Nickelback

Five Songwriting Ponderables

Do you ever find that when you’re talking to other musicians about music in general, there’s a list of “the things you’re most likely to say” guiding your conversations? Everyone has their big issues in music. Their pet peeves. Their guiding principles. Their “why do people think this way!?” kind of rants. There are many […]

Songwriter working out the next song

Songwriting, and Knowing Where to Start

If you’re a bit new to songwriting, there’s probably at least three things you’ve noticed already: Your first few songs may have come together quickly, and this is exciting. Your next few songs took hard work, and this is discouraging. Today, you don’t even know where to start. And because you don’t know where to start, […]

Adele - Someone Like You

The Psychology of Song Section Durations

In the world of music composition, songs in the popular genres (pop, rock, country, folk, and most of their subgenres) tend to be short, at around 4 minutes or so as a norm. Yes, some subgenres such as progressive rock will feature songs that are much longer, but brevity is a feature of most pop […]

Singer - songwriter

Give Yourself (and Your First Draft) a Break

There’s nothing quite as intimidating as a blank page when it comes to writing songs. A blank page means that you’ve been unable to get anything working, and that’s a recipe for writer’s block. A blank page, though, doesn’t necessarily mean that you came up with no ideas. Generally, it means that you came up […]

Guitarist - Songwriter

An Easier Way to Choose the Chords For Your Songs

Chord progressions are the one aspect of songwriting where random improvisation can give you something amazing, but unfortunately you’ll often need to wait a very long time before that amazing thing happens, wading through a lot of garbage in the meantime. That’s because there is a logic to chords and the way they move from […]

Copying Professional Songwriters as a Songwriting Technique

I’ve frequently written about the value of writing music that sounds like your songwriting hero, but it begs an important question: Aren’t you just running the risk of plagiarizing something they’ve written? And it begs a second more important question: Why is that even good advice? Why would you write to purposely sound like someone […]