There are many people who consider the first two albums by the dB’s to be just as influential as those revered early Velvet Underground releases. The singing/songwriting backbone of the dB’s was the tandem of Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey, whose simpatico musical attraction was strong enough to fuel Mavericks, an excellent 1991 album by the duo. Eighteen years later, the longtime friends have released the equally stirring Here And Now. The pair has also begun recording again with the dB’s, including original bassist Gene Holder and drummer Will Rigby. Holsapple and Stamey are guest editing magnetmagazine.com all this week. Read our Q&A with them.
Chris: When people ask me about songwriting (who are these inquisitive folks anyway, and have they never heard of Google?), I usually recommend Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, by Betty Edwards, originally published in 1979. Although the double entendre of the title includes its focus, that of drawing on paper, it explains in clear terms the theory of the bicameral brain, where its left side handles more analytical tasks and the right handles more intuitive, creative ones. I think most songwriters have experienced that feeling of effortless composition, of a song that comes so easily, often in 15 to 45 minutes; sometimes there is even a sense of just taking dictation as the music and words flow out. Edwards shows ways to find that right-brain place and to understand what is going on when it is fully engaged. In my experience, one crucial thing that separates the best songwriters from the rest is that they honor this state of mind by stopping whatever they are doing and letting it run its course—leaving in their wake a host of angry dentists and blown job interviews, of course. These are the people sitting, pen and paper in hand, in the taxi at the side of the road with the meter running or locked up in the only bathroom in the apartment with a guitar and a miniature recorder. They know that that second verse, which seems so easy that you can certainly come back to it after dinner, will, in fact, be agony to conjure up again if you don’t stay put for that extra 10 minutes—while your right brain is sparking away—and get it all down.
