An RTB, like any freestyling, is an event, not a final product. Music that is highly crafted, considered, professionally performed and packaged is, of course, the norm—it’s modern music. We love that. But you can hijack this modern apparatus, the musicians, the technology, even a large audience, to celebrate a spontaneous moment and take a detour from the regularly scheduled program, to make up a song on the spot. Now, that’s exciting. It’s off-book, unplanned, unrehearsed, with no guarantees or safety net. It’s breaking the law!
Rap musicians understand the power of spontaneous songwriting. Freestyling is still essential to the art form of rap, while classical music has left freestyling behind for the most part. But it used to be the way a classical musician earned his stripes. Nineteenth-century composers regularly dueled with other pianists at what were called “salons.” They created pieces from thin air on the spot, as they tried to outdo one another creatively and technically. The jazzers have taken improvisation to a high art, but I wouldn’t quite call it freestyling. Jazz musicians generally improvise over already existing song structures, which they call “the head.” They might play one pass of “Someday My Prince Will Come” and then continue the chord structure as they take turns improvising over it. But the kind of freestyling that connects Biggie to Beethoven requires creating the whole ball of wax in the moment. When it’s over, poof, it’s gone. Next.
Freestyling an RTB with orchestras is a nightly lesson in orchestration for me. I can hear the result immediately as I dictate my spontaneous ideas to musicians. Few budding orchestrators like myself get to hear their ideas on the spot, to determine if, for instance, the flute might be heard in unison with all the violins, or if the French horns would be better in tighter harmonies or broader intervals. A computer simulation only gets you so close. You have to actually hear it with real players. Oddly, I find that my riskier, more audacious on-the-spot ideas often play better in an orchestra than some of the more considered ones that were auditioned with the computer beforehand. A good reminder when composing: Imagine big. Imagine beyond those tools.
I’ve mined the recordings of hundreds of RTBs and completed some of them, like “Effington,” “Cologne,” and “Hiroshima,” for albums. All of these songs were surprisingly complete the moment they were improvised, as a quick YouTube search would corroborate. They had verses, choruses, and sometimes complete forms, all done on the spot. I just needed to give them a little help to get them polished enough for a record. But, like most freestyling, most RTBs were meant for the people in the room. This was the spirit in which they were improvised. As badly as I might want to make songs out of all of them, we can’t be too greedy. There’s always another idea. You can turn the faucet on anytime you like.
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I recently taught a class in songwriting at a music retreat, and I had each songwriter do an RTB in front of the class. I’d throw the songwriters a title and say, “Go!” They did great! It is not a matter of genius to do this, as I prove each night at my own concerts. Something just kicks in. It’s intuitive, natural. You just need to be in front of an audience, with no way out, with the intention of saying something, anything. It can begin by the repeating of the phrase “I’m scared of improvising,” over two changing chords. You’ll get tired of singing that over and over, and you’ll naturally discover and explain more of what you mean, and in doing so will develop your song. Who knows where it will go? We find out together, which is the way any song should feel.
And nobody expects an improvised song to be a masterpiece, so keep that in mind and maybe you’ll relax a little. You and the audience will live in that moment together for the ups and downs. And since you can’t edit those lulls out, you will have to own those lulls and find your way up. This is a gift. It teaches us that dynamics don’t always have to be about literal sonic loud and soft. Dynamics can be about the tone of the content musically and lyrically. Anyway, a song can’t actually be “all killer no filler.” That’s not the way life works. We can’t just edit out the boring bits of our lives—the ones that led to the exciting ones. Those were necessary. When freestyling, you have to accept that you have found yourself down in the valley, own it, and do what’s necessary to get to the peak. As an audience, we appreciate being in on the journey.
Then there’s form, something we take for granted in songwriting. Where did that come from? How can it be that while freestyling intuitively I keep stumbling into intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge and so on, which is textbook form? It could be that I’m trained that way, but I can feel something else going on. Form has evolved because it’s intuitive to organize your thoughts in real time when you’re communicating. This is more obvious when you’re forced to create onstage. It all suddenly makes sense. For instance, if you’re the one onstage, and I shout at you, “Rock this bitch!” you’ll most likely instinctively go for a simple repeated riff on your instrument. It’s what we normally do to get it going. To the listener, this riff sets the backdrop and tone. We assume the artist knows what’s next. But for the freestyler, that riff is just buying time to figure out what to do. The jazzers call this a “vamp.” The classical musicians call it “ostinato.” Form and proper song development, as you discover when you improvise a song before an audience, is not only for the benefit of the listener; it happens to be the natural way an idea rolls off the tongue, as it comes from the heart, filtered through the brain, when you’re just trying to discover and communicate a point musically.
I’ve been Rocking This Bitch for more than fifteen years now, and I imagine I’ll keep that up until I shit the bed one day—if for no other reason than I keep learning. I know it’s what all the cool old men say, but, really, we’re all students for life. It’s important to try new things. What’s newer than performing a song that didn’t exist until that moment?
FOLLOW THE BROWN
DON’T THINK FOR A MOMENT that I believe a song that’s blurted out onstage is the best we can do. I’m actually an impossible stickler, and a painfully slow songwriter. I sometimes sit on an unfinished song for years. Like “The Luckiest,” or the title track from my most recent studio album, So There. I had originally planned for “So There” to be a centerpiece on the 2005 record Songs for Silverman. At the time I was going to call that album Death of the Cool, in response to Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool. The vamp of the song “So There” was going to open Death of the Cool with an overt tip of the hat to Miles’s “Someday My Prince Will Come.” But Songs for Silverman ended up going in a different direction, and I didn’t get “So There” finished anyway. Albums and years went by and I kept not finishing that damn song—until I finally did. That’s a whole decade on a song—about as far from freestyling as it gets.
The most common question I’m asked about songwriting is whether the words or lyrics come first. And that’s a reasonable question. Hell, I ask my songwriter friends the same thing. We all want to know what the spark was. What was the first syllable the writer uttered before the musical sentence was complete? What stuck to the page first? For me, it’s almost always music. I believe my subconscious clues me in to my feelings by expressing them abstractly through music—a few notes, a musical sentence, that I don’t yet understand. I will follow the music to the edge of my lyrical comfort zone, because I firmly believe the music is about something and that’s for me to decipher. Often, the music fools me into writing something I’d rather not have revealed lyrically.