🧠 Stop Listening Like A Fan. Start Hearing Like Prince.

Hey music maker!

As a teenager, Prince copied the lyrics of records he loved out by hand. Then he worked out the chords while the record played.

Jacob Collier says one of the first things he did with a microphone was sing all the chords he loved.

Bassist Gary Willis learns jazz tunes by charting them in numbers, with little notes to himself between the sections.

Some cruise ship musicians I've worked with had about a month to learn a couple hundred songs. Charts were a big part of how they pulled it off.

I spent a lot of time listening to music. It was a pastime for me. While other kids were outside playing, I spent a portion of that time just sitting in the house listening to music.

The problem was how I interacted with it.

I listened like a fan. They took the songs apart and interacted with them.

In today's issue:

Key: Bb major

The solo section has 2 main moves.

Move 1: 1(add9) - 6mi7(sus4) - 5 - 4(add9)

Move 2: 3mi - 2mi - 1, 4 - 3mi - 2mi

Move 1 is a simple chord progression, 1 - 6mi - 5 - 4, with color notes added, bringing more interest to the progression.

Move 2 is a scale-based walkdown (diatonic chords) moving at a rate of 3 or 4 chords per measure, compared to the 1 chord per 2 measures pace happening before.

This adds contrast through new chords in a new sequence and a faster harmonic rhythm.

How this walkdown was imagined... idk.

But one easy way to write something like this is to start with a simple melody, in this case E♭ - D - C - B♭ - E♭ - D - C.

Play it using a nice rhythm, and then harmonize each note using diatonic chords (chords in the key).

In college I took an Intro to Jazz course. Every week we had to sit in the basement music library with headphones on and write notes on records. Mine usually looked like "piano stopped... okay, now it's back."

I had no idea what I was supposed to be hearing.

It only started clicking years later, when I found Bobby Owsinski's book Deconstructed Hits. For the first time, I had an actual list of things to listen for.

In simple terms, your taste is a library of patterns. Every chord move you've heard, every "oh, the drums drop out here" moment, gets filed away somewhere.

Casual listening fills that library too. You just don't get a say in what goes on the shelves.

Owsinski has a name for listening on purpose. He calls it listening through a song instead of to it.

And Prince's handwritten pages for his unfinished memoir are basically a guide to doing exactly that. I pulled four steps out of what he wrote.

1. Find the moment

Prince's version was "any song that caught my fancy." I'd push it one step further. Don't just pick the song. Pick the moment.

Raphael Saadiq fell for a specific bassline before he knew what a bass was. It was James Jamerson on Marvin Gaye's "How Sweet It Is." He only figured out what that sound was when he saw someone play one.

My moment was Jamerson too, on "What's Going On" (yep, still at it from last week). Find the spot you keep rewinding, then write down why you love it, in plain words. "The bass is super melodic, it’s catchy as hell" totally counts.

2. Make the map

Prince never learned to read music, so he wrote the lyrics out by hand. Copying the words helped him see what a line was made of.

My version is a Nashville number chart. Write the sections, then put the chords down as numbers. A six-minute song easily fits on one page, and you can finally see how it's put together.

3. Play it back

The physicist Richard Feynman left a line on his blackboard: "What I cannot create, I do not understand."

I've loved “What’s Going On” for years, then sat down to play it and realized I had no clue what the bass was really doing. Playing it back is how you find out what your ear actually caught. Singing the bass line counts, and so does humming.

4. The arrangement pass

Prince wrote that the overall arrangement was what interested him most. Arrangement just means who's playing what, and when.

Owsinski breaks most arrangements into five jobs.

The foundation (usually bass and drums), the rhythm, the pad, the lead, and the fills. Most songs have all five, but very rarely all at once.

So go section by section and count.

What’s present, its job, and when it enters and exits make up a move. Jot down your favorite moves to borrow.

But remember this: knowing loads of moves doesn't make your music original on its own. Taking consistent action without judgement during the process is essential.

That’s how the acquired moves come out through your personal interpretation.