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 […]
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 […]
For any songwriter, uniqueness is a crucial pursuit. Why would you want to write something that sounds like some other song out there, no matter how good it is? In every song you write, you need to hope that there’s something unique about it so that your fans can tell that it’s you they’re listening to, […]
To borrow an important observation from Barry Gibb, “Songs are about feelings.” To put it another way, if you haven’t caused your audience to feel something when they hear your songs, you’ve probably missed the point of songwriting. Emotions are funny things: you usually can’t tell someone what to feel. One event or circumstance can cause […]
What a time we live in! Technology has definitely changed the way music happens. Using a smartphone, you can sing and record song ideas to yourself, maybe going online to check out a rhyming dictionary if you need it, and possibly accessing a list of interesting chord changes for you to try. Then when it’s […]
I’ve been reading all sorts of commentary, both civil and uncivil, about the latest incarnation of the Rolling Stones list of the 500 Best Songs of All Time, released this month. Predictably, most people have something negative to say about it all. If you’re one of the ones who takes issue with which songs are […]
