Guitar and paper for songwriting

Got Great Lyric Ideas, But No Story?

Let’s say you find yourself in a situation where some catchy lines of lyric, or some great word combinations, have been rolling about your mind, but you don’t have a story or song topic that helps knit those lines or words together. “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process” shows you several ways to […]

songwriter - lyricist

You’ve Got the Emotions, But You Can’t Put Them Into Words

Power up your lyric-writing abilities with “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process.” It’s a FREE add-on to “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle” What do you do when you’ve got the song’s topic, the basic story, and a whole pile of emotion, but you just can’t find the words to make it […]

Amanda McBroom

Controlling the Emotional Build of a Verse-Only Song

Some songs make use of a verse-only construction, and Bette Midler’s hit “The Rose” (written by Amanda McBroom) is a good example of this. There are other songs that are mainly verse-only, with a short one-line refrain, like Lennon & McCartney’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Those two song formats, verse-only and verse-refrain, both have […]

Feist - I Wish I Didn't Miss You

How Listeners Subconsciously Evaluate Song Verses

“Fix Your Songwriting Problems – NOW!” puts the spotlight on seven of the most common errors songwriters typically make, and then offers some quick solutions you can try. Without really knowing it, most people know that verses will be structured differently than choruses. It’s interesting, because if you asked people to describe the differences they’d […]

Finding the Story From a Line of Lyric

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 […]

Pink - Funhouse

7 Steps For Writing a Well-Structured Song Lyric

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 […]