how do these guys write songs so easily?

Anette O'Toole and Michael McKean (husband and wife) wrote "A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow" on a car trip, which is probably the most beautiful song from a Guest movie, and IMO one of the greatest original songs for a movie of all time (as it is such an integral ingredient to the success of the film) but alot of castmembers contributed to the writing of the other music and songs. I can't name one song from a Guest film that HASN'T stuck with me long after the film finished. From "This Bulging River" to "God Loves A Terrier". They're all so well done it is really something great.

Btw, you'll find that alot of improvisers are excellent singers and writers also.

Simple....Guest is a genius!

Téigh trasna ort féin
VICTOR FUNG FOR PRESIDENT

Or when you get the sense of a melody, a lot of musicians are good enough to figure out harmony. I'm getting pretty good at figuring out a harmony for songs I hear on the radio. They're more performers than strictly just actors, so they seem to have the whole package, like any good performer should.

Also...keep in mind...these songs arent being written for commercial success...they're being writting to be ironically amusing for a few seconds...a completely different skill than someone who needs to write a song which can be played on radio station rotation.

I've said this from day one, when I first saw This Is Spinal Tap, then borrowed the soundtrack album from the library: McKean, Guest, and SHearer could have had a career as songwriters. If you ignore the lyrics (which are deliberately exaggerated for satirical purposes), everything on the This Is Spinal Tap soundtrack sounds like something that could have been on an actual record by an actual rock group. And they proved their ability at writing catchy songs when they put out the reunion album, Break Like The Wind, in the early 90's.

Maybe the hard part would be writing lyrics that don't sound silly, but then, if you've spent any time listening to actual rock music (and especially the hard rock bands that Spinal Tap was mostly parodying), the lyrics are silly to begin with, so they probably could have just kept writing satirical lyrics, and nobody would have noticed.

At any rate, Christopher Guest's background was in comedy, but long before This Is Spinal Tap, he had been doing satirical music, on some of the National Lampoon LP's. He did a really good James Taylor send up on one of them, and I believe another one had "Bob Dylan singing reggae".

And I believe both McKean and Shearer had also played in bands before Spinal Tap, with McKean recording an album with David Lander, in character, as Lenny & Squiggy, their characters from Laverne & Shirley.

So these guys all had some musical background even before Spinal Tap. Eugene Levy, I don't know, but it's not really hard to start humming a melody and let's say you put down on a tape so you don't forget it, then you put a few words together, and again, it's satire, so it doesn't really matter if the words are silly or whatever(and again, there's lots of "legitimate" music acts where the words are stupid anyway). Boom, you've got a song. Then when you're rehearsing it, you can flesh out the arrangement, which isn't actually all that hard to do, especially if you have other musicians contributing ideas.