In the pop music genres, a great chorus is a self-contained unit. It doesn’t need a verse in order to work, musically speaking; it will work on its own. That’s certainly not to say that a chorus is all you need, or that a verse serves no useful purpose. In most songs, if all you […]
Every songwriter is a communicator. Most of the time what you’re communicating is obvious from the title and lyric, but there’s so much more than words that contribute to the meaning of a song. A few years back I did a blog article that compared two renditions of “Always On My Mind” (Wayne Carson, Johnny […]
It’s tricky, writing music that pleases your target audience. They want every song to sound unique and fresh. But at the same time, they want to hear the kind of music that attracted them to you in the first place. So you try to write something that goes in a refreshingly new direction, and they give […]
I get a lot of emails as well as blog comments that pertain to copyright. There’s a lot of confusion about what it is, because copyright is a legal term — the kind of thing that lawyers get paid to understand. So you’d be excused for not knowing everything about it if you aren’t a […]
It’s important to realize that what you’re dealing with in songwriting is getting an audience to feel something, more so than telling a story. True, your song will involve telling a kind of story– a lover who tosses you away, or perhaps a plea to the world for more kindness — but what it comes down […]
In 2005, when I wrote my first eBook, “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting”, I was planning to call it “The Essential Principles of Songwriting.” After some considerable thought, I reasoned that most people would be turned off by the word “principles”, and opted instead for “secrets.” To my mind, however, it conveys the same thing, […]
