Career Songwriter

Keeping the ideas fresh and flowing often requires a lot of flexibility. It’s easy to suddenly find ourselves in a dead space, a plateau where all the shimmer is gone from our ideas. When this happens to me, I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve that will keep the pen in my hand and the spring in my creativity. I’d like to share a few of those ideas with you now, in hopes you may be able to jump-start your engines next time you stall as well.

Whether you write music first, words first, or both at the same time, it’s a good idea to change up your process and explore other possibilities. I’m not talking about the style of music or genre of lyric you write, but rather how you go about writing it. Always starting with lyric can lead us in a pattern where all our phrases, rhythms, and rhyme schemes follow the same patterns. The lyric also has the power to steer the musical tempo and style, and so the result can be streams of songs that either don’t match the subtleties in our musical moods, or all tend to sound basically the same.

If you often start with lyrics, try setting words aside awhile. Sit at the piano or with your guitar and just let your musicality take over. Something I like to do is write 8 or 10 different motifs, just little mini-sections of 4 or 8 bars of melody and harmony that I think are catchy. I record each one as I sit there, and once the recording is done, about 15 seconds, I move onto another idea. I don’t allow my editor to interfere too much and I’m not afraid to record bad ideas. Later in the week I dump all my recordings onto my computer and listen. I’ll pick out all the ones I think could make a good verse foundation or chorus idea, and stash it in a folder labeled “New Music 6-22-08.” I may even grab one random idea and consider it a verse, putting it together with another random idea as a chorus, both very catchy and ready to inspire great lyrics. Sometimes the pairing works, sometimes it doesn’t. The point for me is that I’m trying things without any presumptions or concern for making mistakes. I may go through this process each day for a week, letting the music clips stack up until I feel ready to sift through them. When I finally do, it’s like opening little Christmas presents – I’ve forgotten what’s wrapped within each music file and I listen with much more objective ears, responding as the listener might to my song.

In my experience, many songwriters are at least additionally, but often first and foremost performers. Having a bunch of music clips lying around isn’t exact a novel idea. So in this case, lyrics are the issue and we need a process for finishing songs that are gathering dust without words. What I like to do in this case involves a two-pronged attack. First, I focus on a musical idea that I feel is very strong. I record it – just a rough one minute job will do. Then I sit with my eyes closed and earphones on and listen to the track, poised in front of a word document ready to jot down any images, words, phrases, emotions, etc. that the recording sparks. As I type, I pay special attention to the mood of the music. I allow myself to write whatever comes to mind, free of my editor and focused on sensebound descriptions. This process of writing is called ‘Destination Writing,’ and I teach it in my Commercial Songwriting Techniques class. From my paragraph of rambling images and thoughts, I harvest the phrases and words that seem to plug into my melody, building around them always from the destination writing.

Sometimes we get mired in perfecting each section as we write. This can land us in a hole of lots of first verses and choruses, but no back halves of songs. To this problem, I take a bold leap and try using my first verse as the second verse. Seeing the song from this new angle enables new ideas to flow. I write a first verse setting the ‘who’, ‘when,’ and ‘where’ clearly, creating the foundation of the storyline. Again, to do this, give your editor the day off. You’ll need guts to leave behind old ways, but trust me, it’s worth the effort.

Every few months it can be a great idea to change up our process. Not only do we realize greater depths of skill, but we consistently knock down the tower of hesitation that keeps us bound within our typical melodic, harmonic, and lyrical styles.