This is a common situation in the creative arts. You get some good ideas that get the ball rolling, and then everything seems to fizzle, and you’re left with an incomplete song. At those times, it seems easier to start a new song than finish an old one. So that means you’ve got a box-full […]
In typical usage, an Achilles’ heel is a weakness. But it’s a little more than that. To have an Achilles’ heel means that, in the midst of what seems to be many obvious strengths, you’ve got one weakness that threatens to bring you down. That term may be on its way to becoming antiquated. I […]
If you spend any time on YouTube, you can get a pretty clear idea of what songwriters find difficult. It’s there for all to see and hear. It’s the double-edged of social media: it can get your music out there to a large audience right away, but also displays any weaknesses or issues right away. […]
How you know that you’ve written a song that really works comes down to one main thing: its ability to make listeners want to hear it over and over again. When a song fails to do that, your job becomes one of analysis: how to figure out why a song just isn’t making the impact on […]
Most songwriters are well acquainted with the frustration of having a great song idea, but having it fizzle out. You had such high hopes, but now your idea seems to have gone nowhere. To properly address this frustration, we need to look at two aspects of it: Why the idea went nowhere; and What to […]
Knowing why some chord progressions your’e coming up with sound good while others just don’t work at all is an entire area of study in music schools. For many of you, though, a good chord progression is something you can come up with by improvising and by borrowing ideas from other existing progressions. In this blog […]
