In 2005, when I wrote my first eBook, “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting”, I was planning to call it “The Essential Principles of Songwriting.” After some considerable thought, I reasoned that most people would be turned off by the word “principles”, and opted instead for “secrets.” To my mind, however, it conveys the same thing, […]
Talent is a hard-to-define quality that generally pertains to one’s instinct or innate ability to do something well. We admire talent, but we also find it easy to roll our eyes at it. For truly successful people, talent is only a starting point. I have to agree with author Stephen King when he says: Talent […]
It’s not terribly surprising that most people can tell whether they’re hearing a chorus or a verse. That’s a good thing, because songs don’t come with signposts that say, “This is the verse…”; “This is the chorus.” What I find interesting is that even non-musicians can tell. Songs normally start with the verse, but with […]
Good moments in music are good because they make us believe that even better moments are coming, and so we want to keep listening. The inverse of that is true as well: bad moments in music make us believe that nothing better is coming, and so we give up listening and click to hear something […]
Mozart improvised. Mozart had good days and bad days. In fact, much of Mozart’s compositional process, if you research the topic, looks a lot like the kind of songwriting process we see today: a lot of experimenting, keeping good ideas, throwing out bad ones, and so on. So let’s take a look at some of […]
These days, boredom is getting a lot of attention. It used to be that boredom was considered to have no redeeming qualities. Being bored simply meant being disinterested in whatever you were up to, and that you haven’t found anything to grab your interest. More recently, psychologists have been conducting research into the benefits of […]
