Legendary rocker Alice Cooper shared some invaluable advice for aspiring musicians during a Q&A session at the Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy Camp in Scottsdale, Arizona, on November 7. When asked what guidance he would give to those just starting out, Cooper didn’t hesitate (via Blabbermouth): “Listen to THE BEATLES. Yeah. I’m not kidding. When it comes to writing songs, listen to the simplicity of THE BEATLES. I don’t care if you’re writing a death metal song. A song, first of all, isn’t just a riff and a drum beat. You should be able to sit down — I don’t care who it is — and be able to play that melody and sing that song. You could be the most angry person in the world.”
“I’ve had young bands come to me and they go, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And I say, ‘I get it. You’re angry.’ ‘Cause you’re just yelling at me. I said, ‘Well, where’s the song? There’s no song there. There’s a great beat and there’s a great riff, but there’s no song.’
“So I said, ‘What I want you to do is, for one week, listen to nothing but the BEACH BOYS, THE BEATLES and THE FOUR SEASONS — any [of the bands] that wrote songs, or Burt Bacharach, that write songs. And then, I don’t want you to sound like that, but I want you to get the idea of a verse, a B section, af bridge going into the chorus, going back into the bridge. But it means it has to have a melody. You can’t just yell at me. And it’s fine if you do yell at me, but you’re not gonna stick around very long.”
“Why are those songs [from THE BEATLES] still being played on the radio? Because of melody, the melody — we all want to hear the melodies,” he concluded.
Cooper has long credited THE BEATLES as a major influence on his own career. In a 2017 interview with NME, he recalled hearing “She Loves You” as a child, calling it “the first song by THE BEATLES I ever heard and it literally changed something in my brain. It inspired what Alice Cooper became.”
Reeder, the visionary behind Metal Addicts, has transformed his lifelong passion for metal into a thriving online community for metal aficionados. As a fervent devotee of black metal, Reeder is captivated by its dark, atmospheric, and often unorthodox soundscapes.