For any songwriter, uniqueness is a crucial pursuit. Why would you want to write something that sounds like some other song out there, no matter how good it is? In every song you write, you need to hope that there’s something unique about it so that your fans can tell that it’s you they’re listening to, […]
When I was a first year university music student many years ago, I had about 50 classmates. I was planning to be a composition major, but in my classes, there was every possible music discipline represented. Some were training to be singers, others were aspiring teachers, and still others were learning sound recording techniques, music […]
Brainstorming is a great mental exercise in the creative arts. Brainstorming requires you to think quickly and to minimize judgment. When you work this way, your process is being fuelled by pure imagination, and that’s when you get to see what the inner workings of your creative brain can come up with. If you find […]
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 […]
This week, with the passing of legendary singer-songwriter Glen Campbell, we’ve been hearing a lot about some of the songs that made him famous as a solo artist: “Rhinestone Cowboy”, “Galveston”, “Gentle On My Mind”, and “Wichita Lineman”, among many, many others. “Wichita Lineman” was written by Jimmy Webb, and it’s the song I’ve been […]
