notable songs written on an instrument the songwriter had just learned or never played before

apropos of nothing, I saw this on wiki. nothing should surprise me about Page anymore but O_O

"Battle of Evermore" was made up on the spot by Robert [Plant] and myself. I just picked up John Paul Jones's mandolin, never having played a mandolin before , and just wrote up the chords and the whole thing in one sitting.[3]

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, December 28, 2012 11:48 AM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this post in the Led Zep thread brought to mind this phenomenon, which has always intrigued me -- that sometimes someone toying with an instrument for the first time can lead to a memorable song. there are some famous examples on the tip of my tongue but i'll leave it to the thread to remind me.

I believe Incredible String Band made kind of a method out of this, right? Recording on exotic instruments they'd barely touched?

maybe not a strictly good example but supposedly the chords in "Hey Ya" were the first chords Andre 3000 had ever learned on guitar, but i dunno if he had just learned them recently at the time or this was years earlier

Not sure about "notable", but:

After finishing a series of concerts of New York State colleges sponsored by ESP, Sun Ra decided to assemble a number of stringed instruments bought from curio shops and music stores. Ukuleles, Mandolins, Kotos, Koras, Chinese Lutes and 'Moon Guitars' were handed out to his reed and horn players in the belief that 'strings could touch people in a special way, different from other instruments [5].' The point was that the Arkestra didn't know how to play them - Sun Ra called it 'a study in ignorance.' [5]
'Next they prepared a number of homemade instruments, including a large piece of tempered sheet metal with an "X" chiseled on it. Then they miked the Sun Columns.
'Marshall Allen said that when they began to record the musicians asked Sun Ra what they should play, and he answered only that he would point to them when he wanted them to start. The result is an astonishing achievement, a musical event which seems independent of all other musical traditions and histories.... The piece is all texture, with no sense of tonality except where Art Jenkins sings through a metal megaphone with a tunnel voice. But to say that the instruments seem out of tune misses the point, since there is no "tune", and in any case the Arkestra did not know how to tune most of the instruments...' John F Szwed [5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Strings

Sting wrote Every Breath You Take on piano iirc

I think Townshend/"Squeeze Box"/accordion fits this, doesn't it?

i never realized Pete actually played accordion on the track!

i'm not going to raise the bar very high for "notable" -- like it could be a hit or not, or infamously lousy or not, or just vaguely well known for featuring an instrument not usually heard in the artist's catalog.

i'm guessing Eddie Vedder wrote Pearl Jam's "Bugs" pretty quickly after picking up the accordion as well.

haha I'm glad I read your penultimate post before hitting submit on my "okay is 'Bugs' really notable" rant

dunno if this counts, but ikonika:

B: One musical theme that’s run through your productions for quite some time is the use of dissonance, offkey or sour melodies. How do you go about writing these kinds of melodies and what draws you to them?

I: I don’t really know how to play keys so I just smack them until something nice comes out. But I want my melodies to speak. They’re simple, polite and to the point…I guess they're from my attraction to Pop and R&B hooks. I love things that are catchy and memorable, they do turn out a little sour and deranged but that’s what I love about messing around with synths…To me, that’s the whole point, making these machines express their emotions, just like WALL-E.

Not sure about "notable", but:

I'd call it notable. Notable as fuck. Nothing else in Ra's massive catalog sounds like it, but it's still immediately identifiable as Sun Ra.

Had George Harrison played sitar before "Norwegian Wood"? I seem to recall him saying he'd bought one but didn't play it until that song's arrangement called for it.

people who never bother to really learn an instrument but record many songs on it over years and years shouldn't really warrant a mention imo (unless there's one song that's known as their first experiment with the instrument) xp

i'm guess this is true of some Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones songs but i dunno if anything's been pinpointed as his first experience playing sitar or marimba etc. on a song.

Brian Jones knew how to play piano so marimba couldn't have been that big a stretch for him.

skip spence played all the instruments on oar
Never had played bass before

er that does sound like kind of a stretch though! Keys v Mallets?

xpost

Yeah, piano and marimba are at least as different as guitar and sitar and probably a bit moreso.

I suppose buying a new synth - like a Fairlight - and writing a song on it to try it out doesn't count because it's just another keyboard?

i think new models, new technology is fairgame. i'd certainly be interested to know what was the first thing Prince or some '80s rap producer made when they got their first drum machine.

Don't know if it was from scratch, but Nick Cave writing Grinderman songs was a big shift from piano to guitar.

Well in that case, OMD wrote "Talking loud and clear" as a test to see how their new Fairlight worked, in particular the Page R sequencing page.

Bill Withers and "Lean on Me." He didn't really know how to play piano but had recently purchased one.

A lot of PJ Harvey's last album was written on recently-acquired Autoharp iirc.

I think XTC's 'Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her, Kiss Her' was an attempt by Andy Partridge to write a song on a keyboard using both hands, before that his keyboard based songs were very basic, like 'The Somnambulist' for example.