Music Journal

Untrained Listeners Know More About Music Than They Think They know

So many songs in the pop genres succeed or fail based on the quality of the hook. “Hooks and Riffs: How They Grab Attention, Make Songs Memorable, and Build Your Fan Base” contains info that all songwriters need to write great song hooks. It’s part of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Bundle.” I used […]

Musical Notation

Copying Music By Hand as a Way of “Listening”

I was thinking a bit more about my post yesterday, and the importance of listening as a way of developing your songwriting skills. I started that post by mentioning that the classical composers may have had innate talents and skills that made them great composers of music, but mainly they worked hard at it — a […]

Home studio

What You Listen to Informs How You Write

It’s easy to think that the great classical composers — Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, etc. — were born with an innate ability to compose — that they were born with what some might call a “God-given talent.” There’s probably something genetic about musical ability, to be sure, but I truly believe that the great composers were […]

Songwriting Inspiration

Ideas to Make the Bridge the Most Powerful Section of Your Song

“Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process” is FREE with your purchase of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle. $37 USD. Immediate Download. In songs that are in one of the verse-chorus formats, the optional section we call a bridge will typically happen after the second chorus. For verse-bridge songs, the bridge will […]

A Tribute to My Brother David

I’m very saddened to let you all know that my twin brother David recently passed away after a brief illness. He was a really wonderful person. Though he worked in the tech/IT world, his first love was music. He received a music degree in performance, and was an excellent percussionist, drummer and composer. He was […]

Songwriter writing lyrics

Does Good Grammar Matter in a Song Lyric?

It’s not hard to find songs that use slang or grammatical and spelling “errors” in the title or lyric. Lots of “ain’t”, “gonna”, and also a lot of dropped g’s as in Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’”. I occasionally get messages or emails from songwriters asking what I think of grammatical correctness in a […]