Best Songwriting Collaborations are Like the Best Marriages

Collaboration can be a bad word if you're collaborating with, say, a dictator. But if you're collaborating with someone on a song, screenplay, TV script, book, musical or opera it can be the differnece between good and great. I've heard so many songs that could have been better if the writer worked with a partner who was more experienced writing lyrics or music--but I understand. Collaboration takes time.

As children, we're taught about teamwork but when teachers break up their classrooms into groups, they choose for us. There's no time to figure out what a truly great partnership would be. How do you find one?

I think the best collaborations are ones where listeners can't tell who's doing what--and sometimes you can't, either. The legendary partnerships of songwriters bear this out, like the songs of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Fleetwood Mac, George and Ira Gershwin or Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. Sometimes collaborations happen by chance and when they do, you're really lucky. Other times, you have to get to know someone and see how you work together before the partnership can develop.

As a lyricist I've done both, and can tell you there's almost nothing better than working with a composer to put your lyrics into a song. It feels like an extension of your brain, heart and soul that you'd never have otherwise. It's instinctual, cerebral and emotional--pushing all those buttons at once. Can you teach someone who to find it? I don't know; but you know a great collaborator when you start working with them. And a bad one, too.

Just for fun, I'm going to throw a few of my favorite collaborations at you so you can listen to them and see what you think:

Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu's songs played in my house and head almost nonstop in the nineties and I return to them periodically every year. The songs are often political comments on South Africa's apartheid, but they are also love songs or coming-of-age songs that capture me musically and rhythmically every time I listen to them.

Beyonce and Jay-Z's Apes**t: Shot at the Louvre, the video says so much about art, race and how we judge it I could watch it over and over again and never get tired of it. "I can't believe we made it," the song keeps saying, and as a viewer, I am rejoicing they did.

The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl: I don't think MacColl wrote this song with the Pogues but it's my favorite Christmas duet and I think of the song as a collaboration, beginning to end. (I did read that Elvis Costello nudged it into being and am not surprised). It tells the story of a disillusioned couple at Christmas time and is one of the most moving stories about a marriage I ever heard or probably ever will hear. 

Which reminds me: it's often said that the best collaborations are like the best marriages, and I think that's true. In his classic Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy points out that happy marriages are all alike, while every unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way. What is it, though, that makes a happy marriage for two songwriters? Probably the same thing that happens in life; a partnership that sparkles and stays true to each other. But it's also that indefinable whatever it is that most of us can't explain.

I guess we know it when we see it. Here's to happy partnerships for all the songwriters out there.

Guitar and banjo photo: Kevin Dooley