Songwriter in the studio

Coming Up With a Songwriting Troubleshooting List

Once you’ve written a song, do you have a list — even just a mental one — that you go through to assess your song? I have mentioned often that troubleshooting a song should really only be done if you’re noticing something about your song that isn’t really working, but you can’t identify what that […]

Songwriter writing lyrics

The Best Way to Critique Your Own Songs

The best songwriters are also the best analyzers of music. If you don’t have the ability to dig down into your own songs and assess them objectively before your audience hears them, you may not discover problems until it’s too late. There are lots of things you can do which, taken together, make it most […]

songwriter - lyricist

Being Your Own Best Critic

“Hooks and Riffs: How They Grab Attention, Make Songs Memorable, and Build Your Fan Base” shows you how a good hook can make the difference between songwriting success and failure. With great examples from pop music history. If you’re like most songwriters out there, you’re probably dealing a lot with your “inner critic.” That term simply […]

Neil Young

In Good Songwriting, You Can’t Tell a Listener What to Feel

To borrow an important observation from Barry Gibb, “Songs are about feelings.” To put it another way, if you haven’t caused your audience to feel something when they hear your songs, you’ve probably missed the point of songwriting. Emotions are funny things: you usually can’t tell someone what to feel. One event or circumstance can cause […]

Songwriting

Songwriting and Great Expectations

It’s not hard to get completely bogged down in the songwriting process. How familiar is this to you: You come up with an idea or two for a melody, you put them together… sounds good. You improvise a new idea to stretch the original one a bit, but that doesn’t work. So you keep at […]

guitarist - songwriter

5 Important Lessons I Learned Over the Years as a Composer of Music

Like anyone who writes music, I could probably write a book regarding advice I’ve been given over the years — advice that’s helped shape the musician I’ve become. The best lessons I’ve learned have come from individuals, not necessarily from the pages of a book. That’s not because books aren’t good; it’s more because I […]