Country music guitarist-songwriter

Targeting Your Audience: Increasing Your Likelihood of Songwriting Success

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 […]

Emotional audience

Happy New Year, 2024!

As 2023 comes to a close, I want to take the opportunity to wish you all happiness and success for 2024. As you’ve noticed if you’ve been a regular reader of my blog, I haven’t written many articles in the last couple of months. That’s been mainly due to the fact that one of the […]

Guitars

What Changing Key Can Do For Your Song

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 […]

Paul McCartney

What is Song Form, and What Makes It So Important?

It would be a no-brainer to say that I think Paul McCartney discovered things about songwriting that many other writers just don’t ever get to know. But one aspect of his writing that I think has contributed to his success is his very loose concept of what song form is. Most of the time when […]

Songwriter

Connecting a Verse to a Chorus – Keep the Musical Energy Moving Up!

No matter what genre you write in, there’s one thing that all songs have in common: they take listeners on a musical journey. That means that for every given moment within a song (assuming it’s well-written), listeners eagerly anticipate what’s going to happen next. In other words, just like a real journey, where you are always […]

Musical inspiration

Inspiration is Part of a Musical “Machine”

Some songwriters can’t compose unless they feel inspired to do so. That word inspired refers to a kind of excitement that drives our creative process and motivates us to write. You might think of the word in its less metaphorical form: to inspire, meaning to breathe in. It’s like saying that the excitement to write comes […]