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Interview with Andy Duke of the Buck Brothers
Buck Brothers are one of the bands on our label Back2Forward Records. They are currently obtaining ever-increasing exposure and are releasing their first UK single on 20th November (www.buckbrothers.net). We are very privileged to have Andy Duke (lead singer of Buck Brothers) on our label. Andy’s experience in the music industry is extremely impressive, including having mixed a Robbie Williams track and being asked to work on Kylie remixes. He has also had a publishing contract through which he has been asked to submit work for numerous prestigious artists. In my opinion Andy is one of the most talented songwriters I have had the privilege of encountering. I asked Andy to give some advice on song-writing for the website and he kindly agreed. The Buck Brothers songs discussed can all be heard on the Buck Brothers website www.buckbrothers.net.
Phil Warren: I’m trying to write a song at the moment and I’m really happy with the chords and the tune. I’ve now tried to put words into it and its really difficult. Its particularly difficult to find words that rhyme. Do you usually write the lyrics at the same time as the song or afterwards?
Andy Duke: Different people do it differently. There are artists like Geoff Buckley who write the Lyrics first. Then there are artists at the other end of the extreme like Bono. Bono goes into the studio and improvises vocals over the music. He would just keep improvising over and over and then at the end they will take all the best bits and put it together.
P: I listened to your song ‘She’s Red’ and I thought the lyrics were amazing. Some of the red images you used – I just would never have thought of – she’s the fourth planet from the sun – and then making it rhyme as well!! How long did it take you to come up with those lyrics.
A: With that song, that did not happen over night! It took me about a week of walking around mulling over lyrics trying to make get the right lyrics. That was a real labour of love.
P: Really! You see, with help from my computer database I can write chords and a tune that I am really happy with in around an hour, and I really like that. I was hoping there was a quick way to write lyrics. I guess one of the reasons I don’t write much is because it can take hours to work on a song and then I still may not like it at the end and then I’ve wasted hours, and I just don’t have the time to do that regularly.
A: I don’t thing you can you can use a clock in/clock out card for song-writing. There is no quick way to come up with lyrics.
With ‘She’s Red’ I decided to come up with as many descriptions of red as I possibly could without actually saying the word red. It became a challenge – and it was fun. ‘fourth planet from the sun’ did not come fast. I also looked in a Thesaurus for descriptions of red and I found the word capsicum, which I managed to get in there. One of the lines only just works – it was kind of clutching at straws. Sometimes you really have to work hard!
P: So give me some tips. How do you personally come up with lyrics?
A: I always have a protagonist in the song – someone who wants to say something. Is this a sad person, has he just split up with his girlfriend, he likes ‘Manish Girls’, he likes ‘girls in skirts in boots on bikes’. Who is this girl, what’s affecting her. This is much easier than just ‘I’ve got this tune’.
I also like phrases, so in the case of a song about unrequited love I used the phrase ‘One day I’ll say it’ – I try to think of a phrase that sums up the main theme of the song. I try to play with lyric ideas and then suddenly something will stick out and become immediate. I find that a catch phrase is always a really good start.
With ‘She’s Red’. I used a play on words. It was originally about a girl we know who had a real temper. So I would say ‘She’s Red’ – its I play on words. Then came the song ‘She’s Red’, not just the books stacked by her bed, She really is well-red!
P: Also I feel like when you write a song you need to be quite emotional. Sometimes I am very clinical when I talk about issues like love or pain – not so poetic. I like to describe things very accurately, not emotionally. So I feel like I am in a bad position when it comes to writing songs. I feel like people who write well are really experiencing the emotions of what they write about. I just tried to come up with a theme for a song about a random situation I made up and if feels like that doesn’t work very well because I am not really experiencing the emotion of it.
A: Yeah. It should be a theme that resonates with you or it will take ages. One song I wrote recently only took me 2 or 3 nights, mind you it had been in my head for ages.
Also when I write the tune – this is really weird and its my little secret but I will tell you anyway if you like – I use the words of a rap I liked when I was a teenager. It was a song by Rat Dirty called Blowfly. Its got highly profane lyrics and I don’t know why it was that song, but I just started using it and really strangely it just seems to have a meter that fits just about any tune I write. So I start writing the tune and I use the lyrics of that rap and sing those lyrics to the tune. It always seems to fit perfectly. Paul McCartney used to use ‘Ham and Eggs’. So he would sing Ham and Eggs to before he wrote the proper lyrics. So I guess it would be like, for Yesterday ‘Ham and Eggs, Ham and eggs and ham and eggs and ham’, until he put the lyrics in later.
P: So yesterday was originally about Ham and Eggs.
A: I think a theme is half the battle. I work really well with catch phrases.
The first line is always the tricky one. With She’s Red I wrote the Chorus first and then about a week later I was like, ‘How am I going to start this off!’
© 2006 Phil Warren & Andy Duke