Musical Mapping.
Get to know your musical influences. Seven dreams multiplied.
When I began to imagine what I might create beyond The Preatures, one of the best things I did was a kind of musical brainstorm: I wrote down all of the influences that I loved and how they overlapped with each other. I called it a musical map.
Influences aren’t everything when creating, but as someone who grew up between Cassette Tapes and CDs, Napster and Myspace, and the rise of a globalised internet culture, pinpointing my influences often felt like drawing names from a bottomless hat.
With the exception of poor Bryan Ferry who I put in the ‘Americana’ category (he’s about as English as you can get), I instinctively grouped acts together according to the movements, genres or eras they belonged to. What I’d left out was as revealing as what I’d included. If I’d done the same map for The Preatures, there would be more British Soul and Manchurian influence, and late 70s-early 80s New York Punk, whereas solo I was more focussed on singer-songwriters and alt-country.
What I loved about this process was that it offered up specific and unexpected combinations from the cauldron of my taste - like the synths and fretless bass on Joni Mitchell’s Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm and the chimes on Brandy’s Never Say Never, which I combined in Birthday Wish.
Even simply seeing two artists’ names next to each other, like XTC and Santo & Johnny, sent off a chain of sparks in my brain.
It was this map that led me to phrases like “Prince producing Bonnie Raitt” and “Bruce Springsteen if he was in an all-girl UK pop group in the 90s” to explain the sound I was chasing for my first record. And making connections between sounds, albums, songs and artists was useful when I stepped into the studio with producers, engineers and musicians.
Not to say there are deeper ways to develop this language, but I recommend this as an easy initial exercise for any of the artists I mentor.
Draw a map, like the example above, of all the musical influences that define your practice right now. Artists, albums, genres, periods, singles, whatever. If you favour one artist’s period over another, write it down. Draw the weirdest, most unexpected combinations. Share yours here if you want. Discuss.
You can extend this into writing down lists of acts you’d love to tour with or support one day, artists you feel aligned with, or that you’d love to be friends with [beware! haha. I remember hearing somewhere that anything you write down multiplies itself by seven. When I did this I wrote down Marlon Williams, and ended up supporting him on tour less than a year later. I’m still waiting for the other six though.]