Songwriting with guitar

5 Cures For the Lame Lyric

There’s a very fine line between good and bad when it comes to songwriting. Your songs may keep missing the mark, but you could be very close to songwriting excellence. “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” eBooks will help clean up your technique and make you the best songwriter you can be. It could be argued that the […]

Music - lyrics - imagery

Imagery: Painting a Complete Picture With Few Words

In a lyric, imagery refers to any line that touches on and stimulates our senses. Used well, imagery is able to paint a picture in our minds that fills in many parts of a story with a bare minimum of words. An example might be something like this: Let’s say you wanted to convey the following […]

Common Lyric Problems and How to Solve Them

For many songwriters, it’s the lyrics that are the toughest to write. A lot of the difficulty comes from not having a clear understanding of the nature of lyrics. And that nature changes from song to song: Some lyrics rhyme, some don’t. Some lyrics are comprised of sentences, others seem to be more fragments of […]

Rod Stewart - Beyond the Sea

Creating Powerful Lyrics With a Great Metaphor

I’ve always felt that humans learn more by connecting to a great metaphor than they do by a more direct (metaphor-less) description of something. Saying to someone, “I’m in love!” is, of course, clear and obvious. Saying “I’m over the moon!” is full of emotion and power, the kind of power that connects strongly to listeners […]

Pharrell Williams - Happy

The Importance, Or Not, of a Song Topic

Songwriters spend a lot of time thinking about what their next song is going to be about. They certainly spend more time thinking about a song’s topic than listeners do. There is a good reason for that. Audiences take in the entire sonic experience when they listen to a song. The actual topic is but […]

Bruce Springsteen

Creating a Multitude of Emotions Through Imagery

Simplicity in the writing of lyrics is a key part of making a powerful connection to a listener. But simplicity is not equivalent to being humdrum. On the contrary, a simple lyric — one that uses common, everyday words and phrases, should make use of poetic devices that engage the listener. Imagery is a powerful tool for lyricists. […]