[Dave Stewart, Advice for Songwriters]

Dave Stewart: Well, somebody who wants to become a songwriter they just got to start, even in their bedroom, on their auntie’s piano or their dad’s guitar or whatever you’ve got. Or they can start singing without any instruments and writing the words and singing melodies and then meet up with somebody, a friend or whatever, who know how to play something. Well, you’ve just got to start. There’s only so long you can say, “I wan to be a songwriter,” or “I want to be a bricklayer,” or “I want to be a swimming athlete.” You just got to start doing it. And the more books you fill up with songs and the more you keep doing it, the more you start to see a pattern of stuff that is natural to you.

And the best way to do it is find somebody who’s a performer if you don’t want to be a performer yourself, and write songs and ask them to sing them and perform them in a public place. And then you get for the first time some kind of thermometer test or a reaction of how that song fits in the world amongst general people, what their reaction is to it.

And that you can do with no money at all because in every village and street corner in every town, in the middle of the hills in Jamaica, wherever you are, there’s somebody who can sing, somebody who can play, and a group of people who want to listen.

[Dave Stewart, Advice for Musicians]

Dave Stewart: I think people who are starting out usually have other people that they think are great and they start out by trying to be a bit like them. Say somebody likes Elvis Costello so they start learning a few Elvis Costello songs; start singing a little bit like him. But that’s – everybody does that. They’re just trying to get something finished or a sound or to be able to compare if it sounds any good compared to the record. But very shortly after that, the trick is to find your own voice or your own style of playing, your own way of looking or being, and not be scared to make that as extreme as possible. You can always reel it back in again if you’ve gone to far out there. But it’s like flaunt your imperfections and you will be a star my dear.

It’s anything about yourself that you feel uncomfortable with, make it bigger like Mick Jagger would do with his lips, or Marilyn Manson would do, or Alice Cooper would do. All the characters that you would probably name that are very, very, very, very successful in music, if you really looked at them, they’re very extreme. Everything they’ve done has been very extreme, whether it’s Kurt Cobain to Madonna, to the Stones, through to Prince, all of them, Eminem, Kanye West. And they’ve all sang about their real lives and sort of put themselves into a magnifying glass. “When Doves Cry,” when Prince is singing about his mom and dad. Eminem, when he’s singing about his mom.

They all just lay it all out on the line. And they dress in a way and they perform in a way and they become and why they become iconic is that because all of the things that you would love to do and say and be, multiply it times a thousand. So they become larger than life.

So if you starting out in an artist and you really want to be an artist; that becomes somebody who means something to a lot of people either through the radio or television or whatever. It’s very, very difficult to be that person if you just adopt a generic bland persona and use sort of bland cliché lyrics in order to describe your emotions. And you’ve really got to go out there.

[End of Audio]