It’s exciting to hear a song that was a hit several decades ago make a reappearance on the Billboard Hot 100. The latest example of this is Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” from her 1985 album “Hounds of Love.” It’s exciting because in a funny sort of way it’s like a validation that we […]
The best songwriters are the ones who are the most curious. Curiosity makes you wonder. When you hear something amazing or unusual, curiosity is that drive inside your musical mind that makes you ask, “How in the world did they do that??” By being curious, you develop the ability to take other musicians’ ideas and modify […]
Once you’ve written a song, do you have a list — even just a mental one — that you go through to assess your song? I have mentioned often that troubleshooting a song should really only be done if you’re noticing something about your song that isn’t really working, but you can’t identify what that […]
The one thing that music theory gives songwriters is vocabulary. With one word or phrase, a musician can describe and communicate an entire idea to other songwriters: “I think if we modulate to E major at that point…” The time you save is incalculable, but theory does more than offer you a communication tool. It is […]
I think I wrote some time ago about the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“, which was used by lots of performing musicians in a bid to analyze and improve their musical skills. The book has nothing to do with music (and almost nothing to do with Zen or motorcycles, to be sure). […]
Production values — the basic sound of a song that happens after writing it and while recording it — change from year to year. It’s how we know the age of a song when we hear it. It’s not usually the melody or lyrics that tell us how old a song is. It’s production — […]
