Social media makes it easy to seek advice on your songwriting. In fact, it doesn’t just make it easy — it makes it likely that you’re going to play your newly written song for others and then ask opinions. Take a look at today’s Songwriting Reddit and see how many are asking for help.
If you’re a reader of my blog, you know that I’ve written many times about the pros and cons of asking random individuals for opinions. The upside is that you can get a lot of ideas to try out. But the downside is: you don’t even know these people. They don’t have any real insights into what made you write the song in the first place, and may be (or may likely be) the wrong people to ask.
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The thing is, you may have given other songwriters advice on what if anything they should do about their new song that they just put online and asked for opinions. Because you’re a songwriter, you’ve probably offered some pretty good advice.
Which leads me to this: if you really want a good opinion on whether or not your new song works, you may be overlooking advice from the person best placed to give that advice: YOU.
The Power of Objectivity
Listening to a song is a subjective experience, because good songs create feelings — and there’s nothing much objective about feelings. But even though that’s true, there is a lot to be gained by spending some time listening to your song objectively, as if it were actually written by someone else.
Objective listening allows you to make better judgments about the strength of your music. So take that power of objectivity a step further: listen to your song, and then offer yourself some advice regarding what you’d do to make it better.
In other words, pretend for the moment that the song you’ve just written was actually written by someone else, and then start writing down ideas that you could offer that person as to how they could or should improve it.
In writing these thoughts down, don’t forget to do everything you’d do if this were actually someone else. You’d probably start by telling that person the things you like about the song. Remember, a bit of positivity goes a long way.
Then move on to describing the part or parts that you feel are lacking. As you write, remember to keep imagining that this is someone else’s song. That kind of perspective allows you to be more fully honest about the quality of the music you’re listening to.
Once you’ve finished this critiquing process, take a short break. Then sit down and read what you wrote, but now imagine that it was written by someone else, and that you are the songwriter.
I think you’ll find that the advice you’re reading will be spot-on. And the reason the advice will be so good is not just that you wrote it, but because you were guided by fully understanding the vision that led to the song being written in the first place.
In other words, by looking inward, you’re probably going to find that you are often the best person to offer an opinion on your latest song. The quality of that advice will improve as you improve your ability to listen objectively.
Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter.
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I recently changed a song I wrote years ago from third person to first person perspective on your advice recently. Once I did it, it was easy for me to see the benefit from a listeners point of view. The song became more open and personal just by simply changing the pronouns from he/his to I/mine. And heck, I was talking about myself in the lyrics all along anyway. Thanks for the tip!