Songwriters spend a lot of time thinking about what their next song is going to be about. They certainly spend more time thinking about a song’s topic than listeners do. There is a good reason for that. Audiences take in the entire sonic experience when they listen to a song. The actual topic is but […]
More than many other creative endeavours, songwriting is largely an improvisatory art. That notion of improvisation largely happens on two levels: The writing of the song, which is often the spontaneous, “on-the-fly” generation of musical ideas. The performance of the song, which involves players reacting spontaneously to the ideas of bandmates. Every kind of creative activity in the arts […]
Many of you know that I have had a video-based music theory course for sale. “Easy Music Theory” is a 25-lesson course in music rudiments, something I created more than 15 years ago now. It’s a course that I used with my own university music students. I have recently created a Songwriter’s Edition of that course […]
For songs in a verse-only format, the verse has to act as a complete musical journey. It doesn’t have a chorus to rely on to provide extra musical excitement. In addition to the challenge of making a verse feel complete, verse-only songs run the risk of being overly repetitive. To avoid excessive repetition, many verse-only […]
If there are children in your life — if you have children yourself, or you work in a school, or you come into regular contact with nieces, nephews, and their friends — you know that music usually plays an important role in their day-to-day lives. Children seem to always be singing, dancing, or skipping to […]
When you wrote your first song, you likely didn’t immediately self-identify as a songwriter. But there came a point, almost without thinking about it, where it seemed obvious to you that you were indeed a songwriter. That meant that you had written at least several songs, and that you derived creative satisfaction from doing so. […]
