Songwriting Process
Why Waiting for Inspiration Is Costing You Songs
There’s a familiar feeling most songwriters know well. You sit down, open a notebook or pull up a session, and then… wait. You figure something will come. A melody, a line, a feeling. Something to kick things off. And when nothing arrives, you close the notebook and tell yourself you’ll try again when the time […]
Why Your Best Songs Come When You Stop Trying So Hard
“Please stop thinking.” It’s funny, I teach writing, and before I taught I never would have guessed that’s the thing I say most often. But people really write better without thinking, by which I mean without self-consciousness… It’s not that I decide what to write and carry it out. It’s more that I grope my […]
Why Sleep Is Part of the Songwriting Process (Not a Break From It)
You know the scene very well… It’s late. Everyone else is asleep. You’ve got a guitar slung around your shoulder, a notebook on the couch beside you, and something that might be the start of a good song sitting in your head. The house is quiet and the distractions are gone. This feels like the […]
The Seven Songwriter Problems That Are Secretly One Problem
Just imagine, you’ve been at this longer than you want to admit. You’ve tried the fixes. Morning pages for writer’s block. A heavier production layer for the flat chorus. Three rewrites on a stiff lyric. A week off when a song sat unfinished for too long. None of it quite held, and now there’s a […]
Co-writing: Opportunity or Obligation?
Somewhere along the way, co-writing stopped being one option among many and started being treated as a rite of passage. If you’re a serious songwriter, the thinking goes, you’ll be in writing rooms with other people. If you’re not, you’d better have a good reason. And if your reason sounds anything like “I prefer working […]
How to Find Songwriting Inspiration: 15 Tips to Beat Writer’s Block
Writer’s block looks different once you’ve been writing songs for a while. When you’re starting out, you don’t know enough to be blocked. Later on, you know too much. You can hear the cliche before you write it, spot the weak rhyme before you finish the line, and second-guess a melody before it’s had time […]
The One Songwriting Rule That Works Whether You’re Stuck or in the Flow
“When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!) — then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly — why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would […]
It’s Time To Stop Being Precious About Your Songwriting Process
My phone is full of voice memos. My notebooks are full of lyric fragments, half-finished ideas and possible song titles scrawled at odd hours and my hard drives are full of WIP (works in progress) demos from DAW sessions that may never become finished songs. I never delete any of it, that is not until […]
Why Songwriters Struggle to Finish Songs (And How to Keep the Music Moving)
If you spend any time talking to and hanging out with songwriters, you’ll hear a familiar topic of conversation. “I’ve got hundreds of ideas… but very few finished songs.” This would mean voice memos full of melodies. Notebooks packed with lyric fragments and snippets of half finished chord progressions. This isn’t unusual. In fact, it’s […]
Why Songwriting Drafts Die And How To Bring Them Back To Life
You see, every songwriter has an ideas graveyard. It lives in notebooks, phone notes, voice memos, half-finished DAW sessions, scraps of paper, and old lyric files with names like “new song idea 7” or “verse chorus maybe.” For me, I have a folder called “WIP” which stands for “works in progress” and it’s HUGE. Inside […]