Great songwriting, from a listener’s point of view, flies under the radar, by which I mean that the best songs are great without making it obvious why they’re great. A song might have a gorgeous melody, but the average listener won’t know exactly why it’s so beautiful. It might have a really captivating sequence of chords, […]
You may think that a good chord progression is the end result of a random process, but it rarely is. If you spend your time playing one random chord after another, you’ll be looking for a long time before you find something that works. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have the […]
If you’re a songwriter, you’re a dreamer. Not unlike the kid who dreams about becoming a professional baseball player, hitting a homerun to win the World Series, then works to become that player. As a singer-songwriter, you dream about hitting big on the charts. You dream about turning on the radio and hearing your song. […]
For some, songwriting is the kind of thing that happens “on the fly”, at least in the sense that you can come up with a great idea when you least expect it. But if for you, songwriting is always like that — where you write songs when ideas happen to pop into your brain, you’ll probably […]
If, in the end, you get what you want, does it really matter how you got there? If you ask that question in some settings, it’s a loaded one, with intense moral implications: if you were able to get enough money to finally buy that car you’ve always wanted, great. If you got that money […]
Some songwriters start their process by working out a good chord progression as a first step. From there, they automatically create a backing rhythm that brings that progression to life. Once they’ve done that, the mood it generates makes them feel comfortable coming up with bits of melody and lyric, and the song starts to […]
