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So what is Roxanne’s writing process, and what does she think about the current crop of performers out there: Ed Sheeran, Jake Bugg, Sam Smith, and so on? “I had a writing session recently with some really nice guys, and I said, ‘send me over just the sketch of the song’, and it comes over with an actual formula, and I’m like, ‘oh my God, is that how they’re teaching kids to write songs today?’” she says, with a smile. “But then take an artist like Norah Jones. When she came out, every label suddenly wanted a Norah; and it’s the same thing with Adele. There is real talent out there, and I think Ed Sheeran is one of those talents. When I think of the old days, I was fortunate that I owned my publishing; I wasn’t signed to a publisher where everybody was trying to write a song for Cher, you know? “When Cher would go in to do a record, everybody would want to be on it, but you can’t do that now, as they’re all writing their own songs. And if you go back way further, to the days of Frank Sinatra, there was always somebody putting their name on a song. What is also happening today is, so many more songs have multiple, multiple ‘writers’. It’s pretty crazy, and working that way for me can complicate things.”
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I ask Roxanne to take me through the ins and outs of a recent project, and she happily obliges. “A music supervisor friend sent me a brief for a new reality show he was scoring, called Intervention, and he was looking for songs,” she begins. I feel a story brewing. “Basically, a person moves to New York and they have a new makeover in their life. I actually happened to have had a song called First Day Of A New Life which I’d put together with a writer from Manchester, England, called Franco. He’d come [to Santa Monica] three months ago, and on his first day, I thought, ‘let’s write about today’. It was a nice song, and we wrote it in three hours. “These days, shows tend to want one-stops, and they’re also going to song libraries more and more. These libraries have taken over, really; and they make it very easy for the shows, as you have a blanket license to use all this stuff, all different genres, by all different artists. But Franco was coming over the next morning, so we decided to revise the lyrics of that song and immerse New York into it. So the title became First Day Of A New York Life. “By midnight that night, I pretty much had the rest of the song. The one thing I am pushing for all the time as a songwriter is, ‘how does this line go into the next line?’, and that was how we approached it: ‘how are we going to really make this develop, so we have a bit more of a story?’” Franco laid down the vocals, and the following morning, Grammy-winning producer (and dear friend of Roxanne), Gerry Brown, came over and mixed it. That afternoon,
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Roxanne sent the finished article to her trusted composer colleague. “I guess he liked it a lot, because at 11.45pm that night, he sent me a sketch of another idea he had, saying, ‘I’m sure that if you tweak the lyrics, you could come up with something better; if you want to work on this, I’ll take this into the meeting, too’,” she recalls, with a chuckle. “So Franco came again the next morning, and by 2pm, we had a guitar and vocal which now sounded like a completely new song! But we used his hook chorus line, and where he had this riff at the end, I made that a background part, and then we made a completely different section. We used his first lyric, and rewrote the rest of it, but we always kept the template of his idea. And right now, both of those songs are under consideration for the show. “When I’m working with a lot of northern Europeans - even Franco, who has a very thick British accent - I have a routine. When Franco recorded the vocal on that second song, for example, the composer initially came back to me and said, ‘look, even my daughter can’t understand what he’s saying’, so I came up with this system: they send me a track with the melody on it, I will write the lyrics, and I will sing along to it; I then pan my vocal to the right, and the track to the left, so they can control the music. They only need to know how I am phrasing the words.”
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Roxanne used to use Pro Tools for her projects, but these days she’s all about Logic, and her brand new set of Genelec 8030s, of course, which have, in her own words, ‘changed everything for the better’. “Today, Logic is the best DAW for me, no question - and my God, it’s a new world working with my Genelecs. I am totally crazy about them,” she says, as her eyes widen. “You know, Bill always had Tannoys, and Gerry always had his speakers that he just loved mixing on - and he can mix on anything, to tell you the truth - but I said to him, ‘I’ve got these new speakers, you have got to try them’. He agreed, and was extremely impressed. He always says, ‘the test will be when I take it and play it outside, someplace else’. That might be in the car, or wherever, and sure enough, it came out great, and he was very happy. “Using Genelecs, the difference is just unbelievable. The spectrum and depth to me is immense; there is a wonderful clarity of sound, and they have created an ambience that I have never had before. They’ve improved my workflow beyond belief, actually.” As our long conversation comes to a close, I ask Roxanne to share a story or two with me. Here is the edited version of what she had to say: “I was writing for Jacky Cheung, and I had one more song to deliver, yet I was working
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on four, so I asked his people to choose which one out of those I should finish. They went for Double Trouble, and when they were adapting my lyrics, I said that the ideal message would be, a guy gets caught up in two women. But I was told Jacky will never sing that, as he is known for being a real family man, has a wife with two daughters, and he is very loyal to them, so I had to have a re-think! This is what’s so wonderful about collaboration! So I came up with the idea that he was a witness to a gang hit, and he got spotted by the gang, and they went for it. And that song became a big feature on his tour with twenty-five musicians, loads of dancers, and a sixty-foot LED screen, so I think that was a good choice!” It was also a massive number one hit in Hong Kong, I should add! I go to put my dictaphone away, but Roxanne isn’t quite finished: “I have got to tell you this, Paul... [smiles] There was this one Chinese girl called Corina, who came to me from USC (University of Southern California). She was nineteen-yearsold, and she says to me, ‘will you write a letter to Thornton School of Music for me, so I can go to the music school?’ She was really brazen, and had a lot of nerve, but I thought, ‘right okay, you took a taxi, paid fifty bucks to get here, so what am I gonna say?’ ‘Why do you want to go?’ was all I could muster, and she replied, ‘because in my country, there is a lot of copyright infringement and piracy; I want to learn here so I can go back and make a change.’ And I thought, ‘what a great answer!’. She was really earnest about it, so I asked her a lot of questions, wrote the letter, and she got in! That felt good, I have to say.” www.genelec.com