Sometimes the idea for a song will hit you on the spur of the moment, and you’ll sit down with your guitar and try to flesh out that idea, and see if anything comes of it. But at other times, you know that you need to write something, but you don’t have a particular idea […]
Good songs represent a partnership of components. It’s not just that songs have melodies, lyrics and chord progressions; it’s that the melodies somehow make the lyrics sound better, the chords make the melodies sound better, and the lyrics make the chords sound better. Trying to get a handle on writing song lyrics? Discover the benefits […]
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, and so I’ll state this up front, and then give you some additional thoughts: Good music is not meant to express emotion; good music IS meant to create emotion. I want to tell you a bit more about this. To say that a good song […]
Imagery is an important part of writing good lyrics, but it’s hard to teach imagery. There are probably lots of ways to define it, but for me, imagery means that you’ve been able to generate a complex picture with very few words. “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process” is FREE with your purchase of […]
Believe it or not, the specific topic of a song isn’t all that crucial to its success. “Hotel California” is a hugely popular song from the 70s, and there were considerable debates at the time of its release as to what it was actually about. The confusion of listeners didn’t damage the listeners’ ability to […]
After all these years, love songs still work. You’d think songwriters would have run out of original things to say about the topic. If you expand the category a little more and consider the songs that are more generally about relationships, the majority of the songs on the Billboard Hot 100 at any given time […]
