Once you’ve written a song, you like to think of it as your baby, something that had a gestation period, and now — here it is! Except… you’re not very happy with it. The song’s done, but it just sounds lame to you. The first step in dealing with a song that doesn’t work very […]
Lately I’ve been getting lots of very good questions from songwriters by email regarding chord progressions, and most of those questions deal with some aspect of how to make chords a bit more creative without making them sound… well, like garbage! I thought now might be a good time to go back to offering my […]
It’s exciting when a song seems to happen spontaneously and easily; within what seems to be a few minutes, you’ve written something that is, for all intents and purposes, a great song that’s ready for prime time. As you hopefully know, that’s not the norm. It usually takes a lot longer to write songs, anywhere […]
Many songwriters like starting the process by working out the chords first. That’s because chords give us a strong sense of mood, and if you’re trying to generate lyrics, creating a mood is a good start. So you’ve got a chord progression to which you then add a rhythmic feel. With that partnership of chords […]
Sometimes just editing verse lyrics won’t give you what you want. It might happen that despite how many times you change a word here and there, you still wind up with a verse that’s weak in some way. It can be frustrating. So here’s a different way to fix the verse (and lyric) that isn’t […]
Do you ever find that you randomly come up with a killer line of lyric, something that’s clever, poetic, rhythmic and imaginative all rolled up in one great phrase… but nothing else happens? And try as you might, you just can’t come up with more lyric to add to it? Starting June 22, 2018, “Creative Chord […]
