There’s a fascinating story about the Baroque composer J.S. Bach (1685-1750), who reportedly walked 450 kilometers (900 kilometers round trip!) to visit a composer that he considered to be one of his strongest influences: Dieterich Buxtehude. Buxtehude lived in the city of Lübeck. In those days, of course, you couldn’t just put a recording on […]
In my last blog post I wrote about the natural ebb and flow of creativity in all of us, and how we shouldn’t be overly surprised or worried if we find that our musical imagination comes and goes, sometimes within the same songwriting session. But even though there’s something natural about that, you can still […]
You can spend a lot of time worrying about how to get a verse and a chorus to work well together, but don’t forget the other option: consider writing a song that doesn’t use a chorus at all. Sometimes the melody for that kind of song will end with a kind of repeating refrain, like […]
Often the best instruction you can get in songwriting is to listen to the songwriters who have made it big. Not only do you get good instruction, but you find yourself getting immensely inspired; you want to grab your instrument and start writing! Last year, Rick Beato, whose YouTube channel I’ve mentioned in my blog […]
If you’ve been planning to write a Christmas tune, you should be working on it now — Christmas is less than a month from now. In a way, there’s not really a lot of difference between a good holiday song and the ones you’d normally write. But if you’re looking to write something that everyone, […]
Similarity is a dangerous quality in the world of the creative arts. And it is a particular problem in pop songwriting, because — weirdly — it’s also an important quality. And it all comes down to how you define similarity and how excessive that similarity might be. If you’re ready to take your songwriting to its […]
