It’s somewhere between possible and likely that when you come up with a song melody, you’re following pure instinct. You may work and re-work lyrics and may spend a lot of time tweaking the chords, but I wonder if melodies always seems a bit random, where the changes you might make over the course of […]
I’m fond of pointing out the similarities between all the different genres of music, because it reminds me that no matter what style of music we call our own, we’re all trying to do the same thing: touch the emotional soul of the audience. For most musical genres, the main differences with songs lie in […]
It’s not hard to find songwriters who find the writing of the lyrics to be the most difficult part of the process. You know what you want to write about, but every time you try to put it in the form of a lyric, your words sound confused, disorganized, or just plain corny. It’s time to […]
There’s an automatic assumption by many that song lyrics must rhyme. In actuality they don’t. Whether to rhyme or not is often dictated by the genre. Country and pop lyrics are more likely to feature rhyming, while other genres (progressive rock, for example) may not make any attempt to rhyme. To Rhyme So let’s look […]
No one likes negative reviews. You put your heart and soul into the music you write, and then someone says that the lyric doesn’t work, or the instrumentation feels wrong, or they simply… don’t like it. If there’s a way to put your emotional reaction to a bad review aside, you’ll find that you will […]
Of the many ways you can start the songwriting process, brainstorming titles is one of the best. There are several reasons: A title is the first thing a listener encounters when they’re about to click to listen. Titles provide an important point of focus for your song’s lyric. Titles imply a storyline. Titles can be […]
