Dan Wilson Words and Music at the Fitz Review
Dan Wilson of Semisonic, courtesy.
In the belatedly '90s, Dan Wilson was the frontman for Semisonic. The band went on hiatus in 2001 and, by the mid-'00s, Wilson had primarily become a songwriter for other artists. Since and then, his songs take been performed past everyone from Weezer to John Legend, Keith Urban and Taylor Swift. He wrote The Chicks' "Not Set up to Make Prissy" and Adele'south "Someone Like You," both of which won Grammys.
It'southward easy to assume this was the fill-in plan after Semisonic, but songwriting was his aspiration from the start.
"When I was xi or 12, I figured out from album credits on my parents LPs that the people who wrote the songs weren't always the people who sang the songs," he says. "There was a vocal called 'You've Got a Friend' that was on a Carole King album, and that song was a hitting on the radio for a man, James Taylor. Once I realized that, I started imagining that I would be a songwriter and that I would write songs for other people. That seemed like the path in life for me."
During his time with Semisonic, he approached his publisher about partnering with songwriters to acquire the ropes. Not only did the publisher oblige simply it threw him into the deep end: His second collaboration was with Carole King herself, who helped inspire his passion for the craft. Their song "One True Dearest" appeared on Semisonic'south third album,All Most Chemistry.
But his songwriting success didn't hateful Semisonic was over. After all, the band had simply released an EP, You're Not Alone, in 2020. The problem wasn't that the band had separated but rather that Wilson wasn't in a place where he could write Semisonic songs. That problem was solved, albeit inadvertently, by Liam Gallagher of Oasis.
"I had a great meeting with Liam Gallagher about maybe collaborating," he says. "I played him a bunch of ideas. He was really fun to talk to and inspiring. Afterward he left, I fabricated very quick demos of several ideas and less than a calendar week later on I sent v ideas and they quickly got dorsum to me and said, we're sad, the album'southward done, we forgot," he says with a laugh.
"And then when I listened to those songs again, those probably aren't fifty-fifty Liam Gallagher songs, they audio a lot similar Semisonic songs. Possibly I just wrote some new ideas for my band," he adds.
None of those songs actually made it onto the Semisonic EP. Simply the ones he wrote afterwards did.
"But they broke the water ice and helped remember how to sound similar that," he says.
He also hadn't stopped recording in the interim. He's released iv solo albums, about recently 2017'sRe-Covered (of his renditions of songs he wrote for others). Since then he's switched to releasing singles rather than saving them for collected bodies of piece of work, most recently "Under the Circumstances."
Office of the rationale behind the switch is, from Wilson'south perspective, realism about how listeners eat music.
"What if you listen to [my anthology] on your way to work?" he says. "What if you always run out of time to listen after 25 minutes? Y'all may never heed to the seventh song of the tape. You might really like it but yous only never go at that place."
That said, there's also a personal component. Releasing an entire album requires more than work than just writing and recording the music, which can be a lot.
"I had washed the anthology thing so many times in my life, and the last couple solo records were so all-consuming and life-dominating," he says. "The terminal two I made small books with lyrics and drawings. They dominated 4 or 6 months, and my manager Jim and I just thought, let'due south have a different experience this time and put songs out as I call up of them. When it comes time—if it comes time—to make a new body of work, we'll do that, also. But it's been nice to have a intermission from that all-consuming approach."
Despite the solo work and the new Semisonic textile, Dan Wilson is still a songwriter at centre. It's a craft he's trying to teach and spread through his Words + Music in 6 Seconds series, a social media projection where he gives brief clips of songwriting advice and inspiration.
The nearly contempo extension of the project are the Words + Music in 6 Seconds cards, a deck of 74 cards where each offers communication or encouragement.
"For the last v years I've been posting pithy quotes on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, hopefully really helpful things to say to artists well-nigh the procedure, living a creative life, revision, keeping your hopes upward, what to focus on, inspiration," he explains. "A friend of mine told me, 'Do y'all want to make a small-scale book out of these quotes? I think songwriters would love that.' I mentioned the idea to my wife who said, 'Or, you could make a deck of cards, similar a tarot deck.' And I loved that idea."
Follow editor Daniel J. Willis at Twitter.com/BayAreaData .
Source: https://riffmagazine.com/features/dan-wilson-semisonic-breakthrough/
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