Too often, when we look at a life—even our own—we see only the peaks, as if life were a string of isolated events, like islands floating in an ocean. It’s only when you dive down into the depths that you find the great oceanic floor that connects them and from which they all arise.
Songwriting is the great ocean floor of my life. Dream up a melody and some words and string them together and suddenly you’ve made something from nothing—a song. Even as a kid it struck me as rather god-like and magical.
My childhood in Coral Gables, Florida was nice and uninteresting, so we’ll skip over that. The real fun began when I reached teenagerhood and my family moved back to Los Angeles. My big sister entered her pseudo-beatnik phase. She started hanging out in coffee houses and listening to folk music, then she joined a folk trio and began singing on stage.
I tagged along whenever I got the chance. I heard Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Bud and Travis, Dick Rosmini, and Judy Henske. I listened to Ian and Sylvia, Phil Ochs, and Dave Van Ronk on records. I learned their songs. I got a guitar and a copy of Alan Lomax’s “Folk Songs of North America,” the bible of every would-be folk singer. I bought an ancient banjo and got a copy of Pete Seeger’s “How to Play the 5-string Banjo.”
I began to write my own songs. I wrote a lot of them: songs that sounded like folk songs on guitar, songs that sounded like my favorite movie themes on piano. There was a kind of urgency about it. I had no idea how I would do it but I knew that making my living as a songwriter was the New Imperative. It was not a decision I consciously made; it was a compulsion. I was fifteen.
And then The Beatles invaded
On a pleasant Sunday evening in February, 1964, I was sprawled on the shag carpet watching TV when the The Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Probably every adult within hailing distance of my age remembers where they were that night (including the color of the shag carpet).
This is one of those seemingly isolated mountain peaks rising out of the ocean. To understand the enormous impact it had on a generation and indeed a whole culture, one has to look below the surface. The overall cultural changes were slow in coming, but an entire generation of musicians and songwriters woke up the next day to a world that looked like we’d landed in Oz. Everything was suddenly in Technicolor.
I remember getting ready for school in the morning with KRLA blaring “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” Riding the bus to school with a transistor radio glued to my ear: “She Loves You.” Doing my homework every night with Meet the Beatles on the turntable. I had found the most wonderful music in the world and I listened to it every waking moment. It was fun and sexy and exciting. It was a carnival ride at full-speed.
It seemed the world had built up to this great, loud, exciting music in a rush of speed. On Balboa Island, Dick Dale and The Deltones were grinding out the wail and drone of massive surf at the Rendezvous Ballroom. Local L.A. bands were heating up the Sunset Strip at Ciro’s. We twisted the night away at the Stratford Club. Mose Allison was grooving at Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse. I wanted to be everywhere, to hear it all.
The Dylan Revelation
Then the other shoe dropped. Bob Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home in March, 1965. I played it for hours, over and over and over. I had an unslackable thirst for it. My parents looked at me like I was a maniac, which I was. All they heard was a nasal-voiced non-singer chanting unintelligible nonsense. To me it was passionate, hypnotic, emotional, physical truth.
Bob Dylan’s rock mantras, The Beatles, the folk boom of the early ’60s, surf music: each of these had an immense impact on me. Yet, at the time, each was a distinct and separate musical entity, an isolated mountain peak. We did not know they were all slouching toward San Francisco where they would become psychedelic-political-folk-rock. Or London where they would become thrashing-political-punk-rock. I just liked the way they sounded. And more than that… I liked the way they made me feel.
I discover the real power of songs
Thus I discovered the real, potent capability of music, all types of music, all genres. Good music makes us feel. When I looked beneath the surface I found there was indeed a deep level where all these isolated island peaks were connected. And that connection was emotion. These things you could make out of nothing, these songs, had tremendous power to communicate and evoke feelings. I was shy, unhappy, isolated and had no confidence in myself at all. But I could write songs! Everbody loved the Beatles, people were wild about Bob Dylan. Maybe, if I wrote the right song, I could make people love… me.
Of course I thought this was a brilliant idea at the time and no doubt uniquely my own. The truth is that anyone who has ever attempted to write a song has probably had exactly the same idea. Writing songs to get love. When it works, there is no higher high; when it doesn’t work there is no more bitter rejection.
Landing on my feet…eventually
My late teens and early twenties were unsettled years. I moved from place to place. Los Angeles, San Francisco, France (where Nick Drake and I shared a few songs), London (where British singer-songwriter John Martyn recorded my song “Sandy Grey”), and Boston (where the poet I lived with wanted me to stop writing songs). Through it all, I kept on writing songs. (I left the poet.)
Eventually I settled back in Los Angeles where I proceeded to do what I thought I was supposed to do: write radio-style hit songs. It was not an easy profession in which to survive. Most successful recording artists were writing their own songs, or their producers wrote them, or writers who had already had big hits wrote the songs. Where was I supposed to fit in?
Not knowing any other way to make a living as a songwriter, I spent several frightening, impoverished years getting a foot in the door only to discover that I actually didn’t like writing hit songs for radio. But then someone I knew, who knew someone who knew someone, told me about a chance to write songs for a brand new thing called the Disney Channel. By the way, that’s usually how these things happen, so my advice is meet as many “someones” as you can.
The hard work part
Over the next three years, I wrote and produced hundreds of songs for the Disney Channel series Welcome to Pooh Corner and Dumbo’s Circus. I wrote the theme song for another series called You & Me, Kid. Eventually, in the early 1990s, I produced albums with the Disney characters, Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, the Little Mermaid, and more. There’s a whole generation of kids who grew up listening to my songs and as a result of that (and performance royalties) I’ve been amply rewarded.
After working with Disney, in 1994 I was hired to run A&R and production for a division of Rhino Records, Kid Rhino. There I oversaw the production of more than 60 albums with the Looney Tunes, Flintstones, Animaniacs, Sailor Moon, and, even Ronald McDonald (some of the best albums I worked on).
Time for a transition
When I left Rhino in 1997, I was exhausted and felt it was time for something different. I left the wonderful, wacky world of cartoon characters and went back to my roots, writing and singing acoustic songs. A few years earlier, I had been given an album called “Time of No Reply” by Nick Drake, my old friend from school days in the South of France. I’d run across his three beautiful albums years earlier in the import bin of Tower Records on Sunset Blvd. Now, I went back to them.
I became intrigued, almost obsessed, with his songs. After years of playing his albums, I began to hear, for the first time, what he was really doing. His use of melody and chords was far ahead of his time and was a revelation to me. I began to look for a way to fold his ideas into my own songs and to communicate my discoveries to others. Since his death at just 26 years old, guitar players had kept his memory alive, exploring his unique tunings and fingerpicking patterns. Now, I wanted to show that there was more, much more.
Joe Boyd, Nick’s producer, was encouraging when I talked to him about it, and music journalist Ian MacDonald urged me to write a piece for the British music magazine MOJO. I struggled to capture what I heard and express it in a way that anyone, including non-musicians, could understand. When the piece was completed it was published under the title “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” (You can read it here under it’s original title, “Nick Drake: A Place to Be.”)
Following the road wherever it goes
Exploring the songwriting innovations of Nick Drake eventually led to an invitation to write the liner notes for the 2007 re-release of the boxed set Fruit Tree, as well as the compilation of early recordings titled Family Tree. By that time I had been through all of Nick’s songs many times, listening and learning. And I had opened up my explorations, studying the songs of other singer-songwriters like Sting and Peter Gabriel. Today, I continue to explore and analyze the work of successful artists, including Adele, Ed Sheeran, Imagine Dragons, and songs in all of the mainstream and indie genres.
Eventually, I wrote my books Shortcuts to Hit Songwriting and Shortcuts to Songwriting for Film & TV. I put everything I had learned into them and I still kept on learning. Even now, I discover new songwriting skills and tools just about every time I study a new song. And I still get excited about trying them out and sharing them with others. I had no idea this is where my passion for writing would take me, but I guess that’s another lesson I’ve learned: You just never know where the road is going.
Well, if you’ve read this far then you know everything about me that’s worth knowing. It’s the education of an artist. It’s a lifelong process; it never stops. Anyone can learn if they’re willing to sweat it and spend the time. It’s not easy and I don’t think anyone does it unless they feel compelled to do it, but I would not, and could not, live any other way. I write songs, and I write about songs, and I will keep doing that as long as I live. And I’ll keep working on my diving bell so I can go deeper and deeper, down into the ocean floor where everything is connected.
Robin Frederick, Los Angeles, CA