guitar and candle

Developing a Song’s Message When the Lyrics are Complex

If you look at a lyric from a typical pop song, you’re not usually looking at something that’s deep or complex. Usually that’s by design: the purpose of most pop songs is to create emotions within the listener, and it’s hard to create emotions when the words and their contextual meanings are intricate or convoluted. […]

Don McLean - American Pie

Helping Your Audience Connect to a Complicated Story Song

When you write lyrics, you obviously want your audience to connect to those lyrics and feel something. That would seem to imply that the meaning of your lyric has to be at least clear enough that your listeners understand what’s being sung about. But that’s not necessarily the case. There are plenty of good examples […]

Little Richard

Why Pattern Recognition is So Important in Good Songwriting

Psychologists will tell you that pattern recognition is a bit of an area of expertise for most humans. Our brains just seem to be wired to seek out any and all occurrences of patterns. We get a kind of pleasure from seeing and experiencing patterns. So many songs in the pop genres succeed or fail […]

Guitar, paper and pencil

Adding Focus to Your Lyrics With a Short Story

Most songs aren’t specifically “story songs”; they don’t use lyrics that say “first this happened, and then that happened.” It’s usually the case that listeners will infer the story by the various lines within the lyric. It sounds complicated, but most song lyrics work this way. When we hear the lines of a lyric, our […]

Eagles

Using an Open Cadence to Create Momentum in Your Songs

In songwriting, momentum is forward motion… the feeling that there’s a musical engine driving your song onward in such a way that the audience doesn’t get bored or distracted. One moment leads nicely to the next moment in a kind of musical perfection. For tangible examples of this aspect of music, you simply need only to […]

Jim Morrison - The Doors

The Fluctuating Emotions in a Song’s Bridge

We know from looking at decades of songs in the pop genres that the songs that really resonate with us and make us feel strong emotions are the ones that shift back and forth between sections of lower and higher emotions. “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process” is FREE with your purchase of […]