Free Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music by Phil Ramone Page A

melody of a song.
    Paul Simon would hum a melodic line in the studio, and it was a privilege to hear him develop it into a song. The most exciting partof the process for Paul was playing a new song for someone, and he and I would often sit in his study listening to new tunes.
    “This is a guitar song,” he would say, or, “This one’s definitely piano.” Paul’s guitar songs have a palpable folk feel—a chunky rhythm. His piano songs are tinged with jazz and blues inflections, and he tends to experiment more with their rhythms. I loved being part of those moments.
    My curiosity is aroused by the kind of on-the-spot creativity that some songwriters possess, and it invariably begs a host of questions: “Did that little melody just pop into your head? How long have you been thinking about it? What brought it to the surface? How will you go about finishing it? How long will it take?”
    For songwriters who are blessed with “the gift,” songs dwell somewhere within; they’re germinating all the time.
    Paul Simon once explained how a musical idea embeds itself in his mind, and how he follows its lead:
    “I write from instinct, from an inexplicable sparkle. I don’t know why I’m writing what I’m writing. Usually, I sit and let my hands wander on my guitar. I sing anything [and I] play anything. When I come across a surprising accident I start to develop it. Once you take a piece of musical information, there are certain implications that it automatically contains: the implication of that phrase elongated, contracted, inverted, or in other time signatures. You start with an impulse and go with what your ear likes.”
    For Paul Simon and Billy Joel, the process of writing and recording are intertwined. Each of them writes and rehearses their songs in the studio, although their approaches are vastly different.
    Paul is precise; he nurtures his music in an organized, cerebral way. Generally, each of his songs is polished before he records them.
    Because he often coproduces his sessions, Paul listens critically in the studio. He prefers to make the instrumental tracks first and overdub the vocals later. Whether he’s making music tracks or layingdown a vocal, Paul pays careful attention to the phrasing, tweaking every note and word.
    Billy’s approach is just the opposite. He always has plenty of ideas brewing, but nearly all of his songs are born in the studio.
    Billy treats a session like it’s a live performance: writing, rewriting, arranging, and rehearsing with his band, relying on the lively interaction between everyone to push things along. Perfection isn’t the goal; Billy doesn’t obsess over small mistakes if the feeling is there.
    When Paul and I make an album, he starts with a few of the songs fully written. His studio time is spent working on the arrangements until he gets exactly what he wants. Still Crazy After All These Years took nine months to make.
    Once he begins writing and recording an album, Billy works rather quickly. From rehearsal to completion, our first album together— The Stranger —took only six weeks to finish, because Billy had a number of songs written before we began recording and the band was already playing them onstage. Subsequent albums took a bit longer—nine or ten weeks—because Billy wrote everything for them from scratch.
    For Paul, the process of writing and recording merged—but in an analytical way.
    In Paul Zollo’s book Songwriters on Songwriting , Paul Simon offered some thoughts, and what he said neatly coincides with my theory that understanding the nature of writing is 90 percent of making a record better:
    “My writing has always been connected to record-making, and one of the characteristics of my work is that I have very good aural recall—I remember sounds of a lot of things,” Paul explained. “I remember how records I grew up with went—and I remember obscure records, and what part of the record I liked. ‘Did I like the drum sound?’ These were