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 […]
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 […]
I was looking recently at a list of some of the world’s most covered songs, and saw a few surprises on it. Some of them were what we’ve come to expect on such lists: Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday”, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, and Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line.” But I confess I didn’t know that Ray […]
I’m in the middle of a very busy week, so I’m not going to get to write a songwriting post until next Monday. This week I’ve been conducting Symphony Nova Scotia as they do some school concerts in various schools in Halifax. I always love doing these concerts, because for many of the students we […]
Every singer-songwriter has an identifiable style, but what does that word style actually refer to? For the most part, your own “style” refers to the performance and production that listeners hear when they listen to your songs. You can take practically any song and move it firmly into one genre or another just by adjusting the way […]
Once you’ve written a song, do you have a list — even just a mental one — that you go through to assess your song? I have mentioned often that troubleshooting a song should really only be done if you’re noticing something about your song that isn’t really working, but you can’t identify what that […]
