Write Together, Rock Together
Somewhere in our collective subconscious is the presumption that bands should write every single word and note for themselves. But punk history tells us that collaboration is just what communities do.
I.
At some point in the mid-2000s, perhaps not coincidentally at the same time that pop-punk and emo was experiencing a cultural moment, I started getting random calls from both people I knew in the music industry and industry friends-of-friends. They wanted to speak hypothetically: Have you ever considered writing songs for other bands? they asked. Or maybe just get in a room with them and write a song together? At the time, I was genuinely confused. I knew that pop and R&B artists worked with outside writers all the time, but it never occurred to me that rock bands ever did that. I declined, but my knee-jerk dismissal of the question was riddled with what felt like punk guilt: Oh, I would never do that, I replied. Shouldn’t bands write their own songs? And shouldn’t singers sing their own words?
In retrospect, everything I told them only sounded like the punk thing to say, but none of it was rooted in punk history. From the beginning, Joey Ramone sang lyrics that the other Ramones wrote; later in their career, the band invited outside writers including Richard Hell and Plasmatics’ Jean Beauvoir to contribute. One of my favorite Clash songs of all time, “The Magnificent Seven,” would never have come into being without that groove written by Norman Watt-Roy and Mickey Gallagher of the Blockheads—musicians who had been brought in as session players and were not, in fact, members of the Clash. Even Dave Vanian, the legendary singer for the Damned, has only four writing credits over his band’s first three albums.
The thing is, you could also argue that hardcore, up until that point, had been a group effort as well. When a demo of Walter Schreifels singing most of the Start Today album leaked in the early ‘90s, we all got to hear the inner-workings of what most of us believed to be an unorthodox way of writing hardcore songs—a model where singers didn’t write and writers didn’t sing. The band suffered some mild criticism at the time, but not enough to diminish the fact that, however they got there, Gorilla Biscuits made one of the most classic hardcore albums ever. Thirty-something years later and no one really cares.
And what about Dag Nasty? When original singer Shawn Brown was unceremoniously kicked out of the band—“They told me right after we got off stage,” he said in one interview—his replacement, Dave Smalley, simply took Shawn’s existing lyrics and melodies and recorded Can I Say. (This was, of course, sonically corroborated with the 2010 release of Dag With Shawn.) That record is unfortunately a product of coerced outside writing, but it remains technically “outside writing” nonetheless.
I also think of Inside Out. There’s no question that Zack de la Rocha is an incredible lyricist in his own right, but when he told guitarist Vic DiCara that he wanted to name a song “No Spiritual Surrender,” Vic just ran with it and wrote the music and lyrics that you hear Zack sing on the record. That also rings true with my personal experience: When I joined the first iteration of 108 in 1992, Vic handed everyone a tape that he made on a four-track recorder where he played every instrument, programmed the drums on a machine, and sang every word, and just said, “Play this.” Which I did. If the outcome is a great song, why should there be anything wrong with how it became one?
As with so many other aspects of life, this real or imagined obsession with so-called purity that I had as a younger hardcore kid extended itself to this question as well. But when I look back on it now, I understand that I did not reject these offers to write for and with other people’s bands because I was towing some sort of well-considered ethical line or protecting punk precedent—even if that’s what I would have told you at the time. I rejected them because, at that stage in my life, I did not value unfettered collaboration with the same enthusiasm that you should expect from a person who professes to value community the way I do. At that stage in my life, I was more concerned with feeling righteous than connecting with people and making great things.
II.
Earlier this year, in an essay about hardcore lyrical styles, I wrote about a brief but memorable exchange that occurred on a 1986 episode of Donahue that focused on the New York hardcore scene. In a moment that I called “catastrophic,” Phil Donahue reads aloud the lyrics to Agnostic Front’s “Public Assistance” before sincerely asking, “Have we got racism here?” For his part, Vinnie Stigma offered a somewhat indistinct reading of the song, before sheepishly adding, “It speaks for itself.” But what’s more interesting is what he doesn’t say: As it happens, “Public Assistance” is one of five songs on Cause For Alarm with lyrics credited to the late Peter Steele—then-singer of Carnivore, and later, Type O Negative, but never a member of Agnostic Front. (The album also assigns non-band writing credits to Billy Milano of the Psychos and S.O.D., as well as to Nausea’s Amy Keim.) It’s respectable, I suppose, that neither Stigma nor Roger Miret ever threw Steele under the bus when the song was at its most controversial peak—they were the ones to record it and sing it, after all—but I’ve also always wondered how much of that was simply a function of not wanting to draw attention to the fact that they used an outside writer on the album. Hardcore can be ruthlessly territorial, after all.
So when One Step Closer announced that a new album was coming—the excellent All You Embrace, out this Friday on Run For Cover—I was actually surprised to see that they were highlighting their collaboration with outside writers as part of the album’s story. In this case, the band worked with Isaac Hale of Knocked Loose and Mat Kerekes of Citizen, and to hear singer Ryan Savitski tell it, One Step Closer’s decision to work with writers outside of the band was a wholly noncontroversial one.
“At the time, we already had so many songs written for the record, so it wasn’t like we really needed them to come in and write songs,” Savitski explains, in an interview that will be published in full on Thursday. “But I was like, this could be a good experience. We could learn a lot. [With Mat], we took three songs to him that were demoed out already, where we already had a good idea of how we wanted them to turn out, and we kind of gave him a little bit of everything just to see. Honestly, it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. I feel like I’ve taken away so much from the way he approaches music and the way he thinks about music. Isaac is one of the most talented people I’ve ever met, and he’s someone we’ve known since 2018. And it was kind of the same vibe. Ultimately, I feel like if we didn’t do that, the record would still be just as good as it is now. But because we did that, I think that made it even better.”
It could be that we’ve just become more inoculated to the idea of working with people outside of a band bubble thanks to ubiquitous “feature culture” in popular music, or that our prolonged exposure to the social internet has given us an increased appreciation for “collabs,” but I predict that we’ll be seeing more partnerships of this kind as hardcore continues to evolve into its fifth decade. Turnstile, for one, featured separate co-writes from Justice Tripp and Sam Trapkin of Trapped Under Ice on their last album, in addition to a co-write and feature from Dev Hynes—a writer who has collaborated with artists ranging from Blondie to Mariah Carey. The only difference between today and the days of Peter Steele and Cause For Alarm is that somewhere along the way, we seem to have learned that making new things with different people can be both fun and worth talking about.
III.
Some time in 2010, I received another phone call, but this time from a friend. Jonah Matranga, my former bandmate in New End Original, had recently put his old band Far back together, and they had been working on a new album. There was a song I wrote shortly before New End broke up that was then called “Be Careful What You Wish For,” and he told me the album was missing a moment like that. Jonah asked if I would consider recording a guitar demo of the song for them to work with and possibly record. This time, I said yes.
I know that Jonah and Far are incredibly capable songwriters. They didn’t really need me. But the fact that they respected my work enough to want to use it, to find their voice in something I wrote, felt meaningful to me. I didn’t look at it as if I had “written a song for someone else.” I saw it for what it was: A chance to create something new that none of us would have made on our own. The song was eventually re-titled “Are You Sure?” and hearing the final version gave me a truly singular feeling—something different from hearing anything I’d ever composed for myself. Because inside of this music that I had evidently written, there was discovery. There were other people’s fingerprints. And it made me feel connected to them in a way I can’t properly explain. That intimacy and connection, to me, is hardcore.
One more thing happened as a result of finally saying yes to a co-write. Later that year I opened Twitter to find a tweet from Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 that read:
“Far’s song ‘Are You Sure?’ may be my favorite song this year. Sooo good!!!”
Any inkling of punk guilt that I may have had before that dissolved with the happiness of knowing that I played a hand in making a song that would make anyone feel so strongly as to be compelled to shout it out loud to their corner of the world. That’s not something I should be running away from. If I’m being truthful, that’s literally why I started playing in hardcore bands in the first place.
Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Ryan Savitski of One Step Closer.
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"They didn’t really need me. But the fact that they respected my work enough to want to use it, to find their voice in something I wrote, felt meaningful to me."
Well said. Any time that I have written music or lyrics used for/by other artists/bands, I look at it this way: I am helping create baby and trust them to raise the child. It's always nice to see what other folks do with your creation. Keeps us humble, perhaps? Keeps things interesting? AND, sometimes, I'm blown away with how things are made much better by the final rendition once outta' my hands.
Sometimes, other people raise your own child better, safer, stronger and smarter than I ever could have.
When I read about how collaboration happens especially regarding writing music am always reminded of this concept called the “ideomotor effect” - (it is how the planchette in a ouija board works) the brain affects unconscious small movements - but it is also a product of the fact that several people are touching the planchette, so that no individual seems in control. The planchette doesn’t work if only one person is touching it. I’m not a song writer this is just an outsider looking in, but Norman as a person who has been in several bands is this somewhat accurate or am I completely off the mark?