Many (perhaps most) songwriters have less than what might be called a working knowledge of the rudiments of music. Most create their songs on instinct — they write what sounds good, what their ear tells them they should write. So what’s wrong with that? If that’s working for you, why muddy the waters with something like […]
Songwriters spend a lot of time thinking about what their next song is going to be about. They certainly spend more time thinking about a song’s topic than listeners do. There is a good reason for that. Audiences take in the entire sonic experience when they listen to a song. The actual topic is but […]
More than many other creative endeavours, songwriting is largely an improvisatory art. That notion of improvisation largely happens on two levels: The writing of the song, which is often the spontaneous, “on-the-fly” generation of musical ideas. The performance of the song, which involves players reacting spontaneously to the ideas of bandmates. Every kind of creative activity in the arts […]
For songs in a verse-only format, the verse has to act as a complete musical journey. It doesn’t have a chorus to rely on to provide extra musical excitement. In addition to the challenge of making a verse feel complete, verse-only songs run the risk of being overly repetitive. To avoid excessive repetition, many verse-only […]
If there are children in your life — if you have children yourself, or you work in a school, or you come into regular contact with nieces, nephews, and their friends — you know that music usually plays an important role in their day-to-day lives. Children seem to always be singing, dancing, or skipping to […]
When you have difficulties writing good music, there can be any number of causes. Often we blame our level of creativity when there are other more likely suspects: fatigue, disorganization, fear of failure, and so on. It’s tricky to blame our level of creativity because we’re inclined to believe that creativity is similar to a pool […]
