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The Art of Songwriting . By Richard West . New York : Bloomsbury , 2016. 256 pp. ISBN 978-1-4725-2781-3
The Cambridge Companion to the Singer Songwriter . 367 pp. Edited by Katherine Williams and Justin A. Williams . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2016. ISBN 978-1-107-68091-3
The Singer-Songwriter Handbook . Edited by Katherine Williams and Justin A. Williams . 277 pp. New York : Bloomsbury , 2017. ISBN 978-1-6289-2030-7
Reviews
Making songs, singing songs and thinking about songs is a big part of many people's musical lives. Where once the thoughtful and creative young person might have written poetry, or painted watercolours, now, along with the film script and the soon-to-be Arts Council-funded Instagram account, songs are waiting to be written. And so, in university music courses, the practice and study of songwriting is gradually becoming embedded. It follows that there will be a growth of accompanying literature to help the aspiring songwriter, teacher and thinker to make more sense of the form. Richard West's The Art of Songwriting provides a study of songwriting practice, anchored in practical experience along with some academic theory as underpinning; Williams and Williams's The Cambridge Companion to the Singer Songwriter is, as the title suggests, more firmly anchored in the academic approach to the subject; Williams and Williams also provide a more teaching-based study in The Singer-Songwriter Handbook.
The Art of Songwriting situates itself firmly in the tradition of books like Jimmy Webb's (1998) Tunesmith and John Braheny's (2006) The Craft and Business of Songwriting. The book is elegantly organised into three sections: 'Songs', 'Songwriters' and 'Songwriting'. The first section provides an overview of the field, introducing West's own songwriting history and practice, wrestling with the definition of what constitutes a song, with the slippery borders between a more traditional, Tin Pan Alley-derived idea of the composed song and the increasingly useful understanding of the song as recording or track. This section goes on to balance the competing viewpoints and perspectives on what it is to look at songs. The section on words is also reassuringly clear-headed, West acknowledging the difficulties 'in evaluating lyric outside of its musical and performative context' (p. 23), but mercifully sidestepping the curious notion in popular music academia that any analysis or...