Songbird by Bernard Fanning

Songbird is a song off Bernard Fanning’s debut solo album Tea and Sympathy, written while Powderfinger were on hiatus and his first foray into the country and folk genres.

Although Fanning originally intended to write a rock album in protest of John Howard winning the 2004 federal election, the album was pulled in a different direction after losing his brother to cancer, and the end of his 12 year relationship. The country-folk sound was influenced by artists like Tom Petty, Gillian Welch and Lightning Hopkins, who Fanning was listening to while writing.

Songbird was released as the second single off the album, and explores the struggle of being unable to help someone who is going through a hard time. It is quite a short song, with two short verses and choruses, and a fiddle instrumental before a reprisal of the first verse and the line let somebody love you just enough.

It uses a lot of techniques that are good to practise including bass notes, hammer-ons and bar chords. Fanning plays it with a capo on the 2nd fret, and bass down up bass down strumming pattern. The verse is mostly made up of simple chords and the Bm bar chord, with a hammer-on in every bar.

Try playing through the verse chords before learning the hammer-ons: Em, D, C, G, Bm, C, Bm, C. Aim to hit only the three highest strings when strumming. Below is a video of Fanning playing it live, you can see he is not very precise with the bass notes he’s hitting. It should sound good as long as you get the rhythm right and only hit notes that are in the chords.

The chorus has a driving feel and is a bit simpler to play. Each chord is bass, down up, bass, down up, with no hammer-ons. It uses a G chord with a B bass note shown below.

G/B, played with your 1st finger on the 5th string 2nd fret and 3rd finger on the 2nd string 3rd fret.

There are then three bars to lead back into the verse. G, D and D7 are played with a different pattern that can be tricky to get the hang of.

Here is a TAB I put on Ultimate Guitar a few years ago... 

Watch the full lesson here...