Communicating Artistic Vision in a Co-Write
If you’re choosing the artist’s path, you will frequently employ songwriters and producers to help you flesh out you vision in song. Ideally, your co-writes will be places where you can bring your vision to life in an efficient and timely manner. In order to do this, you - the artist - need to have the tools to direct your collaborators during the co-write.
One easy way to do this is to come to co-writes equipped with reference material. Playlists of songs that are currently inspiring you and/or demos that indicate where your music is headed can help direct the sounds that a producer chooses for you or words that a co-writer seeks to place in the song. I cannot stress this enough: bring a few songs for reference. If you only bring one song, then you risk creating a copy of the original as opposed to a truly original song. Bringing multiple songs will allow everyone in the room to draw from multiple places of influence in order to create something unique and authentic.
Some artists should choose to a step further. I know artists who pen three page word documents that they share with collaborators in order to direct their energies. These documents indicate their likes (autobiographical songs, acoustic production, and heavy background vocals) and address their dislikes (trap snares, generic language, etc). Fleshing out your ideas in a systematic way like this can help direct your collaborators in the right direction. If they know what sounds and words to avoid and what ideas to go toward, you’ll be more than likely to pen a song you actually want to cut.
It behooves the artist to learn basic production terminology as well. If you understand EQ, Reverb, Delay, and comping, you can help the producer make sure that your vocal sits correctly in the track. If you can use production jargon to describe the sounds you want, your tracks are - again - more likely to fit into your artistic vision. Communication is key in collaboration.
What all this boils down to is you having the ability to define your vision in a way that is easily understood for your collaborators. If you walk into a session with the goal to “write a good song", your collaborators might do just that in a way that pushes you in a place you don’t want to go. But if you walk into a session with a goal to write a hyperpop ballad with crunchy vocal harmonies and irreverent lyrical content about dogs, you’re going to get the song you actually dreamed of.
Be specific. Be straightforward. That’s the best thing you can do to help your collaborators help you.
