I just listened to the song and it is quite remarkable he put that together so quickly.
Rivers Cuomo from Weezer has claimed to have a very prolific songwriting approach as well, apparently at least for periods of time doing a song per day.
Apparently during the first couple years of The Beatles' songwriting career John and Paul would knock out songs very fast, within hours - they actually 'scheduled' time to work together in a time-boxed fashion, so they could fit in songwriting time around their otherwise hectic schedule. Now they didn't produce that many throwaways, but in a period prior to this over several years they learned ~500 songs by ear. They learned these songs well enough live and used them as tools to figure out how to light up a crowd, and more or less had a foundational vocabulary from which they moved forward with.
Rivers also methodically analyzed many songs, including all of Nirvana's songs to help him with his songwriting. He writes about his songwriting process in the liner notes for "Alone II", an album of his home recordings. The liner notes are amazing. He goes through each song on the album and explains the back story, often mentioning what kind of methods he used to write that particular song.
I dug up an old Rolling Stone article where he talks about his "Encyclopedia of Pop". They also mention him writing several hundred songs in 1999:
In songwriting circles, the two most common pieces of advice are "write tons of songs even if they're not great" and "finish all your songs, even the ones that aren't great." It's very similar to common advice in computer programming circles, and presumably any creative discipline.
True, but I think that extra lesson from The Beatles - learn thoroughly/attempt to recreate the work of those you wish to emulate, is a good, perhaps even more important one.
You have to have the ability to finish your work. But to steadily improve you must push yourself in deliberate ways. You need both the discipline and the vocabulary.
Brian Wilson carried this out to an almost healthy extreme in his attempt to break down Phil Specter's wall of sound technique:
"Brian Wilson cited the song as his attempt to capture the essence of his all-time favorite record, "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes, who would later cover this song. At one time, Wilson listened to his 45 record of the song he "could never do" up to 100 times a day."
Not so hard if you have your (digital) equipment setup right.
A lot of bands used to do almost everything in one recording. And now that is before the digital age.
Stephen King gave the same advice as well "Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer."
(quote from wiki)
Holds true for many things. Our photography teacher told us on the first day that the secret of good photographers is that they take a ton of photos, every day.
That's why I try to write some code (or at least read about it) every day, even if just for a little bit. I'm not sure where I'd be, skill-wise, without it.
If you break up the presentation into sections:
- Hook with related humor (great song by Jonathan!!)
- Acknowledge the issue at hand briefly
- Show the positive side first, back up with hard data, show the bigger picture
- Trivialize the negative side, back up with hard data
- Ensure that people know that you take even trivial problems too seriously and act for your users
- Still uplevel the game and offer generous solutions to what you deemed were trivial problems
- Sandwich the problem with good news at the end again and promise a brighter future
There is a good wisdom in there about the way to handle big corporate crisis. Clearly Steve had not left half of his family back in Hawaii for a trivial issue !!
Thanks Shawn & Jonathan for reminding us of this great lesson in history!
It's funny that artist have to go through the exact same experience as entrepreneurs.
No one believes in you, everybody tells you to get a job. But no, you believe in your ideas and just knowww that one of them will be a hit.
So you publish the next app and the next, some of them completely fail, but some get a bit of traction. Then you improve and you improve and bam, after several years of hustling you're the "overnight" success. ::)
Exchange apps with songs for musicians, paintings for painters, novels for writers.
Yeah but they are telling you to get a job for a reason. Because chances are, you'll never make it big as a writer, painter, or entrepreneur. And te ones that do make it are so dedicated that nobody can change their mind anyway.
Yes, but how many people with loads of potential give up too early? Something to think about. I generally encourage people to shoot for the stars. You may never make it big but at least you gave it a shot.
If that's good enough for you then great. But there are people who lose their savings, lose their family, and still don't make it, and end up miserable. While the guy who took a soft corporate job and spent his time outside work on hobbies and family might be better off, even if he could've made it big.
The path of the artist or entrepreneur has its rewards, but it's not for everyone.
Jonathan Mann is great -- he was actually inspiration for a business I've been working on. The idea is to keep working on things steadily and continuously. As he says, 70% of what you do will be mediocre, 20% will be crap, but that 10% will be golden. Work the numbers and do something every day. I like that philosophy.
I think Jonathan Mann's spirit is very positive. I do think his skills have plateaued tho -- I'm hoping he can make a breakthrough soon. He once did some work with a bunch of other artists in a collaboration and that stuff was really awesome. Check out that work at http://jonathanmann.bandcamp.com/album/song-a-day-the-album
Wow, when I clicked on the link and the overly pixelated 4 second animation filled my screen, I actually laughed out loud and thought "Well done! Nice parody on all the "Steve Jobs once gleamed at me " or "I spent 2 years in college with the neighbor of Steve Jobs" articles.
Then it was for real. And I cried a little bit inside.
There's a lot of value to doing one of something every day.
I'm busy working on terrible music. If I do a few hundred, I might suck less too.