I was very much saddened, as I know most of my blog readers were, to hear the news of Leonard Cohen’s passing. His contribution to the world of poetry and popular songwriting is immeasurable; his music will be studied and performed for centuries, there can be no doubt. Over the past 8 or so years of […]
It’s understandable to get a bit worried if you find that, after weeks of working away on a song, you’re still not finished. You might find that every time you fix one thing, something else sounds a bit off, and the cycle of editing keeps going on and on. As a songwriter, you’ve no doubt […]
Today I say, only half-jokingly, that I had better not hear a songwriter, particularly an American one, tell me that they just can’t think of anything to write about. The subject of the day — Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency — may be difficult to handle, but you sure can’t beat it for providing everything a […]
Chords-first songwriting is a bit of a modern invention. For the great master composers (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc.), composing was almost always about the melody, and so the process of writing music would start there. That’s not to say that composing music was strictly a melody-first process for them after which they’d come up with […]
If you’re looking for ways to make your progressions a bit more interesting without being too weird, there’s a simple modification you should consider: simply avoid overusing the I-chord. In a standard I-IV-V-I progression (C-F-G-C) the I-chord is the tonic chord. It’s the one that represents your song’s key. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with its use, […]
We often use the word ego in a negative sense. After a conversation with someone, for example, you might wryly note to yourself, “Well, he has a healthy ego!” And we don’t usually mean it with a positive connotation. In that negative sense of how we usually use the word, we typically mean that the person has an […]
