Bambi Edlund
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It's not a simple thing to collaborate, let me tell you. Songwriting, unlike painting or novel-writing (or meditating), lends itself easily to team effort because there are two distinct halves to a pop song--music and lyrics--but that doesn't make it easy or fun to work with someone else on a pop song. The Brill Building songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller, the Holland-Dozier-Holland team at Motown, and the classic rock archetypes of Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards have ingrained in people's imaginations the image of songwriters huddled around a piano or guitar hammering out a tune in a spirit of good-natured one-upmanship. One person is absentmindedly tinkering on the piano while the other person is twiddling with a pencil; suddenly the lyricist hears a melody and inspiration strikes: "That's it! Play that last part again!" He sings a line, the piano player inserts a minor seventh, and they quickly and effortlessly compose a masterpiece, laughing uproariously. Then someone does a tap routine with a coat rack, and an angel gets its wings.
When I first started writing songs, I pictured myself as half of this kind of partnership, even when I was writing songs alone. Would my other half be Steven Tyler to my Joe Perry? Or would I be Plant to someone's Page? I even imagined being Mike Nichols to someone's Elaine May, eschewing music altogether, so dear was the dream of having a partner. I figured my other half would come along eventually, and I kept a coat rack handy.
Over the years I've written scores of songs with other people, and some of my partnerships were both prolific and fun, but as I got older I turned more and more toward writing songs alone. The passionate arguments and beer-soaked jam sessions of collaboration seemed like fun, back when I had infinite patience and no confidence, but when my attention turned away from funk jams and toward three-chord ballads, I found my partners were making fewer interesting contributions. As I got better at writing songs, my partner's suggestion that the chorus be played with a reggae backbeat just seemed like it was wasting precious time. Democracy is a lovely idea, in bands as well as nations, but it's seldom implemented perfectly and is often a mask for dishonesty. I've known many bands in which the pretense of equal contribution to the songs was a real handicap: Clearly one person was doing the best songwriting, but most of the band's energy was spent stoking the egos of the minor contributors. "Oh...yeah, play the chorus reggae-style? Yeah...good idea. Let's try that. Hmmmm, yeah, interesting. Yeah, what if...I love the idea, but...uh, what if we try NOT doing that?"
At a certain point, after thousands of conversations like that (and one too many dramatic band breakups), I resolved not to enter into any more songwriting partnerships. I established at the outset of the Long Winters that it was going to be a place for my songs, and that if my bandmates wanted to write songs, they could start a side project and I would play bass. It seemed like a simple matter at the time, an easy solution to the heartbreaking rock Darwinism that consumes so much energy. Every person who joins the Long Winters does so with this understanding, and most have expressed relief and excitement at the prospect of just being allowed to play music and be responsible for their corner without having to fret over roles and responsibilities.
The flip side of the equation is that my bandmates frequently have quit the band after a year or so to pursue their own projects: One went to graduate school, one designs video games, one does improv comedy, etc. I'm often asked in interviews whether the high turnover of band members is due to my dictatorial ways, the suggestion being that if we wrote songs collaboratively, my bandmates would feel more of an investment in the project. I can only reply that in 10 years of working collaboratively in bands, I was never in a project that stuck together for more than a couple of years, whereas I've maintained the Long Winters as a somewhat constant entity through innumerable lineup changes (four drummers, a half-dozen other players) without ever really having to explain the changes. Our current lineup is the strongest ever.
Still, the shadow of collaboration haunts me. Many of my closest friends are also in the arts, not just music but theater, dance, film, painting, etc., and the suggestion that we collaborate is always just below the surface. When we were younger, it seemed like we were constantly on the verge of combining forces to create an art explosion! None of us were well-known in our respective fields, so we had no reputations to damage, and we all loved staying up late and blathering about subjectivity, intention, and the role of the artist. We whiled away many hours excitedly conceiving multimedia art projects that would shake the world: the musical-theater piece about wheelbarrows which we would record, film, choreograph, and then animate! Brilliant! But none of it ever progressed past dreaming, killed at the outset by an almost fundamental inability to collaborate in any practical sense. The moment someone took the reins, or labor started being divided, eyes glazed over. I was as guilty as anyone: I didn't want to work with just anyone, and invariably the artists with whom I most wanted to work were the ones who wanted to work alone.
