- 5 easy exercises to improve your listening skills
- Hundreds of quotes about music, songwriting, and creativity
- Secret haiku found hidden in the New York Times
- Ever feel like an untalented hack? We should start a club.
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5 Easy Exercises to Improve Your Listening Skills
Whether you’re a musician, a lyricist, or both, your livelihood depends on how deeply and how perceptively you can listen. “We are losing our listening” in this noisy world, says sound expert Julian Treasure, and must tune back into “the quiet, the subtle, the understated”. Listening, after all, is a process of “making meaning from sound”, an idea that touches the very core of songwriting.
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Hundreds of quotes about music, songwriting, and creativity
Derek Sivers, creator of CDBaby, also runs a website called MusicThoughts: a Quiet Place to Think About Music. It’s full of quoted wisdom from famous songwriters, musicians, composers, and more eclectic historical figures. The link above will take you to a random quote — many others await.
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Secret haiku found hidden in the New York Times
Times Haiku is a blog of poems lifted directly from the pages of the New York Times. Jacob Harris, senior software architect at the paper, wrote a program that scans new stories for passages that show haiku potential. The program stores these, human journalists review them, then the best get posted here. Some of these haiku are surprisingly good, and worth analyzing.
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Ever feel like an untalented hack? We should start a club.
For songwriters and other creatives, a certain amount of self-doubt can be helpful — it keeps us from acting arrogant, and it keeps us humble enough to continue learning new things. But far too many songwriters suffer from chronic, debilitating self-doubt. You’d be shocked to know how many experienced, knowledgeable songwriters and performers feel like hopeless hacks on a regular basis — in spite of great work, roaring applause, and award-winning discographies. This chronic doubt is called “Impostor Syndrome”, and it’s something to be prepared for should you ever fall ill with it.
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