Connecting Ideas Together to Reinforce Song Structure

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and kick-start your songwriting career! _____________ Ideally, a chorus should sound like the logical “answer” to a verse in every way. It’s easy to see how that happens in a song’s lyric, since both verse and chorus lyrics are usually addressing the same thing. But how do […]

How Tension and Release Creates Successful Songs

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and get your songwriting career going! _____________ I’ve been listening to Foo Fighter’s fantastic new hit, “Rope“, from their newly released album “Wasting Light”, and it got me thinking about song energy, and specifically about the issue of tension and release. “Rope” is a relentlessly powerful tune, […]

5 Tips for Pulling Off a Great Chord Progression

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 e-book bundle. Here’s how to get your songs working right away! _________________ By far, the most common type of question I receive from songwriters concerns chord progressions. Why don’t my chords seem to work? What chords go with this key? How do I choose chords? There’s a reason […]

Connecting A Verse to a Chorus, and Back Again

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and discover why great songs are great! ____________ The way we describe the successful relationship between verse and chorus in songwriting is to say that a good verse “begs for” a chorus. In other words, it’s not enough to simply work out a nice verse melody and […]

How to Analyze Songs, and Why You'll Benefit

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and discover why great songs are great! ____________ The songwriters who get better quickly are the ones who know how to analyze music. Look at it this way: If you don’t have the ability to analyze songs, you have only your instincts to help you improve. With […]

Rihanna's "Only Girl (In The World)": Implied Harmonies and More

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 e-book bundle and discover how to write great songs. __________________ It’s important to hear things repeat within a song, but the danger is if something repeats so much that it becomes boring. The obvious answer is to have things repeat in slightly different ways, so that each time […]