I’ve been offering private songwriting sessions for the past few years to interested songwriters, and every spring I put out a reminder of my availability. The fall and winter are very busy times for me as I do a lot of conducting, writing and adjudicating. But once May hits, I find my schedule pleasantly freed […]
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I recently read an interesting article written by Susan Reynolds, “Five Reasons You’re Experiencing Writer’s Block,” available at the Psychology Today website. In it, Reynolds make the case that writer’s block is a condition that we’ve created for ease of identification, and that it doesn’t actually exist. She starts this way: We’re going to go […]
If you’re not sure what’s meant by a phrase, think of it as a part of a sentence up to a comma or a period, where the sentence seems to pause, either temporarily or permanently, like this 2-phrase unit from Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening”: Whose woods these are I […]
A good lyric tells a story, whether that’s an actual “first this happened, then that happened” kind of lyric (like the stereotypical “A Boy Named Sue” – Johnny Cash), or whether the story happens indirectly, and we piece the details together, like Pink’s “Funhouse” (Pink, Tony Kanal, Jimmy Harry). A lyric where the story is […]
Nothing slows the songwriting process down as much as second guessing every idea you get. Silencing your inner critic, at least temporarily, is a good way of making sure that you give yourself a fair chance to get something written. You need to give yourself the opportunity to hear what different song components sound like […]
