Anyone who has written a song or sang or played one that was professionally recorded and published on Spotify, iTunes, Amazon Music, etc. knows that part of the process is deciding who else you sound like. This is especially true if you use something like CB Baby, and it can also be one of the hardest parts of getting your very first release out there. I know it was for me. It's a little hard to figure that out with your first release. It's really easy to just think “umm… I dunno… I just sound like… me…” which isn't helpful. A lot of brand new artists when picking their genre have trouble, too. Some might say “it's a little punk-ish and pop-ish with some folk and ballady stuff thrown in,” which is too messy and ambiguous. The reason I start like this because it's common to think, “well, who inspires me?" and we don't always sound like those who inspire us, and that's okay!
When I put my first album out, I was so unsure of how to label myself in respect to genre and similar artists so I asked about a dozen well known music personalities like Clive Romney and Yahosh Bonner what they thought (as well as the author Liz Kazandzhy) and was told by more than one of them that I sound a lot like Kenneth Cope and Owl City. I was like, alright then! I'll take that as a compliment! I love Owl City. I wouldn't say any of my music is directly inspired by them, but I thought, “Ok! I have a direction to go now!” Since then I've been able to narrow down my genre to Contemporary/Indie Christian as well. It takes time but that's where it's gotten me.
As for where my inspiration actually comes from, my major influences are more along the lines of Beethoven, The Script, Switchfoot, John Schmidt, and some Hans Zimmer, Harry Gregson-Williams and Steve Jablonsky.
I remember a time when I was in Canada when my late wife Lorraine and I would have conversations with our piano students about our favorite composers. Lorraine's favorite was unhesitatingly always Mozart. She called him the “genius of melody”. I couldn't argue that, because he certainly was, especially composing his first piece at 5 years old. But when I was asked about my favorite composer I would always answer Beethoven and when the question of why came up my answer was always the same. Mozart may have been a genius of melody, knowing inside out and backwards how to use all the theoretical “rules” of music to create masterful works, but Beethoven knew how to take many of those rules and flip them on their head and still make it work really well.
A brief side note about how my being on the Autism spectrum relates to this. Sometimes in Canada I would get in conversations about social “rules” that I was breaking in interactions with people and when a friend would explain how of of these social rules worked, I would sometimes say, in frustration “well, that's a stupid rule!” I think this part of my brain is where my connection to Beethoven's composition methods might come from. In fact, I remember in some of my theory classes with Prof. Kendall Nielsen where I got my AAS at Salt Lake Community College where I would ask why a certain rule of music theory was the way it was. Kendall would just be like “that's just how the harmonic highway works” or something like that and I would say “Well I think it's dumb” when I wanted to break a rule because I legitimately thought it sounded better. He did sympathize with me one time when he recalled his own experience with his music theory professor many years ago when the professor mentioned how “awful” something sounded and Kendall responded with “well I think that sounds pretty damn good!” One of my favorite lines of his was when he would say, things like “look, the main purpose of this class is so that when you walk out of here, you have two ways to do it [write music]”, our way and the textbook way.
Anyways, I have believed for years that Beethoven knew how to do both so well that no one questioned him when he completely turned “da rules” upside down at different points in his music and much of my classical compositions do the same thing.
From the Soundtrack realm, you'll find several similarities in how they use the harmonic highway, “da rules”, with things like modal borrowing. In many of my releases, you'll find ♭III, ♭VI, v in major keys and direct modulation to something like the ♭VI key. In fact, I used the exact same chord sequence from a part of “I See You” from Avatar in my song “The Explorer” and that one was a ton of fun to record. I had a guitarist, a violinist, myself of piano, backup vocals and drums and a mezzo soprano come in and we all just kind of improvised over the chord sequence I wrote, if you go on my Spotify (W Paul Pulsipher), I think you'll like it. I also used a chord sequence right out of “August's Rhapsody” from August Rush in the 3rd movement of my Sonata Animato in the transition to the Coda and I really like the way it helps the transitional flow. Stuff like this, “Arrival to Earth” from Transformers and “Time” from Inception really inspire me.
This may seem surprising but a lot of my stuff that others have said sound like Owl City is actually inspired from bands like Switchfoot and still get some… interesting and fun feedback. I competed at the Thunderground Showdown at SUU during the Spring semester of 2024 and performed two originals. One was “Leaving the Rest Behind” (which also uses those minor v chords I mentioned earlier) and the other was “Happy Family." It was kind of fun to hear one of my fellow SUU Direct Currents band members, Kaylin, who told me after the performances “you should really write music for musicals! I think you'd be really good at it!” I was kind of shocked because I do not like musicals, the only exception being The Greatest Showman. I only watched that one voluntarily because a friend of mine who also hates musicals said they watched it and loved it. Either way, that comment from Kaylin kind of pleasantly surprised me and made me consider possibly broadening my compositional horizons. To be fair, I have already written (but can't sell yet) a Christian parody of “Rewrite The Stars” from that musical. Maybe I'll put it up as a freebie here on my website soon.
I just thought it was a good idea to write about this to encourage other songwriters and composers to explore possibilities outside what they think they might be “good at” or just the styles they think they enjoy. I never would have considered Owl City or Kenneth Cope as a similar sound to me before I was told that, but upon reflection, I realized soon afterwards they were right! Write music the way you want to, but don't always expect it to sound like your favorite artists and don't be disappointed if it doesn't. Make your own sound, if you think it's currently awful, keep plugging away, adjusting you technique, learn more music theory if you must. Just don't give up, find your influences and use them to create your own special style.