If you ask any songwriter which process they use, they’ll probably tell you that it differs from song to song. For most, it really depends on which musical fragment makes its first appearance in their musical mind. If it’s a bit of lyric, they’ll most likely to start by filling out that fragment with more lyric, just to see what happens.
That leads to an interesting but important point: when we talk about process, we’re talking (in large part, anyway) about how we choose to start the act of songwriting. For example, you might favour a melody-first process most of the time, but all that means is that you like working out a few fragments of melody as a preliminary step; it doesn’t say anything about what you follow that up with. Chords? Lyrics? Or in what order you work out the rest of the song.
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Up-and-coming songwriters like to ask more seasoned pros which process they favour because it’s part of learning the secrets of those more experienced. But the truthful answer is that no one process will necessarily lead to a better song simply because you happened to use this or that process. It really doesn’t matter which process you favour. What does matter is what you do with that initial musical fragment that your creative mind comes up with.
So even though you might use, let’s say, a lyrics-first process, you need to see the work you’re undertaking described by that term as being in two parts:
- Lyrics-First: you happened to imagine a catchy bit of lyric that you believe might lead to an interesting song.
- Process: you need to work out how you’re going to proceed from that initial idea.
And that second part, the process part, is where the real work happens. No matter how good or clever your initial ideas are, they come to nothing if you haven’t worked out how to get all those eventual ideas you’ll come up with communicating successfully with each other. The process part of songwriting is always the most important part, far more important than whatever the first ideas are.
But it does bear mentioning that how you start a song (i.e., what that initial idea is) usually does define the final product. Different ways you might start a song usually leads to a different kind of song. A lyrics-first songwriting process (where the first ideas you get are fragments of lyrics) does usually lead to a song where the lyrics take centre stage.
I think it’s time well-spent to ask good songwriters how they write songs. Everyone is different, so everyone will give you a different answer. But no matter what answer they give you, the full answer, even if they don’t articulate it this way, is that a songwriting process is far more than simply how you start a song. How you proceed after the initial idea is the most important part of the process.
And how you know you’ve written a good song comes down to this: does each component of that song support the musical intent of the other components? If you’ve done that, it doesn’t matter which process you used. One process is not necessarily better than another.
Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter.
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