If you spend any amount of time listening to today’s pop offerings, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that mainstream pop music is steadily dumbing itself down. Lyrics often fail to inspire, melodies are less than inventive, and chords are usually simple and repetitive. Getting melodies and chords working well together is vital knowledge for any […]
To borrow an important observation from Barry Gibb, “Songs are about feelings.” To put it another way, if you haven’t caused your audience to feel something when they hear your songs, you’ve probably missed the point of songwriting. Emotions are funny things: you usually can’t tell someone what to feel. One event or circumstance can cause […]
When it comes to a song’s melody, there’s a standard kind of “formula” that practically all songs in a verse-chorus format use: Verse: Start the melody relatively low in pitch, and move higher as it comes closer to the chorus. Chorus: Keep the chorus relatively high in pitch. If the end of the verse is […]
“Rockin’ in the Free World” is one of Neil Young’s most popular songs. It’s number 216 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Every time I ever do a “Why It Works” analysis of a song on this blog, you’ll see me mentioning some aspect of the simplicity of design as a positive feature, […]
When writing a song, it seems logical to assume that it will be either in a major or minor key, and you simply have to choose which one. But there is another option, which is to allow the song to start minor, switch quickly to major, then back to minor, and so on. You’d be […]
Not all songs are about the melody. Since every good song is a partnership of melody, lyrics and chords (and then miscellaneous other bits that get woven in and around those elements), you can wind up with a song that makes a stronger impact through its hook, lyric or rhythmic groove, and leave melody as a less […]
