Behind every masterpiece, there's a mess - so here's a technique that will help even the worst perfectionists cut loose and make a mess. …
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Getting Naked with John & Yoko
This week I’m honored to be featured as a guest writer on Matt Blick’s excellent blog Beatles Songwriting Academy! The article’s called Getting Naked with John & Yoko. In the interest of science, …
What is a Hook?
A “hook” in songwriting is simply a short phrase or passage that grabs a listener’s attention and sticks in their memory. A hook can be musical, lyrical, or both. In commercial songwriting, strong …
Choose One for Better Songwriting: Put Down Your Guitar, Step Away From the Piano, or Shut Your Mouth
If you’re a songwriting jack-of-all-trades like myself, you may not even think about it anymore—when it’s time to write, you set up your instrument. You warm up your voice. You take it all on at once. …
An Unintentional Songwriting Lesson From Barack Obama
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 …
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Writer’s Block or Building Blocks?
Many of my songwriting friends and students have suffered this dreaded feeling at least once: the feeling of wanting to write a song, but having no lyric ideas at all. Some of you may be suffering …
How to Write Vividly Descriptive Lyrics
photo by Hillary Tozier Have you ever read a line so descriptively vivid and lifelike that you feel like you lived it yourself? Writers spend years of their lives—if not decades—fine-tuning this art …
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Why Songs are Like Dreams: Andrew Bird on Melodies and Songwriting
Check out this great interview with singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird on QTV! “I at some point had to extract myself, my identity from the violin.” I can relate to that. I can’t …
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Archive Revision Roundup #3: Backward Rhyme Schemes and Lonely, Lonely Legos
Welcome to Archive Revision Roundup #3! I hope you all had a great weekend. We’ll kick off the new week by revisiting a few of my favorite posts. Write a song this week, will ya? Songwriting …
Life, Hit me with Whatever: an Interview on Songwriting with Fiona Apple
About her songs: “They’re all kind of pep talks. “Life, hit me with whatever… it’ll go through me, and it’ll come out as something nice.” -Fiona Apple Here’s something rare: an intelligent interview …
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How to Pull off a Great Circle-Back Ending to Your Song
photo by Hillary Tozier Sounds like a species of turtle, eh? Meet the circle-back ending. A circle-back ending is a conclusion that repeats lines of lyric from the very beginning of the song. As the …
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Simple Storytelling Through Song
photo by peasap Focus is important in all writing---especially in songwriting, in which we have such limited time to tell a story, make an impact, or make a point. Choose one set of characters, …