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Songwriter Forum => The Writing Process => Topic started by: RJDG14 on July 23, 2016, 02:30:53 PM

Title: Subconscious influences
Post by: RJDG14 on July 23, 2016, 02:30:53 PM
For some reason I came up with a number of melodies between about 2013 and early 2016 which in retrospect sound an awful lot like various Interpol songs. I wrote one which sounded similar to their song "Evil"; another that had a piano line and melody that resembled "Untitled", and another that was a little like "Slow Hands". I was looking up bands similar to Joy Division a couple of months back, and a lot of people mentioned Interpol, so I looked them up, and lo-and-behold I found a number of songs that sounded like stuff I'd written. Is it likely that I was subconsciously influenced by them? The influences that people have tagged to my songs here is also similar to the alleged influence on Interpol.

I also wrote a song in April 2014 which was (in terms of chorus) a lot like the Counting Crows song "Elvis Went to Hollywood" - only that was released some five months later. It had a similar rythm, similar melody, and similar tenses at different stages in the chorus lyrics. What happened there? I wrote mine before they released theirs.

For some reason I find it very hard to write songs in the style of a lot of 2010s music, while other people my age are able to do so with ease. Most of the stuff I've written bears similarity with what others were doing between about 1979 and 2005, yet others my age generally write stuff in the style of what people have been doing since 2005. I don't find this era very melodic, nor do I know how to write a song in the currently fashionable style, even though it's more commercial sounding at the moment.

I'm interested in knowing if the musical tastes of someone's parents tends to influence the music that they write? I was a small kid in the early 2000s, and my parents (who were born in the mid 1960s) would frequently play music by bands such as Joy Division, Idlewild, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Marillion, Husker Du etc (I've looked through their collection and found some Interpol too). Other people who I knew at school had parents born in the early-mid 1980s, who I suspect listened to music such as Britney Spears or Beyonce in the early 2000s, and their children have since gone on to create rap/soul/2010s-singer-songwriter style stuff. A lot of people my own age that I know who've written music are into a lot of black/Asian/ethnic music, whereas virtually everything I like is by white (or white-sounding) artists. Could this have something to do with it? How are different people subconsciously influenced by different styles of music?