This blog article is a bit of a ramble, so I hope you’ll forgive me for letting my musical mind wander a bit! Sometimes when I look at a painting, I find myself wondering what I’m not seeing. It might be that the painting is a landscape — a winding river with a grassy hill […]
In practically any human activity you can name, having an “instinct” — what we might otherwise call a natural ability — is an important starting point. For example, you can teach someone the essential skills involved in hitting a baseball, but it’s far better to work with someone who just seems to have a natural […]
It’s a given that in order for a song to be powerful and effective, it needs to be memorable. But what makes a song memorable? As we know, songs are a partnership of many different elements all working together. So it’s difficult to point a finger at one particular component and say that it alone […]
There are some songs, when you compare the start of the song to the end of it, make it obvious what we mean by musical energy. “Stairway to Heaven” is a great example: it starts very quietly, uses subdued acoustic guitar and recorders, with a nostalgic, mid-range vocal approach. The hook is probably the most […]
In the songwriting world — and I wonder if this is the same in all of the creative arts? — we place more value on songs that pop spontaneously into our minds than we do on songs that we had to work for weeks to get right. In other words, if you compare two of […]
I’m in the middle of a very busy week, so I’m not going to get to write a songwriting post until next Monday. This week I’ve been conducting Symphony Nova Scotia as they do some school concerts in various schools in Halifax. I always love doing these concerts, because for many of the students we […]
