There’s a little trick I use when I’m having one of those days where it seems I’m getting nothing done. It works best at the times in my life when I feel that I have nothing to show for how busy my day seems to be: I put the simplest, easiest tasks into my daily […]
We’ve all been there: a new idea for a song pops quickly into your mind, and with great excitement you dig in and hope to have the song finished in a day or so. But somewhere along the line the ideas fizzle. What you’re left with is something that’s got the promise of greatness, but […]
It’s common with many songwriters to start the songwriting process by working out the chorus, if only because that’s the part that’s going to be most memorable to your audience. Once you’ve got a chorus that really works well, it acts as a kind of goal — a target, so to speak — for you to aim […]
Musical energy is a term that a lot of musicians use but find hard to define. You might use the word energy in a very nebulous sort of way, where it’s synonymous with intensity. With that usage of the word, most listeners of music would know what you mean if you said, “I really like the energy of this song.” They would […]
It’s fair to make the assumption that most songwriters are singers, but that’s not exclusively true. So if you’re trying your hand at writing songs and you aren’t a singer, how do you write melodies? The inability to sing usually means the inability to sing well. In other words, you may be able to manage to grunt […]
I believe that in songwriting, no one can improve what they do until they can hear their songs as others hear them. And that’s a big challenge; it’s not easy to develop that level of objectivity. A song represents your heart and soul in musical form. Most of the time, it’s a personal reflection of you […]
