Jessie Morrell

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Yes, I'm a huge Beatles fan, and have been since I was a kid.  I was brought up listening to their music, but I fully became immersed when I went to see the Eight Days a Week documentary - it changed my life!  While The Beatles kicked off my love for all things 50's and 60's, I also love Eddie Cochran, The Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly.  For my ballad-y piano songs I tend to look to Elton John and Billy Joel for inspiration, mixed with a bit of Frank Sinatra and some more musical theatre-y territory.  

My love for film music comes into it too, especially composers such as Michel Legrand, Alexandre Desplat, Carlos Rafael Rivera and Martin Phipps.  Another specific artist that springs to mind is Dodie, who I listened to lots as a teenager.  I've always loved her ukulele based songs, especially those where she used her baritone ukulele - she inspired me to buy my own, which I regularly use for gigs. 

I went along to see a viewing of the documentary film when I was about thirteen because it was playing at my school, and I thought I should go along because my dad is a Beatles fan.  I'm not entirely sure which parts had such a huge effect on me - perhaps the thrill of Beatlemania, the fascination of seeing present-day Paul and Ringo narrate their experiences, or the huge ending build up of Day In The Life - but I came out of the hall feeling completely different to how I had felt when I first went in. 

I immediately went home and printed out photos of The Beatles and stuck them on my wall, and talked non-stop about them, completely buzzing with excitement.  Over time I collected loads of Beatles paraphernalia, learned their general discography, listened to them in every spare moment, and broadened my interest to the general 1960's and the styles which inspired the band (skiffle, rock 'n' roll etc).  Though I'm not quite as obsessive as I was as a teenager, their impact has, and will always be, completely central to my own music making and future aspirations.

Dodie has three EP's and one main album - I would recommend them in chronological order, so Intertwined, You, Human, Build A Problem. Her main YouTube channel is doddleoddle, and if you go into 'Popular', her most well-known songs and music videos are there, for example Sick of Losing Soulmates and She.  She also has a second channel, doddlevloggle, where she does sort of candid talking videos, where you can learn more about her life and music. I think starting with her most popular songs on the main channel, then taking a look at the EP's, is the best way to go. 

I've played the piano ever since I can remember, pretty much. There are lots of photos of me as a very tiny child sat at the keyboard.  My dad is a piano teacher, and I remember him giving my brother and I some piano books and seeing if we got on with them - I played through them, but found I much preferred to 'wing it' and play what I wanted instead. 

I ended up learning by myself by ear, as my training as a chorister helped me develop perfect pitch, meaning I could sit down and play songs I wanted to without having to find the sheet music.  This has obviously been immensely helpful in writing and covering songs, and has been great for collaborations with other musicians. It also means I have had a few gigs as a cocktail pianist, which I find really enjoyable.

I have similarly been singing for as long as I can remember. I  was in a local church choir with my family when I was a little kid, then when I was nine I became a cathedral chorister.  This meant I had an hour's rehearsal every morning before school and usually after as well, with around five or more cathedral services a week. My singing voice, sight reading and pitch perception benefitted wonderfully from this intense training. 

In my later years of being a chorister I wanted to develop my more pop style singing, and while I have been in chapel choirs and college choirs since, this is the style which I have pursued.  The range of my voice has greatly increased over time, meaning I'm able to use an unexpectedly low range alongside my upper register - I especially love using my full range in multitrack vocal recordings, and it has proved to be very useful especially for my various McCartney covers!

Songwriter / singer / pianist. The main thing I have always wanted to do is to create something new and share my original music.

Oh yes! I play the saxophone and can play the tenor horn and tuba, all of which are Eb instruments.  It is difficult to get used to playing transposing instruments, because for example if I'm being told to play an Eb on the saxophone, it will be a concert pitch Gb .  While others would be able to just play the transposed Eb straight away, I would need a bit of time to work out what it's meant to be in concert pitch so that I don't get confused.  It also means I don't use a guitar capo, and probably never will - I associate the fingering shapes with certain sounds, and if those sounds were transposed, I would be a bit lost! 

Which music did you create / what was your process?  What have you learnt by playing with others and how have you applied that to writing / performing on your own?

When I was a teenager I felt desperate to be like McCartney and find a songwriting partner, someone that I could musically gel with as much as McCartney and Lennon did.  I tried songwriting with a few friends, but nothing fully came to fruition, because either our styles didn't quite blend or I felt a bit too shy to express my ideas. 

I have recently tried again and am finding some very good results which I would not have come up with on my own, especially with friends who are proper guitarists - I only really play rhythm guitar as opposed to solo, so it's great to hear melodic/riff ideas from actual guitarists! 

When I write songs with friends in this way, the way that it has naturally came about was that I would come up with the vocal lyrics and melody and help with the structure, and the other person would do the chords and guitar riffs. I have played in a few bands throughout sixth form and university, and am hoping to form a proper band when I go back for my final year in October.

I think being a chorister disciplined me from a very young age, getting me used to an intense workload, and the pitch perception skills which I developed during that time have been extremely useful for the academic music studies that I have done since then.  I took GCSE and A Level Music courses, and as soon as I got used to putting my thoughts into essay contexts, I found the courses pretty straight forward. 

All of my A Levels were essay-based subjects, proving immensely useful for the university style of teaching and assignments, and I felt as though I had a head start with some of my current modules due to taking Sociology - a lot of my degree has been focused on musicology and music's relationship with sociology, which I find quite intriguing.

One of the things that we've covered in my degree in relation to this is the formation of the musical canon - the consideration of which composers are considered to be 'the greats'. These include Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn etc.  One of the focuses is looking at who has been missed out of this canon, and their social characteristics. 

For example, women composers are often thought of as secondary, with a separate female composer canon being formed instead of women being included in the 'main' one.  Some suggest that there should be a complete reshuffling of the original canon, some suggest the secondary female canon is enough, and some suggest that there is a reason that these composers weren't included and it's nothing to do with gender, and some disagree with all of these points. 

So overall we often look at how music history intersects with social characteristics, identity and social groups - it's all very interesting!

I would love to one day write character themes for a TV show or film.  A composer I particularly love is Murray Gold, who writes the music for Doctor Who - my favourite parts of the soundtrack are the themes for the companions, and identifying when they come up and how it contributes to the emotional effect, for example if the Doctor is talking about a companion long gone and their theme plays in the background. I had a go at this for my play, 'Best of Five', in which I wrote a string quartet accompaniment for some scenes and scene transitions, which included individual themes for each of the love interests.

I don't think I consciously take specific musical characteristics from certain performers. I think the general era influences in my music are very obvious - for example, my song It's Stupid (That I Can't Tell You) is very obviously 50's and early 60's inspired, as it uses a varied version of the 12-bar progression and things like that.  People in my YouTube comments do like to say that my music and my voice reminds them of McCartney sometimes - this is always an immense compliment! - but this isn't something I'm consciously trying to do, I think I'm just absorbing my favourite parts of my favourite artists without realising and releasing these things into my own music.