Curiosity And Craft, with Benny Romalis (How To Write Songs)

Christopher: How does Elton John write such incredible chord progressions? What is it that made Lennon and McCartney songs so distinctive, so that they became the songwriting legends they’re now known for being? And what do Sting and Radiohead do differently in their songwriting that you can learn from?

These are just a few of the fascinating topics covered by Benny Romalis and Keppie Coutts on the popular YouTube channel “How To Write Songs”.

And today I’m joined by Benny for a mini-interview that I think you’re gonna love.

So songwriting is a funny topic sometimes at Musical U, because we cater to such a broad range of musicians, and it’s only obviously a subset of musicians who think of themselves as songwriters or have any aspirations to write songs.

And so for a long time at Musical U, we didn’t really do anything in the area of songwriting or composing. We just focused on teaching you the inner skills that make those easier.

But what we realised over the years was how integral creativity is to musicality.

And so even if you don’t aspire to write songs or to compose music, we realised we really had a duty to equip all of our members with creative skills. And of course, once you get into the habit of creating, whether it’s improvising or writing, you naturally want to turn it into something you can share with other people.

And so more and more, we’ve been talking about songwriting, teaching songwriting, you know, we’ve got Living Music modules and a whole section of The Fountain dedicated to songwriting. We have a standalone course, Songwriting Alchemy. So we’ve done more and more in this area.

At the same time, there are organisations and individuals who focus fully, wholeheartedly on the art and craft of writing songs. And one such organisation that has stood out over the last few years is howtowritesongs.org or the YouTube channel “How To Write Songs”, with Benny and Keppie, where they do a combination of teaching incredible stuff, but also analysing really remarkable songs and explaining what makes them tick.

It’s such a cool YouTube channel. I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out and we’ll have a link in the shownotes. But today I want to share with you our mini-interview.

We had the pleasure of having Benny come in as our Guest Expert at Musical U most recently, last month, and as well as coaching our Next Level clients and presenting a Masterclass, which I’ll share a little bit of tomorrow for you, we had the chance to sit down and chat for 15-20 minutes about his take on musicality, how his collaboration with Keppie came about in the first place, what makes their approach to teaching songwriting so different from a lot of the stuff that’s out there, and how “thinking like a car mechanic” can actually empower you to write incredible songs yourself.

So all that and more in this mini-interview, I hope you enjoy. Here we go!

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Christopher: Welcome back to the show! Today I’m joined by Benny Romalis of the popular YouTube channel and website “How To Write Songs”. Benny is himself a songwriter under various names and tours regularly with his alt-folk band, the Green Mohair Suits. And at How To Write Songs, Benny and his co-founder, Keppie Coutts help songwriters of all levels to get better and better at the craft of songwriting.

In one of the first videos of theirs I ever watched, one of the first things I heard Keppie say was, essentially, “you don’t need to be some magical, talented, gifted alien to write songs. Anyone can learn to do it step-by-step and get better and better”. So you can see why I knew I liked these guys right away!

You can also see why we’re so fortunate to have Benny with us as our Guest Expert here at Musical U this month. He’s going to be in coaching our Next Level members this coming week, and today he’s presenting our monthly Masterclass for all members entitled “Songwriting: Thinking Like A Car Mechanic”.

Benny, welcome to the show!

Benny: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Christopher: I always like to start these interviews with the same question because it draws out such different answers from the people I’m talking to.

And that question is: what does musicality mean to you?

Benny: It’s such an interesting question. For me, musicality is about going into the details of music. You know, it’s an intent rather than the way I think a lot of people think about it, which is more like athleticism.

You know, we look at sometimes this comparison between sport and art or sport and music. And when you look at someone who’s athletic, we say they’ve got natural athleticism, and that’s true in sport.

But anyone who has ever spoken to an athlete or heard them interviews also knows that they work so hard and that really, the talent and the athleticism is the beginning of all the work and the discipline and the training is really where it’s at.

So for me, musicality is kind of the same thing. It’s an intent to go into the details of music and to really understand what music is, the way it’s put together, the way it feels in all its different forms. It’s a deep sense of curiosity around music.

Christopher: Ooh, you threw a little curveball at the end there! I love that. That word “curiosity”, I think, is one we haven’t heard that often in answers to that question, and I love it. I love that you highlighted that.

And it’s no coincidence you’re coming from a songwriting, composing, creating perspective with that curiosity. Tell us a little bit about your own musical backstory, where you came from as a musician and how you came to have this view on musicality.

Benny: So I started music when I was pretty young, but untrained. I just learned guitar.

I always loved playing with language. I used to write a lot of poems in school, but never really thought about the two coming together. I never really understood that until much later on.

So, really, I just loved playing guitar and writing a lot of instrumental music through high school.

And then I went and studied music formally after high school because I really was unhappy with all the gaps in my knowledge. I was delighted to be playing music. I loved playing music, but I didn’t understand what I was doing.

You know, I felt very frustrated by the limitations of my own knowledge. And it’s not that knowing what you’re doing is necessarily required to make music, but I was frustrated by repeating the same things over and over and not feeling liberated to go other places.

So I studied music at college for three years. Had the most incredible experience. Met my future wife there, you know, met some of my best friends there. And then I came back and I just gigged a lot, and I played a lot of music, and I did lots of shows.

And really, I think doing, like, three or four shows for three or four shows a week for about four years, really kind of put all of those things from college into practice in such a tangible, visceral way, and taught me so much about how to put together songs, how to arrange them all the different ways you can perform them. Amazing feedback when you’re playing a song and you see people kind of just not paying attention any more – and you go “that’s interesting”, because that part of the song, that bridge, really isn’t working, you know. Or vice-versa, where you see people really engaged and you start to think “okay, why at this moment of the song? What is it about this song and this moment of the song that is capturing people?”

So that was huge for me. And then I went and studied film and TV as a postgraduate study. I just have always been in love with instrumental composition and film composition. So I did that.

And then from there, all of these projects started to come out of, well, not out of nowhere, but just through these relationships I’d been building. So it ended up with me essentially working a lot in this room and starting to really create a lot of music for film and TV and different kind of audio visual projects.

And at the same time, doing a lot of songwriting with the Green Mohair Suits, playing with them, and eventually what Keppie and I do now, which is to really double down on the art and craft of songwriting and how to teach that.

Christopher: Very cool. And when you were talking there about, you know, really noticing what makes the audience, like, perk up or tune out. Yeah, I think highlights one of the things I think is so remarkable about your YouTube channel in particular.

I may or may not have been binging a lot of your videos recently! And, you know, you guys have a great methodology around songwriting, but you also bring in all of these analyses of popular artists and popular tracks and ask that question of, you know, “what are they doing that’s interesting or different?”

Tell us a little bit more about that collaboration with Keppie, where it came from and what you guys are up to at How To Write Songs.

Benny: Well, Keppie and I have been friends for over 20 years, so that really helped when we decided to actually start a business together. So we’ve been friends for a long time, and we’ve played a lot of music together.

Keppie was actually, she was there with me when I went to Montreal when we were 21, I think, and I saw the Montreal Jazz Festival, and that was a huge moment. Literally 20 years ago.

That was a huge moment where I then came back to Australia and said, I’m going to study music. You know, I’m going to really study music, because I had just spent two weeks immersed in just some of the best musicians and music-makers I had ever seen or heard. So we’ve been together on this musical journey for 20 years.

About three years ago during COVID – a lot of things happened during COVID obviously – but, you know, it was one of those things where Keppie and I have both been lecturing for a long time. She’s been lecturing at various institutions. I’ve been teaching at various places as well.

We were both just getting a little frustrated with the rigidity of the system of teaching in that kind of education system. And they’re amazing places to actually work and so much fun interacting with the students. But it was just one of those things where the time had come for us to think about doing something else.

And together we started talking about this idea of what happens if we start taking all of this material that we’ve been collecting and building and creating over the last five to ten years as lecture material and start putting it on YouTube and just see what happens.

It really was a “let’s see what happens” kind of situation. So that’s how the whole YouTube thing got going, and as that became bigger and bigger, and as we got better at YouTube – we were terrible at the beginning! You know, we were just, it’s one of the steepest learning curves I think I’ve ever been on. But as that got going, it really then gave us permission to start thinking about what else we could do in terms of how else could we deliver content to people who are craving this kind of information.

How else could we then connect with people who want to talk about songwriting more, who want to talk about the realities of writing songs and making music and creative work, doing good creative work?

Because we’re not just thinking about, you know, this very niche thing of songwriting. We’re also interested in people’s approach to creativity, their philosophical approach to creativity, but the very practical, tangible, day-to-day things they do to feel creative and feel inspired and proactive and all of those things.

So it’s really been an evolution over the last two years that began with YouTube and has now expanded into a much bigger business.

Christopher: Wonderful, yeah. And I believe you just wrapped up your Accelerator Program where you were really kind of in the trenches with budding songwriters, helping them day by day.

Benny: Right! It was amazing. We launched a six-week program called the Accelerator Program to, again, just give songwriters an opportunity to go deep into songwriting in a very condensed form.

You know, I mean, six weeks is kind of a long time, or it depends how you want to think about it. It’s not that long over the course of a year.

Christopher: It’s a long sprint! Sprinting for six weeks.

Benny: It’s a long sprint, that’s true. That’s a good way to put it.

It was a long sprint. So it was really immersive, very intense, you know, in terms of the condensed way we delivered the material. We had to kind of run masterclasses each week, and then there were pop-up tutorials, and then there were live song feedback sessions where every week the participants had to write a song, submit it, they got feedback, we re-worked it every week for six weeks.

It was incredible. And that just gave us more confidence to reach out to more people who really do love songwriting but feel like they’re not sure how to create a deliberate and consistent, I guess, process. They’re not sure how that works.

So that’s what we’re really trying to do with those kinds of programs, help people feel a sense of consistency and make deliberate choices around their songwriting and their music making. So it doesn’t just feel random.

Christopher: Wonderful. Yeah. We talk a lot at Musical U about the kind of… I love YouTube, but the “YouTube wilderness”. A lot of music learners find themselves jumping from video to video, trying to cobble something together and getting conflicting views.

Apart from that kind of clearly structured, holistic approach, is there anything else you would say distinguishes the approach you and Keppie take? What makes How To Write Songs so different and so popular, would you say?

Benny: I think all the time we spent lecturing in colleges really taught us the value of pulling apart an idea and trying to explain it in the simplest possible way. Because what you learn when you’re in the classroom and you’ve got 20 students who are eager to understand a concept, but really, there’s a distance, I think, that is created with terminology.

You know, if I start talking in music theory terminology, you learn very quickly – it’s almost like doing those gigs where you see the people leaning in or sort of falling asleep during a song. You see very quickly in a classroom of 20 students whether or not the concept is landing or not.

And I think the more we use, the more we use complex terminology to describe music making, sometimes the further away we get from understanding it creates a bigger gap.

So I think going through that process for ten years, Keppie and I, separately in our own institutions, but talking about it a lot, really gave us a desire to never shy away from breaking down a complex idea into its simplest possible construct or the simplest possible terms, with the desire to help anybody understand it, regardless of how good their music theory is or how much prior knowledge they have. And that really helped us on YouTube.

But the other thing we then decided to do was to make our brand known for describing the things that no one else really wants to describe.

So you know, melody is a classic example where so many videos you watch and so many courses you do, when it comes to melody… Everyone’s happy talking about chord progressions, and here’s a diatonic chord progression, and here’s a borrowed chord. And, you know, let’s talk about lyrics and the rhyme scheme, and you can sort, sort of put it up on screen and talk about it, and it’s, you know, everyone’s usually following along.

Then when it comes to melody writing, you hear so many artists talk about the fact that “it just came to them”, you know, the melody. “I don’t know where the melody came from, but there was the melody”, or you see people top-lining and it just, “it just happens”.

And we had to make the decision to actually say, we’re not going to just say the melody comes to you. That when you listen to artists talk about the melody, that did come to them and break it down, there are all of these instinctive things that they’re doing that they’re not necessarily articulating, because they’re really difficult to articulate.

And any artist who’s been doing it for a long time forgets, in a way, how they put it together, because you’re supposed to forget. You’re supposed to train so much, and you’re supposed to get so good at it that it becomes instinctive. And so The Beatles weren’t ever going to talk about how they constructed a melody because they just spent so many hours doing it. By the time they, you know, exploded onto the scene, that it was instinctive.

So that is our brand differentiator, I think. We give language to the things that are really difficult to describe, and we try and break down and articulate the things that a lot of people won’t articulate.

Christopher: Love it. And I know there’s going to be a lot of people watching or listening who, at this point, are itching to go check out your stuff. We’ll, of course, have links to howtowritesongs.org and your YouTube channel in the shownotes. Give people an idea of what they’ll find there, what they can dive into when they want to know more about you guys.

Benny: So the YouTube channel is obviously where you can find a lot of our content.

And really, the YouTube channel, our only intent with the YouTube channel is to give as much value as we can on a topic in ten to twelve minutes. It’s sort of one of these games we now play with – how much can we pack into a script and then deliver?

So that’s a lot of fun. What it allows us to do is give people access to this kind of information so that we have a shared language around songwriting and around music making. And then if you go to the website, what we’ve started to do is really create a lot of different ways that people can engage with us with songwriting.

We run eight-week songwriting groups where people are just there for eight weeks, getting a prompt every two weeks. And it’s more around accountability and writing together with other people, seeing how they respond to prompts. So we’ve got our songwriting groups, we have our accelerator programs, we have our workshops. Really, the website is probably the best place to find all the different products, but the products are simply there in different forms because everyone likes learning in different ways.

So some people love dipping into 90-minute workshops because they just want a small taste of something. Other people like a six-week program. It’s really there to suit your taste.

Christopher: Fantastic. Thank you. And I can see people are lining up in the waiting room, ready to join the Masterclass.

Give people a little taste of what you’ll be sharing in that Masterclass today. It might be my favorite masterclass title yet!

Benny: Yeah, that’s a result of playing with titles all the time on YouTube, I think Keppie and I think in titles now, 50% of our days.

“How to deconstruct songs and think like a mechanic” is really around this idea of coming back to the thing you asked before about, what’s a differentiator for our brand?

We believe very strongly in not just blowing off creativity and saying “it either happens or it doesn’t”. Or “You either have it or you don’t”.

We believe that it’s like anything, you can develop processes, you can develop habits, you can get better through repeated exercises and intent.

So deconstructing songs, thinking like a mechanic is this idea that whenever you meet a mechanic, whenever you go and you take your car in to get serviced, they really understand cars because they’ve pulled them apart. That’s how they got to know them.

My dad’s one of these amazing people who can strip a car engine and lay it all out on the floor in pieces and then put it back together. And I just find that amazing. But he knows how to do that because he just started doing it when he was young. He just started pulling apart motorbike engines and laying out all the pieces.

So when we take the same approach to music, when we sort of deconstruct it, instead of thinking of it and listening to it as this just one beautiful collective whole, we can see all the pieces laid out and we start to understand how they then fit back together.

So I encourage people to start deconstructing songs, thinking like a mechanic, and laying out the pieces on the floor so that we can then look at them and see how they fit back together. And that’s what the Masterclass is going to be all about.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, I absolutely can’t wait, so I’m going to wrap things up there. Thank you so much, Benny, for joining me for this mini pre-masterclass interview, and I look forward to having you back on the show again soon!

Benny: Thank you so much. It was lovely.

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Christopher: Awesome. I hope you enjoyed that little intro to Benny and the great stuff he and Keppie are up to.

I highly encourage you to go binge-watch their YouTube channel! And I guarantee you will find it a delight whether you’re interested in writing songs yourself or not, just because those analysis videos they do are so expertly done and they’re so revealing on topics that you never normally hear covered.

I’m going to be back next time with a section from Benny’s masterclass to share with you. It was a masterclass our members absolutely loved.

It really tied in with our approach to Active Listening here at Musical U, where you’re dissecting music by ear in your mind. And as you will have gathered by the way he talked about it, that process of deconstructing music can be truly fascinating for any music lover, whether or not you want to write a song yourself.

So I’m really looking forward to sharing that with you on the next one. Until then, cheers! And go make some music!

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