Songwriting Masterclass: Interview with Paul Armfield
- The American Guitar Academy
- Aug 22
- 15 min read
This is a special blog post, and definitely a longer one that you are probably used to reading from myself or Ryan here at The American Guitar Academy. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing a gentleman who is possibly the most gifted songwriter that I have ever met - Mr Paul Armfield.
Paul is a well-known figure on the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom, where I grew up and started my musical journey. I first knew him as the manager of a bookstore (I think we could likely guess where his way with words comes from!), and then we met again through his connections with the college that I attended. Not too long ago, I published a blog post discussing some songwriting ideas (check it out here!) and in that post I discussed a few methods I have used, or am aware of, for writing songs. However, I do not consider myself a fully-fledged songwriter and it makes sense to have a full on masterclass from one of the greats. Enjoy!
Paul Armfield
Whilst we did not discuss how we got started with playing any instruments, let alone playing the guitar and his start with creating his own music, one thing I can observe from his playing is that it is well seasoned; there is nothing in his playing that does not need to be there. From my perspective it seems that, despite him being an accomplished wordsmith of the highest order, the word ‘superfluous’ is not one that appears in his dictionary.
“I am a very basic guitarist, a competent bassist and have no keyboard skills at all.”
Although clearly humble when describing his technical abilities, it would be wrong to say he is a technically proficient guitarist. He has something that so many people lack, which is the ability to play exactly what he needs to bring his thoughts and ideas to life through song.
It is interesting to note that Paul Armfield is not only a guitarist, but a great bass player, an accomplished vocalist and a master at playing the musical saw… Yes, the musical saw! Check out the video of him performing his song ‘Evermine’ in Germany here - a beautiful song in its own right but also a great demonstration of what you can do with a simple tool available in any hardware store.
According to his website, Paul spent some time in eastern Europe in the late 1980s, and returned to the Isle of Wight in the early 1990s.
“After a few years in revolutionary eastern Europe, Paul Armfield returned to his beloved Isle of Wight in the early 90’s to get married, have children, sell books and write songs.”
After this he would slowly start to release albums, working on material and playing a plethora of shows throughout the United Kingdom and Europe, including some more intimate shows on the Isle of Wight that I had the pleasure of witnessing.
The Masterclass
From here I will delve into some of the subjects that we covered in our interview together. This will form the main part of the masterclass and I will condense some of the questions and answers, elaborating from there. The full interview is available here!
Sounding Like Yourself
“ - what I realised as I got older is that it’s hard to not sound like yourself. If you go where the urge takes you and try not to self-censor too much you’ll soon come to recognise the qualities that are distinctly yours.”
Something Paul touches upon here is a very useful realization to have as a musician; it is not hard to sound like yourself. However, just be aware that you are always developing and changing in skillset and tastes, so your ‘sound’ might change too!
Try not to worry too much about what you think your song should sound like, and instead to nurture the idea as it develops. With a few niche exceptions, such as writing to a brief for an advertising company etc, you are really writing for yourself alone. If your project, regardless of what it is, moves in a direction that seems cliché and predictable, try to determine whether or not there is a different approach you can take and if you prefer that alternate path to your original idea. As long as you are not blatantly ripping off another song, then the only opinion that really matters is your own!
This also extends to the application of technique, focusing less on songwriting. Too many musicians, guitar players especially, are hyper-focused on bolstering their technique and outpacing those around them. This is even more true when younger, or less experienced people, have a presence on that cesspool of toxic interactions that is Instagram (I should add, Instagram can also be a valuable tool, and I am not knocking it when used in the right context!). As long as you are working towards being able to play the ideas that you have in your head, then you are on the right path.
“ - this is the very essence of our uniqueness.”
Simple Vs Complex
This is a problem that has plagued musicians for almost as long as music itself - does complexity make a song better? The short answer is no. Let us explore this some more!
When writing my dissertation for my degree, I stumbled across some research that, whilst outside of my area of expertise, I found quite interesting. The research detailed findings that the more popular a song, then the more simple it is. The obvious point to make here is that there is always the element of opinion, and this is the most crucial one - do you like the song you are listening to? Or perhaps more contextually appropriate, do you like the song you are writing? The study went on to correlate levels of intelligence with increasingly complex styles of music, but that was a can of worms I was not interested in opening then, and definitely not now! The author was careful to mention that this only really applied to specific contexts when consuming music.
I was recently teaching a student a John Fogerty tune, and also some classic Creedence Clearwater Revival material, and something they pointed out was that, even though there are three or four chords in each, that does not take away from the fact that they were brilliantly written tunes that are complex in other ways.
John Fogerty - Centerfield
CCR - Bad Moon Rising
“I usually just present a very simple song, and the simpler it is leaves more space for their innovation.”
Paul is no stranger to working with various musicians for his own personal creations, and when joining others for external projects. Something that he appears to favour is the collaborative aspect of creating music, and watching your creation develop into something you could never possibly imagine, whilst still being distinctly your piece, thanks to the offerings of other musicians.
I would like to point out that sometimes you are destined to see a song through from start to finish all on your own, that happens and should be welcomed when it does. Other times you have to pick and choose who you ask to contribute to a song based on them as a musician and not just because they might be your friend. For example, I recently wrote a smooth jazz, funky sort of tune and it would be a terrible idea to ask someone like Kirk Hammett to join in the fun - personal opinions aside, it would be like chalk and cheese, a simply awful prospect to consider. On the other hand, if I was writing an old-school thrash tune, maybe he would be a good fit.
There are times when writing a song, you just feel that it needs something, an added section or an additional instrument playing a specific line to really make the project align with your vision. In the interview, Paul discusses how, when writing the ‘Found’ album (link below), he spent a significant amount of time creating string and brass arrangements. I imagine that, in that particular moment, he could envision the supporting music precisely!
“ - although much of the complexity came from the musicians I invited to do their thing, I also spent a lot of time creating fairly complex string and brass parts.”
Paul Armfield - Found
Do You Need To Be Skilled as a Musician in Order to Write a Song?
This is a question I have been asked myself many times, and I posed this question in the interview to get Paul’s take. From my own personal experience, I have witnessed people write the catchiest melodies on instruments that they have never played before - perhaps not being restricted to normal patterns and conventional ideas allows their creativity a higher degree of freedom? I think that, in this particular case, it is not really possible to show off, therefore you revert to what should matter the most - serving the song.
“I am not a highly skilled musician, I don’t understand music theory, I am a very basic guitarist, a competent bassist and have no keyboard skills at all.”
Some of the most well known and best loved musicians of all time do not, or did not, have a great working knowledge of music theory. One of the most widely revered singers of all time, the late and inimitable Aretha Franklin could play piano well and bring a tear to your eye with her voice, but her training consisted of picking everything up by ear in church. BB King had a great working knowledge of chord shapes and approaches to playing the blues, but I can almost guarantee he could not tell you about the mixolydian flat 6 scale, or quartal harmony (this is not definite, please do not quote me on this!).
For a comical, strangely alluring demonstration of this, please view the link below to see musician/comedian Brett Domino’s guide to writing a hit pop song. You will see what I mean when he produces a bassoon out of nowhere!
Brett Domino - How to Make a Hit Pop Song Pt. 1
Should You Try to Create Lots of Small Ideas, or Create a Whole Piece?
“I don’t generally think about songwriting unless I have a project in mind and then I sit down and doodle with the guitar and record the basic ideas”
The problem I have is that I have written and recorded a multitude of different ideas, consisting of nearly completed ideas, chord progression, basic melodies, strumming patterns, phrasing ideas for solos and much more. Very rarely do I sit down and flesh out an entire song by myself - everyone has a personal approach and, as you can see from the above quote, Paul is firmly in the opposite camp to myself and prefers to flesh out the entire thing in one go.
“ - mostly it’s an all-in-one-go process, sitting down, doodling on the guitar until something emerges that catches my interest and I’ll sing along with just sounds until a word or sentence emerges”
Many years ago, I attended a masterclass held by the great Steve Vai at a nice hotel in Guildford, United Kingdom. The masterclass was called ‘Alien Guitar Secrets’ and, whilst most of us were there just to bear witness to Vai himself, some of the information we were privy to is that Vai is not such an alien after all! The example he gave was simple but effective - he pulled out his phone and scrolled through all of the voice notes he had recorded, just singing or even beatboxing into his phone. Many of these were small and insignificant on their own, but they all had potential.
If memory serves correctly, he actually found the voice note that then became one of the tracks from his recently released album at the time, 2016’s ‘Modern Primitive’.
Steve Vai - Bop!
“I sometimes think it’s two skills involved, the ‘art’ is pulling that initial idea out of the air, and the ‘craft’ is fleshing out that idea to become a whole song.”
Being Proud of What You Have Produced
“There was another time that I’d been working on songs for a project, coming up with lots of ideas, some of which never got finished, and whilst I was in the studio I found a lyric I had written that I could not really remember writing, but suddenly it was clear how it should go and I finished it in half an hour and it’s one of the songs I’m most proud of ‘You'.”
Paul Armfield - You
There will always be songs you revisit and you simply cannot stand. It could be reflective of a time when you were unhappy with your playing, the technique overshadowed everything else (for better or for worse!) or for many other reasons. However, I am of the belief that there should always be something that you have played a part in that you are proud of, that you should happily show people when they ask about your material.
Sometimes it can be useful to have a goal beyond that of just writing a song. For example, a great long term goal would be to sit with a group of musicians in a well equipped recording studio and come up with an idea and record it there and then. The realisation of this goal could then make the end product that much more personal to you.
“I’d made the album [Evermine] I’d dreamed of making. I’d written it in a week whilst recovering from surgery, we recorded it in a week, we’d done it with a very small budget and it sounded a million dollars. It felt like a wonderful realisation of my vision.”
Paul Armfield - Evermine
Writing as Part of a Team Vs Individually
“I pretty much only ever write alone, I have on occasion taken the basic idea to someone else who has more musical knowledge than me to develop further…”
Sometimes writing a song can be such a personal journey, that it almost feels unnatural to let anyone else be involved, at least at an early stage. Writing on your own also means that you have nothing shaping your own personal approach other than yourself - do you want to add a weird chord or effect? Go ahead because no-one is there to say otherwise. Other advantages of writing on your own could be:
There is no limit to how much you can work on a piece at any given time (you may lose interest before the other part and vice-versa),
You pick up projects you have paused in the past, and still retain the vision you initially started with,
Often you just know what needs to come next, but you can’t explain it. When this has happened in my own experience, taking the time to then explain in great detail where the song should go makes the entire project lose momentum - working on your own you can just plough straight on.
In an rig rundown-type video with Premier Guitar, guitar virtuoso and preeminent legend Guthrie Govan discusses a specific tone that Steven Wilson requires throughout the set they used to play together. You can view the video (timestamped) at the link here, and read the full interview with Steven Wilson here. The tone in question is something they call the ‘Lonely Swede Lost in the Forest Sound’ - that was the way that Wilson described the tone he wanted and it was up to Guthrie to interpret that effectively.
Whilst being able to interpret those vague, abstract thoughts is a really useful skill, from a songwriter perspective it is much easier to not have to jump over those hoops.
Regarding the second half of Paul’s quote from above, sometimes you really do need to take the initial idea to someone different, not necessarily better I hasten to add, and develop the idea further. Sometimes you need that extra external spark to really unleash the potential of your tune, even if it is just brief verbal feedback.
Here are some other benefits to working collaboratively:
Another perspective can help your idea move in directions you never thought possible, let alone even considered,
A simple guitar part is sometimes all that is needed, but having another mirror it with different gear or technical inflections can really fill out the sound,
There is always a risk of including an idea just because it works, and not because it is right or the best choice. Input from someone else can helpfully criticise sub-par sections, or helpfully inform you if you are sat on the fence.
To help support the argument for writing collaboratively, I recall the day one of my college bands wrote our first ska song. We had already finished a term as a tribute to ska legends The Specials, and then we had freedom to write and perform whatever we wanted. At first we tried to go down a funky, rock-infused pathway. However, the only thing we had was a riff I had come up with - the problem with that one is that the drummer soon pointed out that it was exactly the same as ‘Suck My Kiss’ by the Red Hot Chili Peppers - oops!
As a joke, I started to play a ska type guitar part, the drummer joined in and then after about 10 minutes we had pretty much the whole song completed. This then spawned our own ska band and it would not have happened unless the drummer was there to highlight my faux pas.
Be warned! You may have heard the phrase “too many cooks spoil the broth” - and it definitely holds true in the kitchen, but also in the studio. If you have 20 people writing a song vs only two, then the ideas are sure to be a confused mess of convoluted pathways that do not really go anywhere. To my ears at least, it ends up being quite plain.
The Story of Trigonometry
Paul Armfield - Trigonometry
One of the best written songs I have ever heard is Paul Armfield’s classic ‘Trigonometry’ - I originally wrote about this song in my first ‘Album Recommendations’ blog post that you can read here. I also transcribed and performed the Fender Rhodes solo from the song that you can view here.
There were many stories floating around about this song when I was at college on the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom. I thought, to round off our interview by asking Paul the actual origins of this tune.
“My friend Adam Kirk was on tour as Joan Baez’s guitarist - he wanted to make some music but wasn’t confident in his own songwriting so we sat down to write together.”
Something that I take from this is that even the best of us might have areas where we are not confident, and sometimes it takes another to help us through it. In this case, the song started as a collaborative effort.
“The first session we spent all day trying to come up with something, it was my first time trying to write with another person and I found it intimidating. He went home a bit disappointed, but the minute he was gone I sat down and wrote it in about an hour.”
One of the most important lessons you can take from this particular quote is that sometimes things simply do not work out. It could be a combination of many things, and doing some as simple as taking the same approach a short while later can make a world of difference. After this they got back together, recorded what they could and then spent a while arranging the tune - as I have discussed previously, arranging a tune can be viewed as a form of songwriting in and of itself.
“The song Trigonometry itself was a challenge to myself to write a mathematical love song, Chaos theory had caught my attention and I thought there was some poetry in the idea.”
As a lyricist, as well as any person that has ever listened to music that features words, can attest, there is a seemingly endless stream of tortured cliches that rhyme easily and fit into various situations. Think about how country and western is associated with trucks and beer, or blues is about how “my lady left me” - that is all well and good, but it certainly gets tiresome after a while.
Not only is ‘Trigonometry’ a difficult subject to write about in general, but it definitely does not lend itself to rhyming easily - it puts up a fight! Furthermore, mixing the themes of mathematics and love is not something you usually see together. A fun experiment you could try by yourself is to think of two unrelated subjects and see if they could work together, you never know! The next masterpiece could be waiting for you on the very next page.
Here are some contrasting ideas you could start with:
Algebra and love (a tangent on the trigonometry and love idea),
The deep sea and theatre,
Technology and the Stone Age.
To expand upon that last point, this could be a comparison between how advanced our technology is now, but how in the Stone Age we did not have that, yet we still survived. Inspired by the first point, I wrote a short 8 bar idea that combines the two ideas - check it out below!
Remember, regardless of the subject, it is always nice to be interested in the instrumental side of a song as well as the lyrical content. Your aim is to find something different, to bring a unique flair that catches the listener by surprise.
Conclusion
I found it to be a tremendously rewarding experience interviewing and learning from Paul Armfield, and I will thank him endlessly for his time and patience. As mentioned previously, the entire unedited interview will be available for you to view here, and I strongly encourage you to check out the links to his social media and material below:
I hope that any of you that made it far can take something away from everything that we have discussed. From a personal standpoint, the most impactful lesson for me was the one regarding finding your own voice and learning to recognise your own unique sound. That same quote I have included again below.
“ - try not to self-censor too much, you'll soon come to recognise the qualities that are distinctly yours.”
I always try to instill a love for music in my students, peers and anyone that will take the time to listen, or at least tolerate my ramblings. If you love music for what it is, and allow yourself the freedom to create without holding yourself back, then you will undoubtedly stand out.
One final point that I would like to make, and it is similar to the last one, is that there should never be an expectation of success. If you are doing this for the love of musical creation alone, then any success you find is just a happy and welcome byproduct. I know that Paul Armfield often commissions songs as well as writing his own material, but those commissions still allow him to express himself as he sees fit. Although I would not claim him to be commercially successful, especially compared to the likes of Kanye West et al, I know exactly who I would rather sit in a room and listen to.
