Tom Petty

Comparing Lyrics From Different Song Genres

Get the eBook bundle that thousands of songwriters are using to improve their songwriting technique. No matter what genre of songwriting you examine, you’ll find a few commonalities when it comes to lyric writing: Good lyrics usually use common, everyday words. Good lyrics usually use a conversational style. Good lyrics exhibit an ebb and flow […]

Piano-playing songwriter

Changing Your Songwriting Approach

In order for an athlete to improve, something needs to change. A golfer who wants to improve needs to develop a different stance, or perhaps hold the club differently, or do some other thing in a different way. Athletes work all the time on that simple idea of change. If they aren’t changing something, their […]

Songwriter in nature

Finding More Sources of Songwriting Inspiration

If you’re a composer of music who is required to be writing daily (film score composers, for example), you know that you can’t count on a steady supply of inspiration to keep you writing. You know you’re going to have days when you feel the excitement that inspiration provides, but lots of other days when […]

Songwriter in Home Studio

Writing Better – Writing More

You should not necessarily worry if it takes you weeks or months to write a complete song while all your songwriting colleagues are getting the job done in days, sometimes hours. How long it takes to finish a song rarely has anything to do with how good it is. Having said that, it’s going to […]

Joni Mitchell

Theme and Variations as a Songwriting Technique

A common musical form that classical composers have loved for centuries is theme and variations; a melody is repeated, changed in some way, but still similar enough to the original that it’s recognizable. It was a measure of a composer’s musical imagination, and fun for an audience to hear what might happen next with the […]

Song energy

Meaning Something to Someone

What metric do you use to measure your songwriting success? Is it money? The size of your fanbase? Your own personal sense of musical satisfaction? For me, it’s all about satisfying my musical soul. The music I write needs to be expressing some part of my innermost being. Not to be too corny about it, […]