There is a kind of musical “muscle memory,” where we keep relying on the same musical ideas as we write our songs. Practically every songwriter is familiar with it: similar sounding melodies, the same (or almost the same) chord progressions, the same kinds of lyrics, and so on. A bit of similarity between songs you […]
It’s an observation about lyrics that I’ve become aware of only recently: I tend to think of good lyricists as people who either a) make me think, or b) make me feel. Sometimes both simultaneously, (like you might experience with a song like, say, “Crying Lightning” – Arctic Monkeys (Alex Turner) but often one or the other. […]
Because most songwriters are also instrumentalists, muscle memory plays a big role in key choice. If you’re a guitarist and you’re noodling around trying to create some ideas for songs, you’ll find your fingers wanting to move to the notes and patterns that you find the easiest to play. “Fix Your Songwriting Problems – NOW!” […]
What do we mean by a song’s “character?” In most cases, we’re talking about the mood or feel that we pick up from it. And we have all sorts of words that might otherwise be described as “character” words: “gentle”, “edgy”, “aggressive”, “laid back”, “dark”, and so on. Whether we know it or not, a […]
Not all artforms are processed the same way in our brains. You might, for example, choose a particular painting to hang in your living room, one that you really like looking at. And you’re fine with seeing it “all the time.” Every time you go into your living room, there it is. It’s a nice […]
It’s tricky, writing music that pleases your target audience. They want every song to sound unique and fresh. But at the same time, they want to hear the kind of music that attracted them to you in the first place. So you try to write something that goes in a refreshingly new direction, and they give […]
