0

Tip Jar: Rewriting the Beatles

By Mark Winkler

That visual artists learn their craft by using a great master’s work as a tool is nothing new. When I was in Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum, I was fascinated to see that the great painter Rembrandt did many copies of works by artists he admired, such as Caravaggio and Titian, to learn their techniques. Paul Gauguin reproduced paintings by Van Gogh, and Andy Warhol studied his young contemporary Basquiat to see what he could learn, which resulted in their collaborative canvases. 

Using great songs as a template for your own songs is a valuable tool for any songwriter. There’s always a reason a song is a hit, and a great song has “great bones.” So, why don’t you go to the top, and rewrite The Beatles, who are undoubtedly (at least in my mind) the most significant pop group of the 20th century. John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison wrote dozens of excellent songs during their quite short tenure as The Beatles. The song of choice to use as a template in this exercise—“Penny Lane.”

The lyrics of “Penny Lane” are basically childhood reminiscences, told through a series of vignettes. Each verse contains a vignette, and the last verse brings some of the characters from the earlier verses together in a final scene. 

Winkler digresses…

In the early 1970s, I did rewrite Jimmy Webb’s classic “Wichita Lineman.” Here’s the story: I worked at the Los Angeles Music Center as an usher. In those days, the Music Center had three performance venues and a wide variety of musicians played there. It was a great place to see everybody from Aretha Franklin to Maurice Chevalier. 

My best friend—then and now—is Arnie Zepel, a fellow usher at the time. Every year, the ushers would have a talent contest and in this particular year, he wanted to win it, because a girl he wanted to impress was on the committee. Arnie, while a great guy, was not exactly a strong singer or dancer, so I had to come up with something to make him shine. My answer was to write a parody to “Wichita Lineman,” which I retitled “Music Center Usher.”

Instead of “I am a lineman for the county, and I work the main road,” I wrote, “I am an usher for the county, and I work the main floor.” I filled the lyrics with inside jokes that only an usher would get, and Arnie’s charming delivery and my spot-on lyrics won the talent contest and cinched him a date with the girl.

A parody is rewriting an existing song’s lyrics for deliberate comic effect. Weird Al Yankovic is a master at it, and he’s also very successful; he’s had a No. 1 album for each of the last five decades. Randy Rainbow, of YouTube fame, is another master of the genre. I’ve written parodies many times and find that adhering to the structure and rhyme scheme of a tune is a great tool to learn to write.

Songwriting Actions

Now, back to “Penny Lane,” here’s what you need to do: 

Rewrite the lyrics to “Penny Lane,” but keep the melody exactly the same. Retitle the song with another three-syllable location that had meaning for you as a child, like “Baldwin Hills,” “Omaha” or “Sherman Oaks.” Be sure to match the stress of the words “Penny Lane,” which is on the first syllable. For example, the New Jersey town of Bridgewater has three syllables, but the stress is wrong. You can tell by trying to sing the word “Bridgewater” to the melody that goes with the words “Penny Lane” in the song. If you want a New Jersey town for your song, try “Basking Ridge.” Sing it and you’ll hear why.

  Rewrite the vignettes in each verse of the song using scenes and characters from your childhood. For most writers, writing about your childhood can be a great way to access your emotions and the details only you know.

• Keep the Beatles’ scansion (length and rhythm of line) and rhyme scheme. It’s critical to memorize the melody exactly, which means literally playing the tunes over and over until you learn it. 

• In the first verse, lines two, three and four rhyme. 

• In the second verse, the lines two and three rhyme and then on line four, there’s an inner rhyme.

In the chorus, lines one and two rhyme and line three doesn’t.

Objectives of the Songwriting Actions

To learn how to write lyrics that match the melody of the song. When the lyrics match the melody, it is called prosody. Make sure you can match the Beatles’ melody in cadence and stress.

Learning to put your lyrics to a melody is a necessary ingredient in songwriting. Even if you have written the lyrics and the music together during the first verse, when you get to the second verse, you have to write different lyrics to the melody you have already set up. I find memorizing the melody of the tune ultimately much easier than thinking you’re matching the lyrics to the melody by counting up the syllables and notating what syllables get stressed. Only by singing the words to the melody will you know if they work as a unit. It’s a muscle you need to develop, that will get better with time. Also, knowing the melody immediately gets you to sing and make what you are doing “musical” and not an abstract exercise on some paper. 

If you are a lyricist, you do not need to be a good singer, but singing the tune will let you know a multiplicity of things about the interplay between the words and the music. A songwriter friend of mine says that until you “taste” the words in your mouth you don’t know if they work or not. 

To make sure you have enough “specificity” in your song: study the Beatles’ lyric. The vignettes in each verse are like little movies and the nouns and verbs are specific: a banker and a barber and a fireman, not just a guy, another man and a girl. In Nashville, songwriters call nouns and verbs that are very specific, the “furniture.” The more furniture the better.

To find the lyric for the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” copy this link

tinyurl.com/2jdxztnk