¶ Intro / Opening
Write a song, write a song.
¶ Mark Erelli's Illustrious Career
My guest today is an award-winning American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and touring folk artist, Marco Relli. Mark has produced albums for Lori McKenna. He's accompanied musicians, including Josh Ritter and Paula Cole. He's appeared on the Tim McGraw and Faith Hills Soul-to-Soul tour and has released over eleven albums as a solo artist.
In 2018, he wrote the critically acclaimed protest anthem titled By Degrees, featuring Lori McKenna, Roseanne Cash, Josh Ritter, Aeneas Mitchell, and Cheryl Crow. It's a song Roseanne Cash calls the most compassionate, vivid, and non-preaching anti-gun violence song she's ever heard. We're going to talk to Mark about the critical thinking that goes into songwriting. Mark breaks down his own personal songwriting process for us.
Demonstrating chord by chord, section by section, one of the songs off of his new record. And then he's gonna play the full song for the first time.
Gdzie jest?
All right, Marcarelli. There is so much to talk to you about. You I think I could do ten podcasts with you.
Let's do a series.
Oh let's do it. Let's do it. Like here's how he produces. Here's how he writes his fabulous lyrics.
Yeah.
Walk us through a process from one of your songs, maybe from your your new record.
¶ Evolution of Songwriting Discipline
Yeah, sure. So I mean I think just to start out with a few general rules. um and just general kind of signposts along my my songwriting evolution. When I was younger I'm forty seven now. When I was younger I thought that everything had to be written uh Via inspiration, which mainly came at night, because that was the brooding edgy time and songs were inspired by things. So how could you just write a song if you weren't inspired?
Uh, and that kind of got me um pretty far, or at least it was a good good s you know, kind of first few steps down the road. Towards learning how to do this. Um, but as I started to get deeper and deeper into songwriting, as I got older, as my life context changed. You know, I found that like my wife wanted to hang out at night. So I couldn't write songs always at night. Or, you know, my y before she was my wife and my she was my girlfriend, like she might want to go out on a date and
you know, that I would I couldn't just sit around and write songs all the time. Uh I'm also I've always been a morning person. So I think it's very important um to kind of Go with your natural rhythms and being a morning person is not the natural thing for
musician. I I don't I've met others but not they're not it's not the rule. So I finally realized that like and especially when I had kids that uh the kids would go to school in the morning or I could get up even earlier before anyone else got up. And I would write in the morning and I started writing in the morning. And it was just the process of breaking all these rules that you assume matter, you know, that you must be inspired, that you must be
writing at a particular time of day. I would just get up, open up the notebook, and write and just show up, you know? And that I think is where the craft would start to to kind of get developed and and strengthened like a m like a muscle, you know, because as you know, even if you do have that bolt of lightning sort of situation, which is what we all love and h hope for, um
You can only ride it for so long. It's very rare that you that that that powers you through to the end of the finished song. Um even if you do get through an entire first draft and you think it's great, you oftentimes c find yourself coming back and and editing it and that's where And so I find that just showing up
um at the page regularly things happen and that's not because I'm more inspired than than any other time. It's just because I'm actually doing the work. I do a lot of my greatest writing on airplanes. completely uh bereft of distractions and I also don't have a guitar in my hand. So a lot of times I will find myself riding on airplanes and I will come up with different harmonic structures.
and different melodic choices, just kinda humming to myself because I don't have the, oh, I'm just gonna go G, C and D like I always do, you know. I kind of find myself freed up from the limitations of my instrument, maybe inst uh limitations I don't even know are there. And then when I go to find the song and and really annotate it later on, once I have a guitar, it's like oh
That's really different and also cool. You know, so I think for me, just in general, my process of songwriting has been one of Coming up with these uh uh having these hard f hard and fast rules as I understand it, or being very opinionated about something and then breaking those those rules and or flipping those opinions on their end and say, Well, what if I didn't do that? What would happen then? And then all of a sudden, lo and behold
It works, you know. So I try not to be married, I guess, at this point to any one particular way of doing it. For uh That that kind of continued during the the pandemic too, you know, like I just was not inspired and not wanting to show up at the page at all.
¶ Co-Writing, Truth, and Life Experience
Um, and I had a little Zoom cocktail hour with my friend Lori McKenna, who as we know has no problem writing songs. And she said, I've never written more in my entire life than this year and I was like Dish, tell me what what the secret is, you know? And she said, Zoom co-writes, you know, you can co-write on Zoom. And I thought that sounds horrible.
You know. And then I thought, you know, a week later, okay, let me try it, you know, and I've came to love it. The thing that I get from Lori, I mean I think I'm always very keyed into things like internal rhymes. love internal rhyme almost to a fault. Um because I feel like it pr it gives your it gives your lyric some flow and some kind of dynamism. It doesn't just kind of
you know, block out at the end of every line that it that it li that the rhymes lined up. Like it kinda gives it some some kind of uh Propulsion in a way, you know, when it w as you skip from from these internal rhymes to internal rhyme. And and I love that. I mean that's what you're hearing with, you know, like a Bob Dylan or or uh And then A. S. Mitchell, you know, they're masters. Um so I I'll I'll find myself thinking of that.
Uh a little bit when I'm running with someone like Laurie and Laurie will say something to me like Yeah, but I think it's more true. Like people are more more think this. Like, don't you haven't you had that experience? You know, or she'll kinda bring it back to Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's songwriting and then there's also just like truth. And they don't always l l line up in a weird way. You want they eventually have to, but in the process of it, like you may be
doing some really cool songwriting maneuvers, but it may not be it may not really ring true. It doesn't have to be true in terms of factual, but it has to ring true in terms of other people seeing themselves in that s in in what you're writing.
And maybe not feel written, maybe just feel more natural to how you would say it.
Absolut absolutely. Like I it's so funny. We did Lori and I have only written a couple songs together, but we just wrote one. during the pandemic and um I had I had this exact situation where I thought, well, if this was the rhyme, then we it would almost give us a little more there'd be another internal rhyme and it would kind of it says the same thing, I think. Um and I brought it to her and she was like I kinda like it the way it is'cause it just feels It feels...
tr uh it feels more like how it actually feels in real life, you know. It's not like adding another layer of songwriting craft over it, you know? That's what you want. You wanna you wanna layer that over the lyric and then edit it and you know, clear the glass with Windex as much as possible so that you can't see that there's anything there, you know? Like and uh she's a she's a master at that. So I d I definitely get reminded uh of that premise.
Yeah. Is it true? Does it feel true?
Yeah, I think it's really easy to l to um lose sight of, right? Because it almost becomes like a Uh, especially if y the in sp the initial bolt of inspiration is worn off and now you're just trying to mechanistically get from point A to point B in a way that feels Um it you can kind of get bogged down in all those well w what can we rhyme with this? What structure can we use? What does it need this? Does it need a pre chorus?
That's all really good, but if it doesn't feel like someone else can see themselves in it, it's you're never gonna impress anyone with it, you know?
I love that.
Yeah. So I think that's you know, that's the That is the secret weapon of uh certainly of her song, right?
I think it's a good thing.
well worth keeping in mind when you know you're trying to write a song of your own. And of course, the way to do that is to just live a life that puts you in context, you know, in contact with that sort of truth. It it's to live a a real well-balanced life, you know? There's nothing I would much I would there's nothing I'd rather do than just sit around and make music.
But the songs are gonna get really boring after a while. I hear I went here on the road and I wrote and I've, you know, was missed you and I but I was living my dream and then I went here on the road. You know, it's like if that's all there is, that's all you're gonna really write about.
And it's it's not gonna be very interesting, you know. Um so I think the the key there is and I take this from Laurie too, who turns down, you know, more than I'll ever be offered is just You have to live a life w worth writing about or at least live a life that gives you that puts you in contact with the kinds of experiences that other people have so that when it comes time to write about them, you have some First hand knowledge.
Yeah, you filled the well.
Exac exactly. Exactly.
¶ "Rose Colored Rearview" Song Genesis
All right. All right. What are you gonna share with us?
So there's there's um a song that I I quote unquote co wrote with my friend Dinti Child who I've I've written a lot of stuff with and I I say quote unquote co wrote because I actually wrote the whole thing by myself but I was dissatisfied with how it ended and I brought him in To help me finish it, and it was tough. to get it finished, but um in the end I only used one line, specific line that he provided, but it was a very pivotal line and and I wouldn't have gotten there without it. So
He has a little bit of credit on this song, um, for for that, for sure. So rose colored glasses, you know, that's like a uh a trope or a uh uh you know a a a term for, you know, looking at things and seeing them in the best possible light. And I o also thought that that could be an accurate description for nostalgia. You know, everyone looks back and thinks, Oh, it was so much better.
uh or simpler or this or that. And um so I was trying to think of like rose colored, you know, n how do you convey nostalgia? And I was like well Yeah.
So don't.
Yeah. So I thought uh
Did you start with the phrase? Were you just sort of, you know, thinking of that cliche and thinking, All right, well, how can I twist this cliche into something and how can it relate to my life?
Absolutely. I was thinking of that phrase rose colored, you know, what could it be? And then, you know, there's the the the the driver's side or the the side view mirrors on your car, you know, objects maybe. Closer than they appear. Um and you know, the side view mirror didn't seem good, but rose colored rear view that that felt good. So I was like, okay, so we're looking back in um a very kind of maybe uh not entirely truthful positive light.
Or it may be our truth, but it may not be everybody's truth.
Did you sit down and then pick up the guitar or did you noodle around a little bit with lyric first? Like what
I think I probably sat down uh with the guitar and started to think about, okay, like what do I remember finding? And I think I had read somewhere recently about It's on the anniversary of Born in the USA. And I went back and looked at that record and I was thinking, like, my God, what a monster. monster record, not just comercially, but you know, artistically. And so I I was thinking of the role that that record and and uh played in my my personal life.
Um growing up. And uh so I started to think like, oh, that was you know, that was the time when like guys like Bruce Ringstein. huge pop stars, you know. It's not that they're not big now, but they were pop stars and uh like ruling the charts. So, you know, then that led to the
There was a time.
And we all watch the same screen Springsteen was made. Everybody had a hungry heart, you know. And so I was it started that once I had that part, I was in like, okay. We were all experiencing these big pop stars together. It's not like today where there's all this amazing kinds of music. There's there's more great music than there's ever been, but I'm not sure we're all keyed on to the same thing.
You know? So it's not I try I was trying not to be a Luddite, but I was just saying there was something powerful about the shared experience of having fewer options, you know. And then someone like a Springsteen, you know, was was truly mainstream and everyone was kinda rocking out to it, or so I thought. Um And uh so I kind of followed that um Major chords mostly.
¶ Challenging Nostalgia's Simple View
But then I wanted to kind of hint at How do you undermine or how do you shine a little bit of a light uh uh or foreshadow the fact that like nostalgia is ne is not necessarily everything that it it is cracked up to be? So I thought it would be kinda cool instead of repeating those same chords, just a change. So, I think that's a good question. So the next verse is uh
What do you think?
So this is a so I'm in the Kia B flat, but if you know with the cape on it
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Springsteen cords.
That same progression gets tweaked, so
🎵 Music
We weren't
Right. So then talking about how You know, back then you could work a certain way and and it would almost be enough. Like the way that the people in Springsteen songs could like save up, you know, for a house and and and and stuff like that. Where now it's it's really hard. So that just that's a good thing.
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You know, to me that kind of hinted at Something else was going on here. You know, and at the time when I started I was desperately hoping to be able to kind of explore that, not really knowing quite where I was gonna go, you know. Um, so then in the chorus, I think that's when it started to get interesting.
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And we all see it. Or am I only looking? This rose colored review. You know, so kind of laying out the version of nost continuing to lay out the version of nostalgia of things being simpler and easier and b everybody being more together. Um and then also at the same time wondering, like, or was it that way? You know? And then if it was that way, why was it that way? Was it just'cause things were better? Or m you know, maybe like maybe there was something else going on there, you know?
So in the second uh verse I start to think about um Like the my hometown feeling like family and I could ride my bike down any street and somebody always knew my name, right? And I really started to think about that because it's like that's the way that it was, but it was that way because women weren't in the workforce. You know, they were just moms at home because they had to be, by and large. And so that got me thinking, like, okay
what are you know, would they look back on this time with similar fondness or or maybe they had some dreams that they couldn't follow? I'm sure they did. I'm sure my own mom did. Um And so then it's you know, then I started to think about like this y this is really more complicated of a song than it than just looking back fondly on how things used to be and and can we get back to there, you know? Um
🎵 Music
Hold out in the p
You know, so jobs going overseas and like leaving people, you know, with some real pain that needed to be addressed and uh and we didn't need
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You know, just like That was um I'm kind of mixing up different communities. It's not necessarily my own community there, um, but I'm thinking more of like, you know, factory towns and mill towns and stuff like that. Um Again it's starting to get a little The dichotomy between the the wonder the wonderment of how great it used to be and the like wondr challenging that n reality is is is really sinking in at this point, you know? And uh that second chorus is the same as the first.
Um and then there's a great solo'cause you need need a great solo. And then the last verse, man, that's really where
¶ Nostalgia, Race, and Social Context
Where it hit me. Like, how do I how do I say that nostalgia is complicated and why is it complicated? And that's where Dinti came in. Dinty gave me this one line No, he was in the court. Sorry, I s I'm I'm getting ahead of myself. The last line, the last verse was about um was written during the uh NFL kind of f flag controversy. Uh right. And um it was also kind of um in the in the uh
Let's see, when did would this have been in the Trump administration? He was he he was 2016, right? Yeah. So yeah, I wrote this in 2018. And I finished it the morning. I went into the studio to record it on the last day of the sessions. So I was thinking about like uh, you know, the the challenges that African Americans had been experiencing for a long time and that were really kind of coming to another boil since the Civil War uh the um civil rights period.
And um and I wanted to to put that in there because While some things might have been simpler and better for me as a white male when I was younger. Um you don't have to go back too far to have things be really demonstrably not better for black people in this country, you know? In incredible viol violence. Um
segregated, you know, restaurants and travel and and lynchings and, you know, horrible things, you know? And while I would never purport to speak for um you know, for a black man or to the African American experience. I can as a white man say that like yeah. And my nostalgia was was not everybody's nostalgia, and it's wrong to assume that. Um So the last verse goes uh
There was a time when
And we thought we knew. When we stood in the And I think I had a an a a previous line about like, you know, taking a knee or something like that. From there it's like
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Only one So like
I don't know if women feel as nostalgic as men for a time when their, you know, place was in the home and they couldn't vote and th you know, things like that. And I don't think that like Uh you know, as we were talking about just a a couple of minutes ago that maybe the African American experience looks at nostalgia a little bit differently. So I was like, Well, who is really nostalgic here? It's just guys like me.
And they're the ones that don't want it to change because they had it pretty great. And that's not really the way it's gonna be moving forward, as far as I could see, you know. It was a very tumultuous time, but to me that was kind of Um emblematic of of white male supremacy kind of being in its death rows and it's taking it's it's taking a while, but I d I do think that it it will eventually move towards something a little more equitable and for everybody.
Um
But that's what I was trying to get at in this song. Like, who gets to define nostalgia and What does it look like? And maybe everyone didn't share that, you know? And maybe that's a way maybe some people are using it as an excuse. to prevent l looking at t you know, s the way things are now and how we can improve
What I think is so great about it.
¶ Applying Critical Thinking to Lyrics
the way you're talking and thinking about this is like this is the critical thinking of songwriting. It's do I Do I stay in the same place? Is every verse gonna just look back and go say the same thing? Yeah, that was better. Yeah, that was better. And now you're going, all right, I'm gonna end this story. with the biggest ide the biggest, deepest idea. Where is this whole thing going?
Absolutely. Yeah, and I and critical thinking that's a that's a perfect way to describe it. I mean it It's not it's just basic critical thinking. Examining assumptions, examining uh you know, comparing your experience to other people, trying to uh have empathy and compassion. Um holding things up to the light and see if they still you know, if anything still shines through or not, you know?
That is Yeah. That is critical thinking. And you know, that's something that I think that we this is a whole different conversation about, you know, education in the United States and whatnot. But I was lucky enough to to have teachers that Reinforced and and uh and taught me how to think for myself and think critically. And that comes out in the song, right? Uh and it you know, it it got to that point where, you know, we there did
at this very climactic line, you know, only white men miss the good old days. It ain't coming back. I was like, I guess I could just do the same thing last chorus again, but is it feels like there's something more that needs to happen. And that's when I had Dinti come over and be like, What what happened?
And um I'd also been working on a suggestion from um my producer Zach Hickman um who had said, you know, maybe this maybe you could kind of Blow out a wall in this last chorus here and expand it. And I thought, Okay, how do I do that? I don't know. And Dinty was the one that came over and and of all the lines that that I struggle with, he was saying, um And we all watched the same screen, but we didn't see the same thing.
And so not only did did he reference the first go back to the early part of the song, which was a wonderful way to button it up, but he also now everything that we've learned during the song sets us up for this notion of understanding that You know, we might have all been watching uh Springsteen or leave it to Beaver or some of these idealized, you know, sitcom families. And maybe we weren't all seeing the same thing. Maybe
It goes to the whole idea of representation, right? You know, like maybe s maybe there were segments of American society that weren't seeing themselves In these stories that we were all turned. Um, and that really just blew my mind and it was I immediately knew that that was that was th both the right thing to say in this last chorus and it was also a way to Expand upon um the form a little bit and and do that thing that Zach had suggested of of banning the chorus. So that last chorus is
Was there a time? And it also changes the possessor here. Oh was there?
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It's not my mind anymore because now this is something we're reckoning with societally, hopefully. Um
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Yeah.
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Light though!
Yeah, I mean I'm hate to give give my admit that I'm giving my own self Uh some chills but like I just remember writing that and it coming together the whole the racial elements the different the way that different people can experience the same time and have different versions of nostalgia and who gets to tell those stories. And all this stuff came together literally at like five o'clock in the morning, the m the last day of the sessions.
Well, a couple of years ago Mary Gaucher uh came to Berkeley and sat in a my lyric writing one class and We just sort of did a demonstrated co write together so that the kids could watch what happened and basically it was me telling Mary this story about my dad and my brother and her writing down what felt like lyric or ideas for the song and plays the chorus and she goes, Nope.
¶ Pursuing the "Truest Truth" in Song
Nope, there's no goosebumps yet. And so she changes one thing about the chorus, plays it, and everyone in the room instantaneously got goosebumps. Because Mary said, Is this the truest? True as truth. Which is a Which is a hard call for all of us to follow. Like, oh okay, is it the truest of the true? But I think I love that you fought for this song.
I know, you know, j just in full disclosure, I know that there was a time in my life that I would not have known I would not have fought for the song in to this extent, nor would I have recognized that I needed to. Yeah. And that's just I mean, that's just part of growing up, you know, and doing it w'cause everything, you know, when you haven't done it a lot starting out
Every time it happens just seems so freaking miraculous and amazing, you know. It's like I did it again. I'm a genius, you know? Like and it's and everything is new, you know? So'cause you haven't done it before, but after you do it You know, uh several dozen, you know, times then it's like, Oh, well, I did this before. Is there something else that I can do? You know, and uh you may not you may not know how to do that thing yet. Right. So I I think there's this is not a song I could have written
as a younger man and a younger artist, both from a craft perspective, song and song craft perspective, and also just from a life perspective. You know, I wasn't When I was in my twenties I was not, um, nostalgic for anything. I was hungry for new experiences. Even now I'm not very n I d I'm not a particularly nostalgic person. I don't enjoy going back or even using that word back. Yeah. Um
because I've done it. Now I wanna go have new new experiences. So I I just felt like this was a song that really was like of a particular time in my life and I think the goal as a songwriter is to continue to write songs that feel like they're uh age appropriate, you know, like that they're commensurate with your life experience and your artistic prowess. You know, as you get older and have seen more and maybe
Yeah. Know more about some things and recognize that you know less and less about a lot of things. And that kind of humility married with the life experience and the you know, the recognition of when something needs to be changed and tweaked to give you goosebumps. That's the goal, right? To stay on the the songwriting train as long as possible and get better and better at
And a song like this makes people think without it feeling preachy, which is wonderful that you need I think I think your first pronoun was I, right? To broaden the scope of including the pronoun our.
Yeah, yeah. W was there a time when it was only or was it only in my mind and then w was there a time was it only in our mind, you know? I I think I think that's important to kind of draw it it's one word, but it draws now you're part of the story listening to this.
I love the fact that you go, I can't rhyme with nostalgia. There are those words where you're just not there's just not a rhyme. So okay, let's put it inside the song so we don't have to do that to our
Yeah, I did get to work it in there. Haze is a lot of an easy a lot easier rhyme, you know.
And you know, also if you had tried to be true to like what rhymes with allegiance, but instead you thought, well, I don't have to, I don't have to find a word that matches it that has three syllables. I will match that with we meant.
Yeah. Well, you know, this is that those near rhymes, that's something that actually I feel like I'm just starting to get. the hang of and I'm just starting to look for opportunities, maybe even to to choose those over the perfect rhyme. Yeah. And I you know, I I mean obviously I've listened to uh a lot of like the you know, the the the songwriting masters, you know, whether it's, you know, D Dylan and Joni Mitchell and, you know, the Great American songbook.
folks, but I feel like at this point I take way more inspiration from my my peers. And uh you know I definitely the near rhyme thing is just straight up Aeneas Mitchell'cause sh she's just the near rhyme queen. I'm just it's it's nuts. And she she lays it all out in her she wrote a book called Working on a Song about her experience uh and the evolution of writing Hades Town.
I just got that book in the mail and we're gonna go see that show in Boston next month.
Oh man. I envy you to see to to kind of be experiencing that for the first time. I mean, it's it's mind blowing. And then that book, the way that the the degree to which she w was um rewriting and then once it got to Broadway she was, you know, forced to rewrite a lot of it. Um I will never complain about editing anything ever again, you know, because you see that she lays it all out in the book and she would be a great one to have on your podcast. Because it really it really
You can see it get better, you know. So
You know, if we're going to be a nerd for a second, you know, allegiance and we meant would be sort of what they call a mosaic rhyme where you're taking two little pieces of other words and matching them up against a longer word. And Arthur Hamilton, who wrote Cry Me a River, not that you would ever use the word plebeian today, but um he had told me love was too plebeian, told me you were through with me and now.
So it's just so fun to to play with that stuff and I just I love your craft and I I just I'm so happy that you're here and and would you play your whole song as it as it was finished?
¶ Live Performance: Rose Colored Rearview
Absolutely. Yeah. I'm I'm gonna uh croak it out in in my morning post tour. All right.
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This rose colored real.
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And face the flag.
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Okay. I love that almost as much as I love the recorded version of that.
¶ Deeper Dive into Song Structure and Chords
Oh, thank you so much. I was hearing more even more stuff that we didn't even talk about, like how the The verses are declarative and the the choruses are uh interrogative, like questions. Was there a time? You know, like I'm wondering right off the bat if I'm if my memory is even reliable.
You know. And then there's like that at the end of the song we were talking about chord structures earlier. Um I mean it seems like it's just G, C, and D and some A minors and stuff, but it there's a there's a lot of Specific voicings happening. So on that last chorus where it gets blown out a bit and extended, I'm you instead of I'm going like a
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Over a three, I guess that's Also kind of still unresolved, you know. It's not like a C to an A minor, you know, it's like a
What were the c were the cord what's the first chord where you have a sustain? Is that a suspicion?
So the it's a it's a susph.
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I'm not going Can we hear that?
Play it without the sus and let's see w how that would feel.
Let's see. All right. Uh
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Uh
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You know, having that low B flat droning against the chord changes. implies uh to me that like it's the thought is continuing. Like we're not done. I haven't finished saying what I what I'm trying to say yet. Um I'm not landing on the one yet, you know like
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Rose colour rear view. And then it's like, okay, we're finally back, you know.
a lot of writers, they are so clear on how they're feeling and they're so clear on the choices they're making to support that feeling that they may not be able to consciously say, I chose to do that, but they are doing that because that's how it all should feel.
¶ Blending Intuition with Musical Theory
Absolutely. I I think I mean I have an interesting perspective on this maybe because I'm not a trained musician. Anything I know about um musical theory, which is mostly just kind of like Nashville number kind of system sort of stuff, I picked up um, through the course of being a sideman and trying to teach myself to be a sideman. Um, but I don't know why certain things work musically
harmonically and I don't I don't understand that. But I did study I did listen to a lot of songs and think about them kind of structurally and architecturally. Oh, what is is that a pre chorus or is that where's the bridge? Is that or what's the chorus? Does this even have a chorus, you know? And um just marveling at all the different ways that you can put a song together and make it work. And I I I s I think that is important because you can't really
You can't really do anything super creative in terms of uh innovation if you don't know what's already been done, you know? You can't you can't claim innovation if other people have already done it. So you need to kinda know w w what other people have done in order to say, like, Okay, well that's great and I'm gonna try it this way and see if it works, you know. And that way if you break the r the rules and and it
And a really cool thing happens, you can say, like, well yeah, that's that's my little contribution, you know, and someone else will come along and break that rule and contribute something after me, you know? But I do think it's important to kind of realize that all this stuff doesn't just kind of thin air. There is there are reasons for why things work and why th they m might feel unsatisfying.
And my background is not so much in music, but in biology. I I have a masters in evolutionary biology. And people would say the same thing to me all the time. Like are does is don't like you studying the the birds and the and the bees, doesn't that like
Well that's a bad example. I wasn't studying the birth and peace. I was I was studying insects. But like can't you just like appreciate the uh the uh the beauty of a butterfly? Don't doesn't studying it kind of take something away? And I was like, no, it just Enriches my experience of that butterfly because the more you delve into something, yes, the more you might know, but also for everything you know, there's
eight or ten or a dozen more questions that arise in the course of really c carefully considering it. So The act of of studying something uh you know really concretely just to me leads to more wonder and more mystery and draws you deeper in. And I I feel the same way about music. You can never really know it.
¶ Favorite Chord Progressions and Voicings
know it all. So I d I do think there's a lot to be said for studying As many aspects of your craft as you you know, you can kind of m make yourself do. I still can't make myself do guitar scales, but But I
I think you're good.
I'm t I try I I can d I n I get excited about what I can do and I'm t constantly pushing myself to try and do new things. It it might be easier if I had more you know, extra skills, but I am always trying to kind of build
stuff. Well I want to ask you when you so in the in the first part of the song where you were using just kind of the classic one, four, five chord progression, and then you decided to change it to sort of First of all, it made the song more interesting because it was surprising that you went to the two minor. Did you play anything special on that or was it just a triad?
Every once in a while I might do like a installation.
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A minor seven is that the other one is a little bit more. And it um Or C minor seven without the K bone. That's that's a little more open ended. But I I think I kind of favor you know, this to me is like kinda comes from the like Springsteen kind of Melencamp tradition, you know, of like kind of meat and potatoes. sort of rock you know, so the sonics of it come from that uh tradition and and then the lyrics of course
Well they're the best storytelling, Corey.
Yeah, right. I mean I think it's cool to I've I've never really had to screw around with like open tunings and stuff. I've done a few things in Open D, but for the most part, like I never get bored with like just a give me a good G chord. You know. You can capo it even all the way up here the way Lyle Lovett does in if I had a boat. You know, it's still just fascinating to me.
How now when you play a G chord, do you have a s a favorite way to play that?
I don't. I don't. I do all I do all the um I use all the different ones. I I mean I'll do the standard kind of fingering. I don't know if And I'll do uh or I'll sometimes flip it around so that that my pink is a little bit.
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The uh whatever note that is in the B string B
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I love I love all that stuff, you know. I'll I'll do any number. My favorite G in vr uh voicing now w uh currently and I have to keep myself from using it too much is add adding the um A
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I kinda it's got a nice kind of washy kind of feel to it to me that I that I like. Instead of just sitting there strumming a G chord, you know?
I just got the two.
A little bit of filigree, you know, a little bit of kind of finished work.
¶ Producer's Role in Form Innovation
So your producer in Nashville, um, d Zach Hickman.
Right. Yeah, he lives up here. The two of us went down. Yeah, we he was the one thing I brought with me to the new um the new situation down there and new players and new I'd made everything I'd ever made was in New England and I said, All right, it's time to try something different. And I tried this this these group of guys that I really had connected with and they all happened to live down there. So I said, All right, I'm bringing bringing one, you know
Well, I love I love his idea of expanding, extending that chorus because again, that you know, shifting the form, surprising the listener on you know, the sus chords and also expanding that last chorus and then adding that content was such a great idea because it made the song even better.
Yeah, and Zack does not weigh in on songwriting stuff a ton, but when he does, I really pay attention because he's a bass player primarily. Um, and you know, ba bassists they're talk about people that have to be intimately familiar with the architecture and the structure of a song. I mean, if you make a mistake as a bass player and play the wrong thing. It's n you there is no hiding it. And uh so, you know, he was when he m made that reference of kind of expanding it
To me, it it immediately resonated and it reminded me of um like the Picasso Museum in Paris. I had visited the Picasso Museum. years ago and uh I was the in the Picasso Museum they kind of blew out walls in in cubist shapes the way that
mirrored the the display and the art. Or the the the display kind of mirrored the art. And walking through the Picasa Museum All I could think of was Bob Dylan because he was working in twelve bar forms and and these you know, these traditional music forms, ballad forms, and he was blowing out a wall here, you know, like combining two rooms there, you know, putting in a window here. Um
you know, putting in a fire pole from the second floor to the first floor. I mean, he was really, you know, tricking them out. And uh so that kind of way of really s kind of screwing around with traditional structures. Um really resonated with me. As soon as Zach said that, I said, Oh right, like the Picasso Museum, like Bob Dylan. Got it. Right. Oh it just was immediate, you know. Yeah.
Always think of a metaphor.
But if I had never been to the Picasa Museum, I don't know if I would have known that, you know? And there and now we bring it back to the importance of like living a life.
Living a life. Yeah. I love. Okay. So I just want to encourage everyone to grab your record blindsided. There is just um I don't know. I you know, I had a couple of lines that I grabbed from the whole record and just I loved the metaphor of tender soldier. I love your town now. I think that's such a great. Take on a breakup song. And um, I also loved the lyric um Dawn spilled on the mountain.
Ah yes.
¶ Conclusion and Mark Erelli's Legacy
So I wanna say, after all of the reviews I read about your record, if I had written a review, I would have said, and I hope this I hope this is a good thing to you, but I would say if I were going to describe you, I would say if Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Van Morrison had a child.
Oh man.
Mark a rally.
Oh my god, that's That'll do. I'll take that. Yeah. No, that's I mean, God that
Really. It was such a pleasure to hear. Thank you for just being so wonderful at breaking things down and sharing what you do. And um, you know, I just I have so much more to say to you, but I know that we're we're out of time. But just thank you so much for today.
Oh, it's my pleasure and uh you know, this will probably Well I'll just say this and so It's my pleasure. I'm so honored to be on on this kind of thing where where it allows you to kinda get under the hood and really talk about the craft of songwriting. It's um it can be inside baseball stuff, but it But for those of us that are into it, it's endlessly fascinating and really rewarding when someone, you know, thinks you're doing a good job. So thank you.
Absolutely. All right, Mark.
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What's in a song?
To find out more about Marcarelli His tour schedule and his music, go to marcarelli dot com. That's M A R K E R E L L I dot com. And to find out more about upcoming guests and future events, go to scarletkeys.com. If you'd like a copy of my book, The Craft of Songwriting, Music, Meaning and Emotion, you can find it on my website or through Amazon.
I really appreciate you listening. If you know of anyone who would like the podcast, please share it, and it would mean so much to me if you would leave a rating and a review. Now go write a song.