compared to his peers, but it’s not like he couldn’t fly off the handle when he wanted once Genesis started making their ambitious projects. When he was in rare form, nothing was off the table, but the drummer said that there were a few types of songs he found hardest to nail down.
When going through Genesis’s discography, it’s not like Collins ever found a point where he was struggling to write something. He may have had the same tuneful heart as Paul McCartney, but when he wanted to, he also had the same aggression as John Bonham, somehow managing to balance being in Genesis, getting up to his own jazz-fusion shenanigans, and even trying out his solo chops once the 1980s kicked in.
Then again, that was probably the reason why so many people had a problem with him. There’s only so much Phil Collins that most people can listen to for any length of time, and when he came for air, he realised that he had become the Barry Manilow of his generation. Nothing’s wrong with listening to that many ballads at a time, but whereas people could understand why a song like ‘Against All Odds’ made it big, it looked like he was losing the plot by ‘Sussudio’.
Because looking through all of his songs, do you sense a theme in all of them? There might be some anger on tracks like ‘Tonight Tonight Tonight’ or ‘That’s All’, but most of the hits that come from their records all revolve around the silly love song mentality that the music world thrives on like ‘Invisible Touch’. Collins never dropped in his two cents about political matters all that often, but as far as he was concerned, it was about keeping his nose clean.
He never wanted to be preaching from a soapbox like Bob Dylan, and when he did eventually go down that road, he knew he wasn’t equipped to make that big a jump, saying, “It just doesn’t come naturally for me to write like that. I feel that my music is helping in another way–helping people understand more about other people. That’s really what I do best. I’m not politically motivated. I don’t even vote. I have pretty strong views of what’s right and wrong, though. There’s so much to do, but for me, that doesn’t mean writing political songs.”
Then again, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t tried to throw his opinion out there now and again. The fact that he played Live Aid was already a political move for charity, and while Collins even claimed the song ‘Long Long Way To Go’ was about politics, some of the commentary that he offers on that track is far from Rage Against the Machine in terms of passionate doctrine.
But once Collins started to get more introspective and soft in the 1990s, the fact that he didn’t say anything is probably why he got so ridiculed by the masses. There’s nothing wrong with writing the odd silly love song, but when that’s all you sing about, it’s easy for some people to see you as toothless, and every aspect of Cool Britannia was mercilessly taking the piss out of him for committing the crime of writing tunes that people liked to hear.
He may have had a raw deal trying to fit in with the cool crowd circa 1996, but Collins wasn’t interested in that market, either. No matter what project he was working on, he was making music for himself, and if other people happened to like it, he was completely fine living his life without telling people how they should live theirs.
