History of Alternative Pop

Series Summary

Songwriting has a long and rich history dating back hundreds of years. From the bards and troubadours of the middle ages to more modern songwriters like Bob Dylan or Paul Simon, songwriters change, shape, and in most cases improve the quality of life for those around them. Songwriting is made easier when the writer has a knowledge of music theory, but this kind of expertise is not a always a prerequisite, as many songwriters describe themselves as a mediums rather than creators.

In this free video series, our expert Cody Kimmel will give you a bit of the history of the alternative pop song before going over songwriting tools, tips, and methods. He will give you tips for starting a song, and teach you about chord and lyric structures for verses, pre-choruses, choruses, and bridges. Cody will then show you how to put all these disparate parts together and blend them into a completed whole with examples from his own music.

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Cody Kimmel. I am the lead singer of the band Eliot Fitzgerald, and I’m here with Expert Village to teach you how to write an alternative-pop song. To begin with today, in talking about writing an alternative-pop song, it’s first important to understand the history of alternative. One thing we must do as song writers, and as just people dabbling in song writing, whether you are a songwriter and have been for a long time, or somebody that’s just interested in looking into it; one of the things to remember is that you are not just a songwriter. In fact, you are one of many songwriters within a history of music. So depending on what genre you are writing for, for example alternative or pop or whatever, you must understand the history of where it came from. For alternative music, for example, it has a much shorter history than a lot of other genres such as country or rock and roll or hip-hop, folk or anything like that. Alternative was really a musical genre that came out of about the early 1990’s. It kind of came out of frustration with where music was heading. Really the only reason it’s called alternative music, is because they didn’t really know what else to call it. As far as they knew, there was the hip-hop funk, there was the dance techno, there was kind of the ‘80’s wave music, there were the hair bands, and there was the hard rock. And this came out, and bands like the Counting Crows, even Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and different bands like that, and DJs didn’t really know what to call it. So as you enter into the world of song writing for alternative-pop music, it’s important to know where you came from. "