Songwriter Listening

Listening: The Best Antidote When Writer’s Block Hits

If you ever spend time reading or listening to interviews with some of the world’s best songwriters, you’ll probably notice how much time they spend talking about other people’s music. McCartney often talks about how he was influenced by Dylan, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, and many others from many genres. To McCartney, listening to others […]

Imogen Heap Recording Tital

A Powerful Way To Plan An Entire Song

If you are a fan of the music of J.S. Bach, you might know that he often took the shape of a small melodic fragment, and then planned for the entire piece of music to also adopt that shape. Here’s how that might work. If you listen to the beginning of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. […]

Peter Gabriel - Shock the Monkey

When Lyrics Are Hard, How Do You Attract an Audience?

“The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” eBook bundle comes with a free copy of “Creative Chord Progressions”. Learn how to take your chords beyond simple I-IV-V progressions. With pages of examples ready for you to use in your own songs!  The most important part of getting a song right is getting the audience to care about what you’ve […]

Ray Charles - What'd I Say

When Songs Take More Than 20 Minutes to Write

There’s an opinion amongst some songwriters that songs that don’t form themselves quickly, usually within minutes, are duds; that the more you have to work to get a song to sound right, the less likely it is that you’ve got a song worth keeping. It’s a surprisingly common view. Even Jay-Z, in his introductory paragraph to […]

Audience at a rock concert

Getting Feedback On Your Songs, and Then What To Do With It

Feedback is a tricky thing in the creative arts. Just because someone dislikes a song you’ve written is not an indication that you’ve done something wrong, or that you need to change anything about the way you’re writing. By the same token, if you only surround yourself with people who claim to love everything you […]

Songwriter in a Hotel Room

Anyone Still Writing Songs the “Old Fashioned Way?”

I came across an article in my Twitter feed this morning, though it’s been out there for a couple of weeks, and you may have seen this already. “Songwriting: Why it takes more than two to make a hit nowadays” discusses why today’s hits seem to have such a long songwriter credit list, while a couple […]