Monday’s blog post, “Uniqueness is a Powerful and Necessary Element in Good Songwriting”, got me thinking a lot more about the challenges of writing something singular within a particular genre, and so think of this post as a kind of “Part 2” to that article: One thing that practically all artistic works have in common, […]
There’s no way of saying how many songs a good songwriter should be writing. Some are fast writers, and can get a complete song ready in a day or two. Others (and it often depends on your genre of choice) may take weeks or months before they’re finished. Sometimes, though, the slow pace of songwriting might […]
I find that whenever I think of what the Bee Gees went through in the early 1980s, with the public in general suddenly expressing an intense dislike for their music, I feel a lot of sadness. The Bee Gees as a songwriting partnership wrote some of the best songs in the history of pop. Maybe […]
If you like starting your songwriting process with chords, you’re usually OK to take pretty much any chord progression you hear in anyone else’s song. That’s because chord progressions, on their own, are not protected by copyright. But having said that, there’s a caution here that you should consider when you do, in fact, use someone else’s […]
If you ask any songwriter which process they use, they’ll probably tell you that it differs from song to song. For most, it really depends on which musical fragment makes its first appearance in their musical mind. If it’s a bit of lyric, they’ll most likely to start by filling out that fragment with more […]
There is nothing wrong with being a slow songwriter. Leonard Cohen was practically famous for how long it took him to complete songs to his satisfaction. But if your songwriting process is slow because your creative brain constantly blocks up, that’s more than just being “slow.” The main annoying feature of songwriter’s block is frustration, and […]
