In order for an athlete to improve, something needs to change. A golfer who wants to improve needs to develop a different stance, or perhaps hold the club differently, or do some other thing in a different way. Athletes work all the time on that simple idea of change. If they aren’t changing something, their […]
If you’re a composer of music who is required to be writing daily (film score composers, for example), you know that you can’t count on a steady supply of inspiration to keep you writing. You know you’re going to have days when you feel the excitement that inspiration provides, but lots of other days when […]
You should not necessarily worry if it takes you weeks or months to write a complete song while all your songwriting colleagues are getting the job done in days, sometimes hours. How long it takes to finish a song rarely has anything to do with how good it is. Having said that, it’s going to […]
A common musical form that classical composers have loved for centuries is theme and variations; a melody is repeated, changed in some way, but still similar enough to the original that it’s recognizable. It was a measure of a composer’s musical imagination, and fun for an audience to hear what might happen next with the […]
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 […]
