Country music guitarist-songwriter

Targeting Your Audience: Increasing Your Likelihood of Songwriting Success

In the world of pop music, targeting your audience has always meant identifying who was likely to enjoy your songs, and then make it easy for those potential fans to familiarize themselves with your music, and then hopefully buy the record. If you like starting songs by working with a chord progression, you need to […]

Emotional audience

Happy New Year, 2024!

As 2023 comes to a close, I want to take the opportunity to wish you all happiness and success for 2024. As you’ve noticed if you’ve been a regular reader of my blog, I haven’t written many articles in the last couple of months. That’s been mainly due to the fact that one of the […]

Guitars

What Changing Key Can Do For Your Song

Most songs will end in the same key that they start in. If there is a key change, probably the most common one would be presenting the verse in a minor key, and then switching to the relative major key for the chorus. For example, you might start your song in A minor, and then […]

Don McLean - American Pie

Helping Your Audience Connect to a Complicated Story Song

When you write lyrics, you obviously want your audience to connect to those lyrics and feel something. That would seem to imply that the meaning of your lyric has to be at least clear enough that your listeners understand what’s being sung about. But that’s not necessarily the case. There are plenty of good examples […]

Paul McCartney

What is Song Form, and What Makes It So Important?

It would be a no-brainer to say that I think Paul McCartney discovered things about songwriting that many other writers just don’t ever get to know. But one aspect of his writing that I think has contributed to his success is his very loose concept of what song form is. Most of the time when […]

songwriting frustration

The Value of Small Goals in Songwriting

If you find yourself always succumbing to writer’s block, you may find yourself thinking that there’s as much frustration in the act of songwriting as there is fun. What can you do to prevent a creative block from constantly showing up at the worst times? One of the best ways I know to keep writer’s […]