[Dave Stewart, Collaboration]

Dave Stewart: A collaborator is somebody who likes to work with one other person or a group of people, and put the ego outside the door before it starts. So everybody talks to each other in a kind of excited respectful and in a creative, inspirational manner, where the common aim that you’re all going toward. So if that’s songwriting, I’m sitting down for this with Gwen Stefani, which we were in my bedroom and the band were upstairs waiting to see what we were gonna come up with.

There’s a certain kind of pressure element and there’s a certain nervousness because she’s used to writing with the band. And that collaboration is about – a lot of the collaborations are doing all right with other people – is about getting Gwen to a place where she really wants to write about something that she’s been kind of hiding under the surface ‘cause maybe it’s a bit – how should I call it? It’s something maybe she didn’t talk about because it’s quite emotional; and being able to put it into a context that allows to sing about it in a sort of positive way or make part of the song in the positive way so she feels good about the negative side of it or whatever.

And it’s about making them – like being a facilitator to make them feel comfortable to unload a lot of stuff even though it might be jumbled up, and then helping rearrange it into a pattern that becomes something which would – then it becomes a song which we wrote called “Underneath it All.” And then we go upstairs to the band and we were playing it and very quickly that afternoon we recorded it, and it becomes a reality.

And that process – I went with Mick Jagger, writing songs; looking at a movie, Alfie, about a guy who’s a real – out of touch with his emotions; he’s like a cold fish, but has loads of different women. And writing songs about he must be really, really feeling if he was to sit down and go deeper. And so we wrote a song called “Blind Leading the Blind,” about that. And that was an interesting process because Mick had to the same thing. He had to think he was Alfie and do the same thing to himself. But musically, we had to make the song turn from like throwaway into very intense as the lyrics changed.

And when you went with somebody like Mick Jagger, who’s written all those brilliant songs, “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Honkytonk Woman,” and “Get Off My Cloud,” “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” “Tumbling Dice,” they just go and on, you could sit in the room and go, “Oh my God, I’m not saying anything. I’m waiting ‘til he does it.” But because he’s such a great collaborator, he’s not like that either. He’ll be like, “I don’t know. What do you think? What about this? What about that?” You’re immediately drawn into a kind of musical conversation.

Sometimes you’re working and you both the got the same vision exactly and it just goes, “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!” And you get to the end and you go, “Oh, that’s exactly what we both were thinking.”

Sometimes you have two very different people’s ideas and visions and that can be very interesting because it slowly twists and turns and becomes this hybrid that you both get a shock ‘cause it’s nothing what either of you thought it was.
Annie and I are bit like that. Annie and I, who’ve written hundreds of songs, have come from completely different places and they end up sound nothing like what either of those places were. And yet they sound like the sum of two plus four equals five. It sounded like this other new thing and it’s almost like we’ve had a baby that you kind of don’t know yet. You gotta get to know it.

And I’ve written songs with so many different people. Like Sinead O’Connor, where her whole thing is about she wants to get the emotion out and all chord structure and everything else is fine, but she wants to pour the emotion out. And so you have to try and constrict something that helps her do that.

And then I’ve written songs with Jon Bon Jovi, for instance, who really want to tell a story and he wants to tell a story and he wants his voice to sound like you’ll believe it. So that’s all to do with what key you’re in and how does it transcend into him delivering the punch line. And is that story – it has to be real to do a – something to do with him, but it can be a fantasy as long as it’s based on some form of truth. Everybody’s different.

Well, the producers are a little bit like a collaborative songwriter. He’s more collaborating on the sound and what the overall effect of that group or artist wants to achieve. But maybe if they don’t know how to do it and you’ve got to get him to trust you that you would know how to do that as long as they explain it to you, very well, what it is they want, which can be a problem sometimes.

But often you do end up writing sometimes with artists because they’ve gotten nearly finished, but they haven’t got this bit or they want help on this bit. And it’s all about helping them get to the end of the race, because a lot of artists can love to be around in the middle forever and not want to end it because they’re enjoying it or they’re paranoid to end it. They don’t want to be judged on it so as long as you don’t end it, then you’re not gonna get it out, and they’ll be no critics.

And I think it’s also like being a little bit of a psychiatrist and kind of saying it’s okay to let go of this record or whatever, and let it be out there. Because you know what? You can always make another one. So it’s an interesting job.