Max Martin, who is, if you don’t know an absolute genius, he is, apart from John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he’s the most, he’s had the most number ones of any songwriter ever since they started counting such things. And, whether you’re a fan of that kind of like big explosive radio pop or not, it’s sort of like, I have a theory whereby it’s, it’s you sort of, it’s good to respect and pay attention to the greats of, of any genre or any, you know, great guitarist.
Even if you can’t stand heavy metal, if you’re a guitar player, like listen to James Hetfield’s rhythm playing. It’s, he’s unbelievable. Or if you are, if you’re not really into jazz, you know, obviously there’s tons of, of incredible music and incredible records that you could get something from. So I think with, with someone like Max Martin, yeah, whether or not you actually like that kind of music or wanna make that kind of music, it’s worthwhile to pay attention and kind of have a look and have a listen and sort of absorb some of the tricks because I think they can be used really in, in any genre and they can just help you to make your songs have impact.
I think it’s really, especially with pop music, it’s really important to be, to think in terms of, of the, yeah, having, having impact and, and, and having, bringing out a reaction from a listener.
Like generally hits aren’t the most passive. They kind of, they sort of slap you in the face in, in the best possible way. so yeah, the first point, it’s almost five plus. So yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get stuck into my content. So the first thing I wanted to talk about is the power and the importance of phonetics. So this means the sound of speech, really.
It’s the, and in terms of music, it’s singing, it’s obviously just the way a vocal line sounds. So irrespective of the lyric of the meaning of the concept, it’s just how it hits your ear and is it pleasing or not. and what’s interesting about someone like Max Martin and there’s a whole school of Swedish songwriters, especially kind of the mid to late nineties into the two thousands absolutely dominated pop music. and one of the interesting thing about it is the fact that they’re Swedish and English is their second language.
When they were growing up listening to records or the radio listening to English and music, they didn’t necessarily understand the lyrics. So they just heard it phonetically. They just heard like sounds. And it’s like, is this, does it sound cool? Does it sound catchy? or not? So it’s sort of like having that mentality of, of really keeping an eye on when you’re writing does, does your vocal line, does your lyrics sound cool?
And actually like thinking in terms of, is this gonna be emotional to a listener who doesn’t speak the language that you are writing in? And it kind of should be, you know, there’s that classic, chu thing. There’s one of these talent casting shows where there’s a lady singing, without you, but she obviously can’t speak English. And it’s, it’s very funny. And, but kind of, that’s a great example where it’s obviously very emotional for her, but she doesn’t have a clue what it’s about.
So like, can you write a melody that is emotionally moving even if you don’t understand what it’s about or what it’s saying? and I think a lot of this is really like, it’s about managing vowels. ’cause singing is it’s most, it’s, yeah, vowels is kind of the bulk of what’s actually happening. ’cause you know, consonants and things are just the bits in between the vowels. So it’s really the, a’s the e’s the i’s the o’s the oos, that are important.
’cause you know, you can’t sing a long K, it has to be KKK for example. And you could sing a long s or a long L, but would you want to like, would that sound good? I kind of have a feeling maybe not. In fact that’s why D ss exist to kind of manage ss. so if there’s a whole sort of strain of technology designed to remove ess, you know, so it’s kind of what a cool thing to do. A way of writing, which is, is massively, prevalent in pop writing is to just get onto a mic and just record yourself singing, just phonetic gibberish.
and just think about what sounds cool and just get into it and forget meaning, forget words. Just sing nonsense. And it’s very common that when you listen back, you’ll, you’ll have sung stuff. and you’ll find that you get quite attached to the way it sounds.
’cause that’s kind of the focus is just, does it sound phonetically good? and then if you achieve that, if you write a melody with a cool sounding phonetic melody, and then the job is to put a lyric to it, oftentimes you’ll find yourself really wanting to, to try and stay close to what you did phonetically. ’cause it just ’cause it sounds good. so that can be kind of a job in itself actually kind of molding a lyric around, you know, it’s like, hell is that, you know, you just have to make, make it work.
But, so yeah, 0.1 is your singing your songs, your melody should just sound cool. And I think if you’re a lyricist and you like, are very into lyrics and you write lyrics maybe separately and then you put them to music, you can come up against the problem of, of like, does it sing well? And oftentimes I’ve had this situation so many times where you write a lyric and you think it’s great and you love it and you feel like it’s nailing what you wanna say, and then you get up to sing it and it just doesn’t sing cool.
It doesn’t come, come off the tongue. Right. You know, and then you sort of have to change it. ’cause I think really in a, in an ideal world, you have every, every kind of box’s tick. So you have the greats lyric that has meaning and emotion and it sounds great, phonetically really catchy and pleasing. but sometimes you kind of have to pick your battles.
And I think in the pop world, most people would probably say, just go for what sounds cool. Like, prioritize that. Because a lot of people aren’t really gonna pay attention to lyrics. you know, some people do, some people don’t. I mean, also it’s kind of a genre specific, a little bit like with country music. so much of it’s about story. So you, you generally are really engaged in the storytelling aspect in the lyric. So, yeah, try that.
If you don’t already do it, I can highly recommend just sing nonsense and think about phonetics. What sounds, what’s just pleasing to the ear. Okay. The power of intros. So again, with the Max Martin sort of school, those songs really written, with radio in mind. ’cause obviously a hit single is, it’s, if it’s a hit on the radio, then that’s, that’s real.
That’s the real deal. Obviously these days with streaming, streaming numbers count for a lot of what sort of, demarcates success with a, with any given song. But, when you’re thinking about radio, it’s like really you want to create impact instantly and you want to keep people engaged and not reaching for the dial to change the radio station. ’cause if they don’t do that, radio stations that are playing the song will notice and they’ll go, Hey, this is great.
This is keeping people on our station. We’re gonna play it more. So, an intro can be like an ID stamp, you know, like a, you should know what song you are listening to, you should recognize it within two, three seconds. And, I think when you’re, especially if you are kind of coming from more of a band musical background, where you are like strumming an acoustic guitar is your, is your kind of, standard sort of operating procedure. You can kind of just be a little bit unimaginative.
with intros you can just kind of 1, 2, 3, 4 jammies, jammy jams, jammy. And it’s sort of, you can easily, and I’ve done it a million times where you just kind of meander into a song and that can be fine. There’s obviously lots of amazing songs that kind of have those kind of beginnings. But in the pop world and in the Max Martin world, and also like, you know, Beatles, who I’ve been obsessively listening to since I was about five years old, they kind of, songs tend to often start with a bang, you know, and, so it’s grabbing folks from, from the get go.
