Musician’s Notebook

There are five rock and metal musicians who I listen to on a regular basis when I need inspiration for my own music. I listen to these guys for recreation, but usually I spend hours at a time analyzing their music and what makes it really work. I want to understand how they created sounds, moods, and atmospheres, how they create a soundscape that just won’t leave your mind, or how they create intense, bursting build-ups to important parts of the song. I pick apart each song until I feel I have an understanding of how they made it such a great tune (attention to detail really counts here!). Here are the rock and metal artists that I listen to for these purposes - we’ll look at artists from other genres who I do this with another time.

1. Guns N’ Roses

These guys are the guys that introduced me to hard rock when I was 13 years old. I still remember the first time an older friend sat down and showed me their material; the first song I ever heard was Don’t Cry which just epitomizes fantastic evocation of emotion in music, and after that, Locomotive, which is such a diverse tune with fantastic vocal variance even if it’s not one of their most popular songs.

Appetite For Destruction is a masterpiece in my own opinion and if you can break this one down, you learn how to create unceasing energy in your songs. Of course, a big part of this is having that energy in you to begin with, but it’s so important for grabbing attention.

2. Alice in Chains

I hate it when rockers and metalheads make music devoid of melody for the sake of sounding hard. Even Dimmu Borgir manages to blend a huge amount of melody into their breakneck-pace songs. Alice in Chains were masters of heavy melody, and Layne Staley in particular had a voice that could make the heaviest of heavy songs melt away with vocal melodies that you could swear were stuck to the side of your head like a two year old playing with jello. Check out Junkhead and I Stay Away for some songs that will blow you away.

3. Korn

Korn don’t always have the best reputation in the metal community; they’re too “mainstream” for these cool kids. I love my metal, but I still have respect for Korn because despite their commercial success, their creative vision has still expanded in various directions. Their latest untitled effort is full of songs with such an experimental nature that I think some of the aforementioned boneheads are so mainstream they don’t realize it; pretty ironic for a community that prides itself on its counter-culturalism.

Korn wrap their songs in so many layers of sonic goodness it’s not funny. I have listened Hollow Life to hundreds of times and I’m still picking up layers that I was sure weren’t there before. If you listen to Freak on a Leash from their recent Unplugged album and analyze it, you’ll learn a lot about making an original studio song with a hard rock edge into an amazingly beautiful acoustic piece. Tip: it’s not about taking the chords and strumming them on an acoustic guitar.

4. Bon Jovi

I love this guy’s voice (if you hadn’t noticed by my obsession with the way a band’s singer sounds, I’m a singer myself). I mean, I really love it. When I first decided to sing after playing guitar, bass and keyboard for years, something I’d wanted to do since I began with music but never thought I could, I put Bon Jovi’s Crossroad (Best of) album on and sang the whole thing, every night, for a month. I still struggle with Always, but the challenge is a learning experience, right?

Bon Jovi, to me, is a great example of retaining your own sound while making music that is commercially viable. And as long as you don’t give up on your creative vision, there’s nothing wrong with commercially viable music; everyone has to eat, and despite what most people think, that includes musicians.

5. Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath sounds like cliched 70s metal today, but that’s because they sparked a new wave of music. They were the revolutionizers. To me, listening to this band is a way of reminding myself why I make music; not only because it’s my first love in life, but because I want my music to change people, to help them, to communicate a message. Black Sabbath communicated a lot of things, but the most important thing is: they sparked a new wave of music. They were an essential part of defining the type of music rockers and metalheads would listen to for generations. It makes it seem possible.

Not only that, Black Sabbath were masters of the hook. Even slow, haunting, minimalist songs like Black Sabbath itself stick in my mind for days after I hear them.

So there you have it; the five rock/metal bands that I listen to for inspiration on a nearly daily basis. By careful analysis of an artist’s tracks, you can figure out what works and what doesn’t. Now go and compare the studio version of Freak on a Leash with the Unplugged version, and come back and tell me what makes the acoustic version so much more powerful!

Tags: musicians, guns n roses, alice in chains, korn, bon jovi, black sabbath