What metric do you use to measure your songwriting success? Is it money? The size of your fanbase? Your own personal sense of musical satisfaction? For me, it’s all about satisfying my musical soul. The music I write needs to be expressing some part of my innermost being. Not to be too corny about it, […]
I read a quote recently by Paul McCartney (I believe it might have been Philip Norman’s book “Paul McCartney: The Life”) in which he said that he didn’t know how to write songs, he only knew how to finish them. That quote shows great insight. I’ve made it a large part of my life to […]
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 […]
What we call writer’s block has many possible causes, but most of them related to fear, and in particular a fear of failure. But fear is not often the first step in a creative block. For many songwriters, it’s creative exhaustion. Chapter 5 of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” shows how melody and lyric need to work […]
The most recognizable section of practically any song will be the chorus. That’s because it’s likely to contain the “hookiest” part – the melodic/rhythmic idea that everyone will recognize. The verse melody is also going to be recognizable for the fact that it starts the song — it’s the first thing people hear. Get “The Essential […]
Rules and songwriting don’t go together, in my opinion. I like to think in terms of guidelines and principles, because those don’t insist so strongly on being followed, at least not as much as rules do. And if we wrote everything to accommodate a rule, where would we find the possibility for creativity? People say that “rules are […]
