Have you ever had the experience of feeling that you write pretty good poetry, but every time you try to come up with a melody and chords that makes it sound like a good song lyric, it just doesn’t work? There are any number of reasons why that might be happening. Here are some possible ones: […]
Melodies and lyrics are the two components of any song that must be unique. Song titles, chord progressions, rhythms… they can all have been heard before, and probably have. But melodies, if they share more than a few notes in a row with some other song, are said to have been plagiarized. Because every melody needs to […]
I’ve always liked R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” but there’s something odd about it. Because most of its melodies and melodic fragments dwell on the 3 notes A-B-C, in the key of A minor, it sounds very much like a drone. Normally, that just doesn’t work all that well for a song; you normally want to hear […]
To write a love song lyric means different things to different songs. You can write about how nobody understands your relationship, or you can write of simpler things: how much you love the other one. Or perhaps you’ll use imagery: your love is like a flower garden, a walk in the park, a sunny day… that sort […]
It’s easy to understand why a song uses verses and choruses. The chorus tells the listener the essence of the song. The verse explains the situation behind the emotions of the chorus. That part is usually pretty cut-&-dried. But there are other miscellaneous sections your songs might use. And a commonly-used section (also a commonly-misunderstood […]
A couple of posts ago, I wrote about what to do when you think all your songwriting ideas sound bad. Thinking about that always seems to bring things around to writer’s block, and it’s possible that you’re going through that right now. Is it bad enough that you find yourself asking, Can my songwriting abilities […]
