Writing a “Sad Banger” with Ian Janes

Despite being known across the globe as an R&B and Soul-Pop focused artist, Ian Janes was a Semi-Finalist on SiriusXM’s Top of The Country contest, and wrote a Blues song on Matt Andersen’s 2023 JUNO nominated Blues album, “Matt Andersen and the Big Bottle of Joy”. His music has been streamed millions of times across platforms, and has been featured on CTV Morning Live, The Morning Show, CBC Radio One, SiriusXM, Rolling Stone France, and MacLeans Magazine. His first single from “WeakNights”, titled “Share” was written with Grammy and Emmy nominated songwriter, Jamie Hartman (Backstreet Boys) and features David Cook (Musical Director for Taylor Swift) on keys. Janes recently charted on Classified’s CBC Top 20 reaching single, “Wonder” as co-writer and featured artist, and is notably featured in Classified’s brand new single ‘Amnesia’, which samples the song of the same name from Janes’ 2022 album, Episode 5.

Ian talked about his song WeakNights. Download the lyrics to follow along.

We talked about:

• Our songwriting challenge for 2024 to write a holiday song
• Writing a happy pop song with sad lyrics
• The lyrical device of playing off the days of the week or months of the year, and how fun that can be
• Basing a song on a misheard lyric
• Stuck on figuring out a instrumental solo? Just play the vocal melody, according to Chet “Mr. Guitar” Atkins
• Writing with others vs. writing by yourself, and how crafty or clinical the results can be