5 Ways to Make a Verse Melody Beg for a Chorus

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and kick-start your songwriting career! _____________ The successful song is, quite simply, the one that entices the listener to keep listening. In other words, songs that work are ones that cause us to think that something great is about to happen: you don’t want to stop listening […]

Connecting Ideas Together to Reinforce Song Structure

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and kick-start your songwriting career! _____________ Ideally, a chorus should sound like the logical “answer” to a verse in every way. It’s easy to see how that happens in a song’s lyric, since both verse and chorus lyrics are usually addressing the same thing. But how do […]

How Tension and Release Creates Successful Songs

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and get your songwriting career going! _____________ I’ve been listening to Foo Fighter’s fantastic new hit, “Rope“, from their newly released album “Wasting Light”, and it got me thinking about song energy, and specifically about the issue of tension and release. “Rope” is a relentlessly powerful tune, […]

The Special Charm of V7: With the 7th in the Bass

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 e-book bundle, and kick-start your songwriting career! ____________ Most of the time, we use chords in root position, which means that the root of the chord is the lowest sounding note. An inverted chord is one in which the root of the chord is not at the bottom: some other […]

Songwriter’s Experiment: Try This Evaluation Method

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 e-book bundle, and kick-start your songwriting career! ____________ Here’s an interesting and useful experiment that songwriters can try, one that will help get a clear picture of song energy. It works whether you’re simply at the guitar-vocal demo stage, or if you’ve got a more-or-less finished product: Listen to […]

“Jar of Hearts”, and the Art of the Long, Slow Build

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 e-book bundle, and kick-start your songwriting career! ____________ Christina Perri’s single, “Jar of Hearts”, currently no. 19 on Billboard’s Hot 100, is a beautiful example of how to contour a ballad into a hauntingly beautiful musical journey. The secret to the song’s success lies in its subtleties. The song evolves […]