I firmly believe that if The Beatles were a band of our decade trying to get a start in the business, they’d probably not have survived the onslaught of negative opinions and comments that come hand-in-hand with social media. There’s a really interesting video you can watch of young folks in 1967 — in their […]
Psychologically speaking, there are two ways to approach songwriting; you can be the kind of person who assumes you’ve got it wrong, or the kind of person who assumes you’ve got it right. Most of the time, your songwriting process relies greatly on improvisation and testing ideas as you go. When you create something — […]
They say everyone has an opinion. As a songwriter, though, you deal with an aspect of modern life that people even just 15 years ago didn’t have to deal with: how quickly an online consumer of your music will offer that opinion. It’s not just the immediacy of opinions, though. If you’re involved in the […]
One piece of advice songwriters hear over and over (and I think it’s usually good advice) is to “silence your inner critic.” The belief is that songwriting can grind to a halt when you spend all your time finding fault with what you’re writing, before it’s even finished. Being critical, though, need not always be […]
There’s something about reliving bad moments in our lives that we find good, in a weird sort of way. Sad songs work for that reason, and in fact, a recent study shows that we love to be reminded of sadness in our lives, if those reminders happen in song. If you’re trying to make your […]
