Songwriting tips, techniques, and ideas
Every songwriting book I’ve ever read recommends that songwriters keep an idea file, which is simply a notebook or folder full of lyric ideas and loose ends. For years, I’ve dutifully kept such a …
Continue Reading about Is Your Notebook of Song Ideas Holding You Back? →
I didn’t think I even liked Auto-Tune, the studio production trick used to create robotic-sounding voice textures on club and dance tracks. Then I found this fateful video clip on YouTube that uses …
Continue Reading about An Unintentional Songwriting Lesson From Barack Obama →
Dedicated songwriters have a lot of craft to learn. Rhyme schemes, lifelike description, structure… every song poses unique challenges. It’s a lot of fun to rough out a lyric with scruffy charm and …
Continue Reading about Stepping Back: an Introduction to Rewriting Songs →
For years I’ve noticed a murky distinction in some songwriting books—drawn between commercial and non-commercial songwriting. The commercial label is used to describe any song that’s well-crafted and …
Continue Reading about Commercial vs. Non-Commercial Songwriting →
Psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis got curious about what happens in our brains while we’re reading. …the scientists used a brain scanner to see what regions lit up during the reading …
This week I’ve been singing the praises of object writing, a creative writing exercise that I learned from the book Writing Better Lyrics by Berklee professor Pat Pattison. I’ve outlined the …