How To Organize Your Lyric Sheets & Chord Charts
I used to be lazy about keeping track of the songs I’d written. When I…
Don’t Worry About The Rhyme – At First
The way I often write lyrics that rhyme – and I don’t think this is…
How To Find The Lyric That Points The Way
Tonight in a songwriting workshop I was working with a writer and something came up…
Finding the Angle to Your Chorus
Often the trickiest part of writing a song is finding what I call the ‘angle’…
Consume Or Create – Our Choice
Our opportunities to consume grow every day. There’s stuff – things we spend money on.…
The Secret Ingredient in a Hit Song
We take in songs on different levels. One is with our heads. We like or…
The Two Stages of Writing A Song
There are as many songwriting processes as there are songwriters, and there’s certainly no ‘right’…
How To Come Up With A Great Intro
Catchy. You want your Intro to catch people, to grab them, to pique their interest.…
Two Ways Out Of A Songwriting Slump
I’ve never acknowledged to myself that I have ‘writer’s block’. So if I’ve ever had…
How To Change Keys Without Modulating
‘I Can’t Tell You Why’ is a classic song written by Timothy B. Schmit, Glenn…
The Right Line In The Wrong Place
A lyric might tell a specific story, describe a situation, paint a picture, create a…
A Look Backward Can Move You Forward
For me, what has always been most important is the next song. I tried my…
The Old-School Rhymes of Bob Dylan
It was a coincidence that, just weeks after writing a post about how finding an…
Pedaling the Bass
When chords change and the bass note stays the same under the moving chords, that’s…
Who, Me…? Use A Rhyming Dictionary??
I never liked the idea of using a rhyming dictionary. Occasionally, when in a song…
Don’t Worry About Making It Good. Make It Better.
At various times most of us writers worry about whether what we’re working on is…
The Inspiration… and the Carpentry
You get an idea – let’s say it’s an idea for the design of a…
Details and Trade-Offs
The big ideas in a song are most important – the Chorus, the Hook, the…
Just A Simple Blues Melody?
Melodies are fascinating. Probably the most mysterious – and often under-explored, by us writers –…
Is There A Chorus Beyond Your Chorus?
Someone sent me a link to a recent, live version of El DeBarge singing his…
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