Career Songwriter

Last week I began a series called ‘While You Are Writing’, in which I offer up a few business and creative activities to grow your songwriting career. Here are a few more suggestions, and feel free to add in your own this week as opportunities present themselves.

Business: Buy one new record in the genre of music in which you write. Find a quiet place and listen to the record in its entirety. Read the label notes and familiarize yourself with the songwriters. Find 30 minutes and research those writers on the internet and find out what other songs they’ve recorded. Read any other biographical information you can on those writers, such as how they got started and the publishers or labels to which they were signed.

Craft: Try writing some simple choruses, such as 4-line or 6-line, repeating the title in the first, middle, and/or last line. Don’t concern yourself with verse sections just yet, but work from some of the title ideas you sifted from your newspaper/magazine/book resources from last week. Try to write 2 or 3 choruses, music and lyric. Record a rough work tape of each as a simple guitar/vocal or piano/vocal.