Alice Cooper’s advice to young people: “Listen to the Beatles”

A recent guest at a Q&A session held at the “Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy Camp” in Scottsdale, Arizona, Alice Cooper returned to share his advice for young musicians. Asked what advice he would give to those starting out on a musical career, the Detroit musician said: “Listen to the Beatles!”. According to Blabbermouth, Alice Cooper continued:

“I’m not kidding. When it comes to songwriting, listen to the simplicity of the Beatles. I don’t care if you’re writing a death metal song. A song, first of all, is not just a riff and some drums. You should be able to sit down – no matter who you are – and play that melody and sing that song. You can also be the angriest person in the world.”

The master of shock rock then added: “I get young bands coming up to me and saying, ‘What do you think?’ And I’m like, ‘I see, you’re mad.’ Because you’re just yelling at me. So I say, ‘Where’s the song? There’s no song there. There’s a great beat, there’s a great riff, but there’s no song.’ So I say, ‘What I want you to do, for a week, it’s just listening to the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Four Seasons. Or anyone who actually writes songs, like Burt Bacharach. I don’t want you to sound like them, but I want you to understand the idea of a verse, a B section, a bridge that leads to the chorus, and then it goes back to the bridge.'”

Returning to the advice to take the Fab Four as a model, Cooper underlined: “Why are those Beatles songs still played on the radio? For the melody, the melody: we all want to listen to melodies.”

The advice dedicated to young musicians that Alice Cooper returned to share reiterates what he had already said in the past. In 2017, for example, in an interview with NME the musician explained how “She loves you” by the Beatles was the first song by the Liverpool quartet he ever heard as a child and how “it literally changed something in my brain. It inspired what Alice Cooper became”. Then in 2020, in an interview for the US edition of “Rolling Stone”, the artist included “Meet The Beatles!” in his list of the best albums of all time. “It was the first one that really shocked me, because I had never heard anything like it before,” he said: “We were listening to the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons, and suddenly this band came along with all that hair and the Beatle boots and those suits, and they were singing songs that you only had to hear once and you already knew them. I’ve always said this, and maybe some people won’t agree with me, but it’s easier to write something like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ than to write something like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. I’m still pretty convinced that the Beatles were aliens. I don’t think they’re from this planet.”