MUSIC: Songwriting + Rohan Shirali, “It’s Alright” (2014)

Boy, it’s amazing living with talented and creative people. Not only is it a pleasure to listen to their music and share in the delight of combined music making, but it pushes my own creativity further in all aspects of my life. This summer I’m trying to collaborate with my friends to highlight some of the great music happening around St. Louis, as well as provide an opportunity to relate the music back around to central themes from Beyond The Score, my a cappella project.

Last time, Cassie Parks and I took on Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel Im Spiegel” and got lost in the moment. This time we’ve got Rohan Shirali (Stypes GC / Beat Therapy president / singer-songwriter) who, in addition to all those credits, is my roommate, a best friend and large contributor to the collection of 8 guitars in our apartment.

Rohan’s got an album coming coming out this Fall - “From Another Time”. Earlier this week a few of us got together to film a video of Rohan’s song, “It’s Alright”. Take a listen:

In addition to being a catchy tune that sticks in your ear, “It’s Alright” has an empathetic message that can relate back to the listener’s experience, allowing them to fill in the gaps of knowledge with their own circumstance. It’s much like the feeling discussed in the Pärt post and further explicated in a reflection of my Next Level adventure - the idea that music can be understood beyond its intrinsic artistic value and as a part of a more personal and holistic undertaking, breaking the boundaries between music and life. This realization is central to an understanding of a cappella music, but for our purposes here in this post I will focus on how this applies to songwriting.

Songwriting as Healing

While a song like “It’s Alright” certainly serves many needs of the listener - being catchy, musical and relatable - it also functions as a tool for the performer: a vehicle for individual self-expression. The combination of a guitar, a melody and personally penned lyrics results in an experience that, for the songwriter in the moment, feels like a deeply imbedded truth. Many times I have walked away from writing a song feeling as if a weight has been lifted - the physical effect of wrestling an emotion and refining my understanding of it.

This is because songwriting is an act of self-discovery - a process that unfolds, importantly, over time. The act of conceiving then writing, re-writing, perfecting and finally performing is a product of creation and reflection. Trying to find the right words to accurately and artfully express difficult thoughts requires careful and deliberate work, and (speaking from personal experience) if the words aren’t right I definitely can’t move on until they are.

The musical expression of this creative/healing process occurs in the voice. It is not a deliberate choice necessarily, but instead is the fusion of musical content with personal/emotional substance. This occurs in subtle ways like tone, inflection or timing, but humans have the capability to automatically pick up on these cues to make inferences about the singer/speaker. Simply put, it is the ability to understand context - like whether the person you’re talking to on the phone has just lost a loved one or received a promotion, based on their tone when they pick up and say “hello” - without being presented the actual information. It is this context that imbues such art with extra-musicality, and provides an additional perspective that leads to fuller understanding.

Laurie Stras, professor of music at University of Southampton, provides in her article The Organ of the Soul: Voice, Damage, and Affect an example of how the experience of the performer translates into a vocal delivery, using an instance of vocal damage as a particular case study:

“Nonetheless, the disrupted singing voice cannot help but tell of trauma, for the damage leaves its traces at sublinguistic levels–it is not a structural part of the vocal narrative, but it is still ‘essential’ to the voice” (Stras 2006: 176).

With this understanding it becomes difficult to separate the singer with all of their experiences from the actual song, thus contextualizing the depth and resonance of “It’s Alright”. This also explains the healing elements of songwriting, and how the act of musical processing is carried with the singer even as they move on.

Voice + Self

But why is it that a vocal delivery allows for the most sympathetic listener response? Don Campbell opens a chapter of his influential book The Mozart Effect entitled Sound Voice: Your Original Healing Instrument with a powerful statement that may explain:

“The human voice is a remarkable instrument of healing, our most accessible sonic tool” (Campbell 2001: 86).

We already addressed the first half of his statement in the upper portion of this post, so let’s focus on this idea of accessibility. By this I mean that the act of singing, particularly self-written material, is an intimate invitation into your self. When you share a song through your voice, it not only conveys your artistic and musical intentions, but also invites the listener to join into your emotional, physical and spiritual state.

I have mentioned before that the voice is the only instrument to be physically embedded into our being. You cannot separate your voice from your actual body - they are physically connected. This fuels the association between the voice and the self, and is the reason that such common phrases as “raise your voice” or “voice your opinion” are present in our vernacular. Ultimately this leads to the modern notion of artists expressing their personal identity through music (an idea that really began back with Beethoven…)

So while songwriting includes an internal act of individual healing - the process of turning over of ideas and emotions within the mind in an effort to make sense - there is also the external invitation to an artist’s musical soul, shared through the act of performance and facilitated by the properties of the voice.

This understanding allows us to view songwriting as a holistic endeavor, one that can be evaluated musically and artistically but cannot be fully understood without taking into account the elements of individuality, personal fulfillment, or spiritual/emotional healing.

We may never know what Rohan actually means when he repeats the song’s ubiquitous title over and over in an act of reassurance. But does it really matter? At the end of the day it becomes difficult to tell exactly what a song like “It’s Alright” really is - a musical creation of Rohan’s making or a musical manifestation of Rohan himself.

You can follow along with Rohan Shirali’s music by liking his Facebook page. This’ll keep you in the loop as the album gets finished and released! Woohoo!

Next up: Leo Chang joins me with a jazz standard and we discuss the subtle difference between a cover and a version. Thanks for reading!