Sometimes you need to hear your own music before you know what your song is actually about. There’s something about the chords you choose, and then the melody that gets created above them, that implies a kind of musical meaning. But occasionally it’s hard to get going because you can feel the melody starting to flow, and […]
There’s an obvious problem when it comes to writing lyrics that rhyme: the more diligent you are in creating a rhyme, the more limited your choice of words. The other side of that is this: creating a rhyming lyric that says exactly what you want to say can be quite a treasure. The strength of […]
Songs are vehicles that take a listener on a 3-4 minute journey. However interesting and captivating that journey is, that’s the measure of a song’s success. Since songs are partnerships of many different elements all working together — melodies, lyrics, chords, instrumentation/production, tempo, time signature and more — it can seem to be a daunting task […]
Good songwriting means creating a strong partnership between all the various elements of your song. You know you’ve got a good song when your lyrics, melodies, chords, rhythms, instrumentation/production and formal design all support each other. It’s not easy to troubleshoot a song that has problems. You can tell just by listening that something’s not […]
Let’s say that you’re working out a lyric that tries to explain to your listeners how you’re feeling about some aspect of your life. It might be that you’re going through a rough patch, let’s say, and you want the audience to feel something of what you’re facing. So the lyrics come to you quickly […]
In a lyric, imagery refers to any line that touches on and stimulates our senses. Used well, imagery is able to paint a picture in our minds that fills in many parts of a story with a bare minimum of words. An example might be something like this: Let’s say you wanted to convey the following […]
