Scott Walker (singer) - Compositional Approach

Compositional Approach

Initially working as an interpreter of other people's songs, Scott Walker had developed his own songwriting skills by the heyday of The Walker Brothers and by the time of his first solo album in 1967. In a 1984 interview he spoke of difficulty in writing songs: "I don't write songs for pleasure. I can only write when I have to — like I'm under contract, or to finish an album."

Walker's late 1960s and 1970s work was relatively conventional. On a superficial level, it followed the melodic orchestral pop template used by singers such as Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams and Jack Jones - mainstream artists whose career path he was initially expected to follow. Crucial differences came via the more experimental orchestrations of his arrangers (primarily Wally Stott, Peter Knight and Reg Guest) and by Walker’s own approach to lyrics, which involved a cinematic mise-en-scene approach once described as "unsettling short stories, all the more creepy for their delicate orchestral backdrop." As his solo career progressed, Walker began working political themes into his lyrics. Among the first of these was "The Old Man’s Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime)" (from Scott 4). Further references came via his dramatisation of the work of a CIA torturer on "The Electrician" (Nite Flights)

Walker's next artistic development as a songwriter came when he jettisoned his remaining conventional lyrical concerns along with his remaining connections to formal popular song (and, by extension, the easy-listening ballads which he had been famous for). The New York Times has described Walker as arriving at "the point where he barely needs melody anymore. Instead, there are whirring synthesizers, great orchestral blocks of sound, noises of unknown provenance." Despite the radical alteration of his methods, Walker has commented that he does not consider himself a "composer" in the established sense of the term: "I think of myself as a songwriter, but I agree they are maybe not traditional songs. I know what people mean, but what else can you call them?"

Walker has described his current lyrical technique (assembling short blocks of text containing images that are sometimes seemingly unconnected and disparate from each other) as being similar to "a general, assembling troops on the battlefield." The Wire has noted that the short blocks of white-on-black text presented in the CD insert for The Drift is reflective of this. The roots of this compositional technique are apparent as early as the Scott Walker tracks on Nite Flites - the lyrics insert for the album clearly feature the technique, albeit with a black text on a white background.