For any songwriter, uniqueness is a crucial pursuit. Why would you want to write something that sounds like some other song out there, no matter how good it is? In every song you write, you need to hope that there’s something unique about it so that your fans can tell that it’s you they’re listening to, […]
Coming up with song ideas is hard. You start down a path and then you realize that whatever you thought your song was going to be about is just leading to dead ends. There are lots of ways to stimulate your imagination. Sometimes just picking up a pencil and writing, stream-of-consciousness-style, can yield surprisingly good […]
Apparently Bruce Springsteen used a rhyming dictionary to come up with the lyrics to “Blinded By the Light.” That cleared up a long-held puzzlement for me: I was finding it hard to understand how in the world his musical mind was coming up with those lyrical images: Madman drummers bummers and indians in the summer […]
As a songwriter you likely think sectionally. All that means is that you’re always aware of what part of the song you’re in. The downside of this kind of sectional thinking is that if something is going wrong with, let’s say, your verse lyric, the tendency might be to fault the entire section of lyric, when the […]
If you’re a chords-first songwriter, sometimes all you’re really needing are some chord progression suggestions that you can experiment with. Once you’ve got chords that you like, it frees you up to move to other more important aspects of a song, like lyrics and melody. If you like the chords-first songwriting process, you’ll want to […]
The best lyrics are the ones that create an emotional response in the listener. That means that the words you choose, and the way you put those words together, becomes extremely important. Songwriters are very familiar with the chorus hook, but there are other kinds to experiment with, and you will want to discover the […]
