In the world of pop music, targeting your audience has always meant identifying who was likely to enjoy your songs, and then make it easy for those potential fans to familiarize themselves with your music, and then hopefully buy the record. If you like starting songs by working with a chord progression, you need to […]
I’ve been reading a book I received as a Christmas gift: “Let’s Do It – The Birth of Pop”, written by Bob Stanley, a writer, musician, DJ and film producer, and I’m really enjoying it. In the book’s introduction, Stanley reminds us that what we call ‘pop music’ has more to do with sales than […]
As 2023 comes to a close, I want to take the opportunity to wish you all happiness and success for 2024. As you’ve noticed if you’ve been a regular reader of my blog, I haven’t written many articles in the last couple of months. That’s been mainly due to the fact that one of the […]
Most songs will end in the same key that they start in. If there is a key change, probably the most common one would be presenting the verse in a minor key, and then switching to the relative major key for the chorus. For example, you might start your song in A minor, and then […]
When you write lyrics, you obviously want your audience to connect to those lyrics and feel something. That would seem to imply that the meaning of your lyric has to be at least clear enough that your listeners understand what’s being sung about. But that’s not necessarily the case. There are plenty of good examples […]
It would be a no-brainer to say that I think Paul McCartney discovered things about songwriting that many other writers just don’t ever get to know. But one aspect of his writing that I think has contributed to his success is his very loose concept of what song form is. Most of the time when […]
