You’d be surprised how much of a strong role honesty plays in how your song comes across to an audience. Honesty, from a audience’s perspective, is simply this: Are you writing music that accurately reflects the person you are. You can spend an awful lot of time trying to figure out what your target audience wants […]
Sometimes you’ll hear a songwriter criticize their lyrics, saying that the chorus “falls flat.” That kind of criticism usually means that the chorus lyrics aren’t generating the kind of emotional response from the listener they were hoping for. You’ll notice that I say “generating”, because that’s exactly what a good chorus lyric does. It doesn’t […]
For some songwriters, working on a song is a little like staring into the sun: you can do it only for very short periods of time before you have to look away. That looking away can mean any number of things, depending on who you are. You might: concentrate instead on your playing skills; start […]
If you find song melodies hard to write, the trick to getting that step on track is to pair up the writing of melodies with existing lyrics. In other words, melodies will come a bit easier if you practice a lyrics-first songwriting process. Recently I saw on an online forum that someone new to songwriting […]
Form is one of those words that can cause songwriters’ eyes to glaze over. It sounds like a term that’s only going to help other people understand what you’ve written, but not help the songwriter so much. Got a melody but don’t know how to add chords to make it come alive? “How to Harmonize a […]
Scott Borchetta is an American record executive, known mostly as the founder of Big Machine Label Group. You may not know who he is, but suffice it to say that he’s spent a lot of his career working in the business end of music. He started Big Machine Records, and his first major client was […]
