Articles
Songwriting & Music Industry Guidance
3 Reasons Your Songs Will Never Rival Your Idols…and Why You Shouldn’t Worry
We spend a good portion of our early writer years wafting in and out of love with our songs. One moment, we’re flirting with a beautiful new melody. The next, we’re convinced it belongs to someone else. We can’t seem to find and define what makes our songs lovable. Sometimes it feels like all the good ones are already gone. So why is comparing our songs to those of our idols always a losing game?
Why Your Mom Loves Your Songs & What You Should Do About It
For most songwriters, Mom isn’t a trustworthy source of feedback. She’s delightfully ignorant about the craft, never worked at a record label, and has a history of giving her sweet baby James the benefit of the doubt. Even if mom’s perfected the art of sugar-coated criticism, deep down our inner teen knows the old eye-roll and ‘you just don’t understand me’ puts the guilt back where it should be - in the relationship rather than the song.
4 Tips to Improve Your Songwriting
As songwriters, we’ve all wondered, "Are we doing the most important things to make progress every day with our songwriting craft and our industry aspirations?". Use the following tools regularly, and you will inevitably see progress.
Write Faster, Judge Less
Something I’ve learned over the course of my writing career has come from these two somewhat opposing processes to writing: Involving my analytical brain during the creative brain-storming stalls my writing and clouds my judgement.
Simple Tools to Write from a Title
When we start with the title, we are starting with the main message. The title typically falls in the chorus, is usually in the power positions of the first, last, and even the middle line of the chorus section, and may be repeated several times. Titles that are sensory, meaning they involve a specific image such as when a noun and verb are combined, can sometimes be easier to develop into a song than titles that are more general.
How to To Write Songs with Groove
Some genres of music are driven largely by groove. If we’re not accustomed to writing with groove in mind, it can be difficult to push our songwriting into this space. A great first step to writing more groove-oriented songs is to listen to songs driven by a sense of groove. Trying to emulate those grooves on our instrument is an excellent way to start defining what groove is and how it functions in a song.
4 Critical Listening Tips for Songwriters
One of the most important techniques you can learn as a songwriter is how to listen critically. So how do we learn to do this? We start by breaking the different components of a song into four large moving parts: Melody, Chords, Lyric, and Groove.
How to Work Smarter and Not Just Harder
Having a desire to create without the time or process to create it can feel like an enormous burden. How do we make a plan when we’re not quite sure what activities will land us in the ballpark of the people we want to meet and the songs we want to write?