Guitar, Pencil & Paper

Getting Ideas When a Line of Lyric is Missing

One bad line of lyric can make an entire verse or chorus sound lame. So what do you do when you’ve got a verse that you really like, except that there’s that one line that just seems to be elusive: you just can’t come up with anything. It might be that the line in question […]

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 […]

Songwriting tools for lyricists

Songwriting and Finding the Story

One of the biggest differences between writing a song and writing a book is the number of words you’ll use. A novel might use 80,000 or more words to describe a story, but with a song lyric you really only get a tiny fraction of that; maybe 100 words or so. So with novels, the […]

John Denver

Making a More Effective Song Lyric: Stresses, Pauses and Natural Flow

If you’re hoping to make lyrics a more important feature of your songs, you need to read “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process.” Right now, it’s free with your purchase of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Bundle.” For most languages there is a written form and an oral form. You’ll notice this […]

Songwriter - lyrics

Organizing Words and Phrases Into a Complete Lyric

Improvisation plays an important role in pop songwriting. And we love that feeling of quickly coming up with musical ideas and having them sound great right from the start. Hopefully you know, however, that most songs, even the ones that seem to spill deliciously out of our musical minds within minutes, require some working and […]

Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process

Get This Free With Your eBook Bundle Purchase: “Use Your Words!”

Starting today, I am offering a free copy of my eBook “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process” when you purchase “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle.” It’s been interesting to study the stats on my blog over the past decade of its existence. It used to be that easily 8 out of […]