Taking a look at the lyrics of the current top hits in North America, it’s easy to conclude that lyrical quality just isn’t that important. “You think I’m pretty/ Without any make-up on/ You think I’m funny/ When I tell the punch line wrong…” are the opening lines of “Teenage Dream.” Or how about this rumination? “You know […]
Most songwriting books and manuals make the assumption, quite understandably, that the reader is already a songwriter, and simply wants a bit of advice. But there are many people who feel that they’ve got the ideas for a song inside them, but have never known how to go about getting those ideas organized into a […]
Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-book bundle, and learn every aspect of great songwriting! ________________________ The worst reaction a song can generate is boredom. Most songwriters would rather deal with outright hatred of their music. Hatred usually means someone didn’t like your tune, but leaves the possibility open that others might like it. But […]
A verse needs to progress in such a way as to make the chorus feel like the next logical step. By this I mean that verse lyrics, melody and chords should be constructed to build certain tensions that are then resolved in the chorus. But sometimes, moving from the verse to the chorus can seem […]
Momentum in the songwriting world comes from the sense that whatever is happening in the song right now is about to get better; whatever questions are being asked are about to be answered; whatever tension is being created harmonically is about to be resolved, and so on. Momentum, otherwise known as song energy or forward motion, […]
Most song lyrics fall into one of two categories: 1) poetry, or 2) common narrative. My experience is that songwriters often worry too much about trying to create something poetic, when it’s not really necessary. You don’t need to be a T. S. Eliot or a Longfellow to write a lyric that gets the job […]
