[porcupine]

A friend of mine and I were talking about our influences. Obviously, you could be influenced on guitar or piano by one person, lyrics by another and so forth, but it was very hard for us to come up with the ONE artist that made us want to be a musician/songwriter/lyricist.

I said, jokingly, "...for me it was the Bay City Rollers, because I thought I could do better than that...lol".

So the question is two parts

1) who do you think influenced your music the most?

2) who have people SAID you sound/write like that has surprised you?(vocally, lyrically)

my answers:

1) JOHN HIATT
2) NEAL DIAMOND

[FunkDaddy]

1.) Dave Matthews / Dave Matthews Band - by far the biggest influence on my music as a whole, even when all I did was play drums

2.) The Tragically Hip - I am a huge, huge fan of this band but never really heard the influence in my own tunes, I get the comparison a lot though (to which saying I'm flattered by would be a huge understatement) I think it's mainly musically/melodically, I don't think my lyrics come anywhere near Gord Downie's.

[Duane Clancy]

It was a girl I hooked up with after a divorce who got me started ... she wrote me a poem and I just had to reciprocate. That was in 2003 and I've been writing ever since. I've been told I look like "Shaggy" from the Scooby-doo cartoons (especially if I forget to shave) ... I write like whomever I want ... and my voice sounds more like a combination of Bon Scott from early AC/DC, Tom Petty, and Rod Stewart. But I was told by the owner of a kareoke club I was playing at that I should only sing Rod Stewart songs because no matter who I tried to sing like it sounded like Rod Stewart trying to impersonate everyone else. Hey ... that all just makes me well rounded ...

[DannyDep]

That would be Richard Rodgers.
My memory is singed with the TV series “Victory At Sea”.
I guess I was 5 years old at the time and I remember that we had one of the first TV sets around, since my Dad,
who was a disabled Vet and worked for the DOD got to quality control lots of electrical equipment back then.

I can remember how the music and the visuals from the TV provided a moving metaphor of War and Hell, Peace and Heaven,
sometimes changing from one extreme to the other in such a short time frame.
The emotions that I was feeling as I listened and watched are still with me to this day and it was my first encounter with just how powerful music can be.
I knew then that music would always be a part of my life.

While these (youtube link) are not the visuals that went with the TV series, this is the best audio of the work that I could find.
The original episodes of the TV series are on youtube we well, if you’re interested.

I don’t really sound like anyone else, and that’s good because I don’t consider myself a singer. But some have said that I write in the style of Seal.

[Kenneth Bradshaw]

1) Harry Belafonte
2) The actor/drummer who played Little Ricky on I love Lucy

DannyDep,

I love Richard Rogers' music. But have you ever had to play it? I remember a miserable concert of Richard Rogers' music when I was playing the string bass. Hours of two chord music - mostly Bflat & F7.

[MABBO]

One name. RAY CHARLES.

MAB

[zmulls]

Stephen Sondheim
Dave Frishberg
Paul Simon

Pretty much covers the bases for me.

[DeeDee]

Blondie, Abba and Elvis

[Scotto]

My uncle gave me an old reel to reel with some tapes. You could seperate what you were listening to into 4 tracks I remember. I had Revolver, Rubber Soul, and magical mystery tour along with some Neil Diamond. I was a huge beatles freak after that and bought up any 45's or 33's I could get. After that there were many phases I went through Zepp, ACDC, and many others. Always came back to the Beatles as a touchstone though. My Rush phase is still going strong and recently I've decided there are some cool things the Stones did. I'm all over the place musically but the Bealtes are it for me. Cliche and cheesy I'm sure as it is everyone's but it is what it is...

[Bruce N]

This was a tough thing to come up with, the obvious answers for me just didn't seem to sit right, all of them being from my teens, Hendrix, Zappa, Young, yada yada...

I just felt that it had to be prior to that, and I think it was probably when I was around 9 years old, when I was watching the "Jonny Quest" cartoon on TV.

It was that jazzy music score for the intro and the outro of that show, for some reason it just clicked with me and I think it has been running around deep down in my subconscious ever since.

The composer of that music, Hoyt Curtin - http://www.youtube.c...ature=endscreen

Wiki-

Quote

In a 1999 interview Curtin said, "My pianist, Jack Cookerly, invented the synthesizer as we know it for Johnny Quest. It was made of orange crates with a keyboard and thousands of vacuum tubes! A regular jazz band, (of) 4 trumpets, 6 [trom]bones, 5 woodwind doublers, 5-man rhythm section including percussion"; was used to record the music for the Johnny Quest cartoon. The Johnny Quest session was done "...at RCA in Hollywood. Alvin Stoller or Frankie Capp usually played drums. I always tried to get the same guys where possible. They were the ones who could swing and read like demons."

When I think back, there was a lot of great jazz music scores playing on tv in the sixties, that was probably the biggest influence on me.

2) who do I sound like ? Please, let's not go there.

[DannyDep]

Kenneth Bradshaw, on 27 April 2012 - 07:29 PM, said:

1) Harry Belafonte
2) The actor/drummer who played Little Ricky on I love Lucy

DannyDep,

I love Richard Rogers' music. But have you ever had to play it? I remember a miserable concert of Richard Rogers' music when I was playing the string bass. Hours of two chord music - mostly Bflat & F7.

Not as part of an orchestra.
But right up till the last band i was in, we were always playing songs like,
It Might As Well Be Spring and My Funny Valentine.
As i recall, there were more than two chords to follow in those songs.

[kimberlyinnc]

Great question and one hard to answer


1) who do you think influenced your music the most? I think the one that made me sit up and notice LYRICS more is Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shelby Lynne and as late, Kelly Clarkson and Lady GaGa.

2) who have people SAID you sound/write like that has surprised you?(vocally, lyrically)

I have been told a couple of times that my lyric style reminded them of Mary Chapin Carpenter, and they didn't know I was a huge fan and it made my day. If I could write even a 10th as well as she does, I would be thrilled.
Also, I have been told I reminded them of, though I am NOT a singer, Lucinda Williams. for one, and Cheryl Wheeler. I don't hear it but its a compliment as well.

Kimberly

[NigeQ]

Most definitely The Beatles for me, particularly from Rubber Soul onwards, but in those days I was more interested in how stuff was recorded rather then songwriting.

I think I sound like Davy Jones but a lot of people (particularly from the US) say I sound like Peter Noone (Herman’s Hermits). Although I would like to sound more like Gary Brooker or Don Henley

[DCW]

FunkDaddy, on 27 April 2012 - 11:50 AM, said:

2.) The Tragically Hip - I am a huge, huge fan of this band but never really heard the influence in my own tunes, I get the comparison a lot though (to which saying I'm flattered by would be a huge understatement) I think it's mainly musically/melodically, I don't think my lyrics come anywhere near Gord Downie's.

Do you know the Gordon Downey song "Escape is at Hand for the Travelling Man?" It's about his meeting with Jim Ellison at a show in the 1990's. Jim Ellison didn't "start it all" for me, but he's done enough to cause me to seek out and literally uncover his gravestone on a rainy Sunday.

As far as "starting it all". It's a lame and unoriginal answer, but The Beatles. I got the "Red Album" when I was in Junior High. I'd put on disc 1 side 1, daydream until the end of the groove, flip over, and continue through all 4 sides. That was the first time I was compelled to want to write melodies of my own (as opposed to playing toy guitar or something).

Of course, the Beatles will lead you to a plethora of similar good influences-Big Star, Dwight Twilley Band, Raspberries, Badfinger, and so on.

The inspiration that made me "come into my own" as a songwriter was Lou Reed. I remember after the first practice with my second, and favorite, band in which I played, the other songwriter got out the new reissue of "The Velvet Underground and Nico" and played "Heroin" and "Venus in Furs" for me. Those were the most terrifying, transgressive songs that I'd ever heard, heavier than Motley Crue or any other metal that I had previously been into. That was the point at which the lyrics began to matter. Never before had heard lyrics that affecting and well-constructed. Still impossible to beat.

Beatles and Velvets, it is.

[Jim Colyer]

Elvis Presley and The Beatles started everything in modern music.

[CToronto]

A couple people have separated their influences between who they wanted to sound like and who they wanted to be understood as. I make the same definition but for me, it's the same artist.

When I was younger I fell in love with the sound of a singer's voice and wanted nothing more in the world than to be able to physically sound like him. It wasn't until I started writing my own songs and wanting the songs to be more important than the sound of my voice that I started looking for other qualities. What really opened my mind artistically was listening to the commentary track of a DVD special edition album. He wrote an entire album about a single topic but was able to make every song different because they were written from completely different points of view. Some were what he believed, some were what his enemies believed, some were written from the point of view of people that loved him but didn't understand him, and some were written from the point of view of the inanimate objects that he couldn't live without.

I've tried many times to get people to understand just how complicated Maynard James Keenan's(Tool, A Perfect Circle, Puscifer) songs can be and very rarely have any success. If I ever manage to inspire someone half as much as he did me....

[NickSpangler]

My first influence as a young kid was metallica, but my most influential became alice in chains and layne staley. Still inspirational to this day...

[oxe57]

Good question and one that I've never thought about. I would say the one artist who got me to consider being an artist myself would be Stevie Wonder. Bob Dylan would be a close second. Stevie instilled a feeling of determination and Dylan made me focus on content. Good topic. All the best....................peace!