• Song of the Year Nominees 2003
• Most Performed Australian Work nominations
• Most Performed Country Work nominations
• Most Performed Dance Work nominations
• Most Performed Foreign Work nominations
• Most Performed Jazz Work nominations

Song of the year

We asked the five songwriters nominated in the prestigious ‘Song of the Year’ category for the 2003 APRA Music Awards to write about their nominated song.

By Kasey Chambers
Not Pretty Enough

"I actually wrote the song about radio stations, to be precise. Generally the song is about insecurities, and this one night when I wrote the song I was having an insecure night – which I’m sure everybody does every now and then! It just happens to be those times I write a song! I sat down and I wrote Not Pretty Enough, and it was asking a lot of questions about why I get ignored by commercial radio and things like that. I think the most ironic thing about it is that that’s the only song commercial radio ever really picked up on! I certainly didn’t sit down and write the song thinking that that would ever happen, so it was a huge surprise! I was pretty flattered that they played it, it was great! I’ve never ever geared my career towards radio. It’s never been something that I sit down and think about, I don’t write songs to get played on radio or anything like that. But there are times that I think every musician sits back and scratches their head and wonders why something is getting played or something is not getting played. From my point of view, it wasn’t so much about my music in particular as just a lot of music out there that I think deserves a chance on radio and doesn’t get that chance. That was just something I was thinking about at the time, and that’s where all these questions came from. Am I not pretty enough? Do I cry too much? Am I too outspoken? I sat back and thought, well the answer to those questions is yes! That IS why I don’t get played on radio! In saying that, it’s not something I lose sleep over. I listen to the radio all the time, and I enjoy it – most of the time! It was just that one night, that little moment of insecurity and managed to get a song out of it. Not Pretty Enough took me a little while to write. Normally I sit down and I write a song from start to finish, or maybe one night I’ll write half and the next night I’ll write the other half, but generally I don’t like to drag them out too much. With Not Pretty Enough, I sat down and wrote the chorus, and something came up and I couldn’t finish it, and I found it really hard to get back into the head space. It was actually months later that I ended up finishing the song because I just couldn’t seem to get back into that same thing that I was feeling at the time. I think maybe that’s why the chorus of the song is geared towards what I was saying with the whole radio idea, that’s how I was feeling at the time, but the verse is a lot more of a general thing, it’s not about anything specifically. It’s because I was feeling quite different at the time that I finished the song. I remember writing the chorus, and I kept going back to it so many times trying to write the verse because I thought this song is going to be a stand out track, I really need to finish this song! I think I just felt like that song might just connect with people more than any other song I’d written. This sounds really weird, and I’m not a weird person or anything, but I really think songs are using the writer to get out to the world. I really don’t have any control over my songs. I don’t know why some songs come out sometimes and why I can’t write other times, and why I write that sort of song at that time in my life. I don’t really know why they happen, I just think they have a mind of their own, and I really don’t feel like I have all that much control over them. They’re just going to come out when they want to and the way that they want to, and they kind of write themselves a lot of the time. I think I’ve been lucky to be given a chance to do that, to write songs. Every songwriter will tell you, all their songs aren’t great at all, and mine certainly are not all great. The ratio from good to bad songs is not going as well as I’d like it to, but I always end up with songs I’m happy with on albums, and I have a whole lot of fun writing, and that’s the main thing I guess."

By Daniel Johns - Silverchair
Songwriter - The Greatest View and Without You

"The Greatest View actually took months to finish but unlike most of the songs on "Diorama" most of it was written in about 10 minutes. A lot of the time the words come with the melody so it's almost like someone's handing it to you - all you have to do is be in the right place and just grab it. I think there's an honesty that comes with a song that's written that quickly so I tried not to change it too much but getting the arrangement right just took ages. There was actually a lot of pressure from the American record company to make the structure a lot simpler but I'd rather overestimate the intelligence of the audience and have them not get it than deliberately dumb things down to make the masses happy. I think the fact that the song ended up doing OK shows that the public is actually a lot more open minded to music than the music industry usually thinks they are."

"Without You was the first song written for this album. Most of it was actually written around the time of "Neon Ballroom". I came back to it later when I was writing "Diorama" and saw that it could be reworked to really fit on this record and I changed it quite a lot. Because of how it came together it's got elements of what Silverchair were, and what Silverchair have become, all in one track. By that I mean that musically it's got an energetic guitar driven quality which might remind some people of our older rock songs as well as a lot more melody and some unconventional arrangement ideas like the songs on ‘Diorama’ The lyric on this song is about half way between the old and the new too. On our other albums, the mood was all pretty black. This time around I wanted to try painting with different colours - to allow people to escape from their problems rather than wallow in them - and this song is probably an example of the lyrical mood starting to change."

By Donna Simpson (The Waifs)

"After months of touring with the band throughout America, I found myself landed and alone in the big ole beautiful London town. I knew nothing of London and I was there alone. A girl I knew had left for a stint in Europe and had left me the key to her apartment in central London. Ironically enough, even though I was in one of the most populated cities in the world, I felt as though I had space... Space to breathe and write and explore this city on my own.

I would sit in her bedroom in the attic on the top floor and look out over Hyde Park and watch the big red busses swing by and people run for cover from the rain. I was happy here in London and thought I could stay here for a while, live here get a job and blend into the masses, catching the tube everyday was still exciting. It was exciting not knowing where I was going everyday,, I knew how to get there, locking a front door and having my own key was something that I hadn't had in years. I had my own key... Even though I was only in London for 3 weeks when I wrote this song, I was living somewhere. It felt like home.

After about three weeks of being completely alone and exploring London, I started thinking about home. It was a Sunday night,, Sunday's back home I used to have a regular jamming sessions on the floor of my little apartment in Bondi beach. About 8 regular friends would drop by, we'd eat Mexican and play music till late or until the man upstairs banged on his floor (our roof) and we'd shut up. I tried to call them, but it wasn't happening anymore since I'd been gone. I missed those days.

I called my Pa in Western Australia, he was at home cooking up fish n chips, having a rum n’ coke with Creedence Clearwater blasting loud in the background. It was his birthday. I missed him soooooooo much.

After the phone call home, I picked up my guitar (my best friend of 12 years) and started playing. I think I was crying when I wrote this song. It all came out, just as it's been recorded. I had my mini disc recording at the time. It's an important tool when I'm writing. It helps with the flow of the song. I don't have to stop and try and write things down....just let it flow out. And it did. It is exactly how I felt. This song wrote itself.

Phil Jamieson and Pat Davern - Grinspoon

PHIL JAMIESON:
"Pat was writing it and had the guitar melodies for it. Then we were up at Avalon, and he was telling me it was going to be the greatest song he’d ever written. And I was telling him that it sounded like fucking Dead or Alive. Intermittently, we might go to this rehearsal studio in Alexandria to write. I might be on drums and he’d be on guitar and then we’d swap; he’d hop on drums and I’d hop on guitar. And we went in there and were just mucking around. It’s one of these places where you store your gear but we didn’t have a bass rig, so I actually stole – or ‘loaned’ – a bass rig. So I plugged the bass in and Pat taught me the bass line to the song. The bass line is really similar to the melody of this song so that’s where the melody came about because I was actually playing the bass with Pat and it was really simple to follow. And I had all these empty bags of cocaine and speed and stuff, and I was just sitting around bag-licking, eating off all the cocaine at midday and just waiting for the chemicals to kick in. And that’s where it kind of came from really.
Once I had the bass in my hands, it was really simple for the melody to come. I knew that Pat really cared about the melody he’d written, he thought it was really decent, so I wanted to put together something really good. We both put in a bit of effort. I was a bit high when I wrote it but I think the end result was good. It’s good it’s being recognised. We didn’t write it just to win Song of the Year but it’s nice to be thought about in that company. The strings came about because we demoed the song and the strings came about just at the keyboard part at the end of it. I put this kind of descending keyboard part over the instrumental section and then added the loop with it, and forwarded it on to the producers. And people got more and more excited about it and we got Jackie Orszaczky to do the strings, who did a fucking brilliant, brilliant job on it and brought the song up completely. I don’t think the song’s complete without those strings and he deserves a lot of credit actually, for doing such a good job in arranging those strings. It’s pretty much really, really central to that song.

Instrumentation wise, we’d never used strings before. We’d never even thought of them. And now it’s like strings, the instrumentation is a tool used to make a song broader. I think we were a little bit narrow-minded about that – not narrow-minded, just like pig-headed or something – about using them. But now it’s like if a song requires us to do it, you don’t question it – if a song needs strings, or if a song needs a banjo, just put it on there. It seems silly not to do that now.

You have to sing about what you know. Other people know about other people – I know about getting high. I’m not saying it’s cool and I’m not saying it’s tough. And actually "Chemical Heart" is quite mournful, it’s really like ‘Fuck, I’m really strung out this time.’ But other people write about what they know and I don’t know about stuff that other songwriters know about. And that’s what I know about so that’s what I write about. It doesn’t particularly concern me – I just turned 26, I’m not particularly worried about people thinking I’m a huge fucking drug head or whatever. Because I’m not, really. It’s probably harder for my parents than anything else. They have to deal with the innuendo and myth more than anyone. And that’s who I feel for probably the most about it because it’s not necessarily true. But to be eventually an honest writer, you have to write about what you know, and that’s what I knew, so I wrote about it. Better than writing about fucking twilight and spaceships and shit – I don’t know about that - "Ground control to Major Tom…"

PAT DAVERN:
"We finished doing all the demos for the record and the record company weren’t happy with what we’d done, basically. They said there wasn’t enough immediate stuff on the record. Basically, just out of hard work, you know, it happened. We came up with a riff and then Phil came up with a melody – he was kind of playing bass along to it and then it all just came together. It’s funny, isn’t it? Pressure on. But I think we work good under pressure –well, I know I do. Not everyone’s the same but I’m good with the whole pressure thing. It’s my kind of thing, I like being put on the spot where I’ve just got to go for it. I am happy with how it ended up. I guess, in hindsight, when I listen to it I’d probably like to do it again. That’s the same probably with a lot of stuff. But I don’t have the opportunity to do that now. But I am happy, I like the song. But yeah, I think there would be a few things I’d like to change. Maybe the drum loop, I wouldn’t mind changing. I guess if we had more time to work on the string lines and stuff like that, we could have. But at the end of the day, I think it worked out well.

I think we’re in a position where we’ve been around for such a long time that they were just kind of waiting for us to do something that they could play and as soon as we delivered something that they thought they could play, they would. I guess because the awareness of the band was so high, we’d never had commercial radio play before and you know, commercial radio stations love to get on the bandwagon. As they do. And it really worked in our favour. I think you know it instantly once you’ve written something you think is a good song. As a songwriter, you write so much crap that when a good one comes along, you’re really aware of it, you’re just really happy it’s come through. I think you just know. A good song’s a good song."