One of the worst things you might do as a songwriter is to use clichés in your lyrics, but I’d like to make a small defence of this faux-pas, at least in certain situations. You’d think that a cliché is going to get your song sent immediately to the naughty chair called “Worst Songs Ever”, […]
If you can’t express or sum up the main concept of your song — what the song’s all about — in one sentence or less, you’re going to have trouble connecting to your audience. Lyrics may take the listener on a journey, but there needs to be one concise way of describing that journey. It’s like […]
One way to make a song stand out and grab attention is to create an instrumental hook, one that may or may not have much to do with the song itself. One of my favourite examples of how this can work is Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition“. The sung part of the song doesn’t really have a […]
As songwriters, you’re constantly trying to make your music a personal experience that others can feel – to which others can relate. You do this by singing about universal emotions and experiences (love, peace, friendship, etc.), and you use common, everyday words to convey your thoughts. Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, and most of […]
Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” was the number-one single on the Billboard charts for 2014, and by any measurement you choose it was the most commercially successful song of that year, with 13.9 units sold. If there was ever a song that could be called an “accidental hit”, “Happy” fit the bill perfectly. It innocently inserted itself […]
It’s amazing how imaginative you can be using mainly pentatonic scales to create melodies. You might think that limiting yourself to 5 notes per octave means you’ve cut out a lot of possibilities, but that certainly doesn’t have to be the case. If you haven’t done so yet, you might want to give Deerhunter’s new album, […]
