5 Lyrical Clichés That Will Kill Your Song

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website. It makes for fun reading to go online and find a site devoted to the worst songs ever written. The writers of these songs can at least console themselves with the knowledge that to be renowned for being bad requires the song (often) to have […]

How Lyrics Change as Your Song Progresses

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website. ________________________ A good lyric is not necessarily good poetry, and in many cases doesn’t need to be. With Gary Ewer’s songwriters’ e-books you can discover how your lyrics can make a connection with the listener, how to create chord progressions, how melodies should be contoured, […]

When You've Got Killer Lyrics, Other Elements Can Step Back

“The lyrics on “There’s a Reason” are wonderful, and on first listen you’d swear you’re listening to Dylan…” Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website. Check out Gary Ewer’s Songwriting e-books here. Follow Gary on Twitter You’ve probably got the instinct of most songwriter’s out there, which is to ensure that […]

Good Lyrics are Developed After They Are Written

“There’s nothing worse than bad lyricists trying to sound deep. Like coolness, profundity can’t be faked.” Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website Follow Gary on Twitter Leonard Cohen has spoken of songwriting as “cultivat[ing] this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about…” For him, and […]

Creating Lyrics that Have a Natural Flow

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: If you want lyrics to sound natural, you need to sing them with the natural pulses that occur in spoken language. For songwriters, you need to match up the natural pulse of the lyric with the natural flow of your music. It may not be […]

Lyric-Writing is an Art that Needs to be Practiced

by Gary Ewer, from”The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: You know, we could learn a lot from the famous artists out there, like  Da Vinci, Rembrandt or Monet. We look at their paintings and just assume they sat down and just started to paint. But in reality, most artists sketch out many preparatory attempts, before […]