music | The Essential Secrets of Songwriting

Don’t Go Overboard With the Contrast Principle

Musicians and psychologists hold slightly different practical definitions for what is known as the contrast principle. A good description of a psychologist’s use of the term might be something like the following, which comes from the JackMalcom.com website: If you put your left hand into a bucket of cold water, and your right into hot water, […]

Introvert or Extrovert: Refreshing Your Creative Mind

For many, songwriting is a personal activity done in seclusion. For others, songwriting means getting together with bandmates to work out the next song. Your comfort level with regard to how much you like to write alone or with others probably relates in a direct way to whether you are an introvert or an extrovert. […]

Common Lyric Problems and How to Solve Them

For many songwriters, it’s the lyrics that are the toughest to write. A lot of the difficulty comes from not having a clear understanding of the nature of lyrics. And that nature changes from song to song: Some lyrics rhyme, some don’t. Some lyrics are comprised of sentences, others seem to be more fragments of […]

5 Tips to Make You a More Objective Songwriter

I believe that in songwriting, no one can improve what they do until they can hear their songs as others hear them. And that’s a big challenge; it’s not easy to develop that level of objectivity. A song represents your heart and soul in musical form. Most of the time, it’s a personal reflection of you […]

Consistency: The Most Important Songwriting Quality

The term one-hit wonder, in the realm of music, refers to a performer that manages to make the charts only once in their career. The actual definition is complex, but suffice it to say that it typically refers to a performer or band that makes one appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and no other appearances. Less […]

Dealing With a Stunted Songwriter’s Imagination

You are more likely to hear the word “creativity” when talking about the arts than you are to hear the word “imagination.” We usually speak of creating — not imagining — something artistic. Nonetheless, when we do use both words, we tend to use them interchangeably; we think of someone’s creative abilities as being synonymous with their […]