Career Songwriter

Songwriting Worksheets

Brainstorming ideas for our songs can be an overwhelming process, knowing where to start, how to organize all our ideas, and where to stop. Creating a worksheet is one great way to lay our ideas out on paper in a fashion that is simple to draw from later, but there is a software, called ‘The Brain,’ that I recently discovered that may make this process even easier.

A songwriter worksheet may look like this:

Song Title: “Waiting Down the Road”

My first step is to brainstorm on each substantial word of the title.

Road – asphalt, tires, drive, stretch, heat, straight, curved, dip, pothole, engine, sputter, oil, gas, truck-stop, flat, rubber…..

Waiting - time, pass, eventual, distance, illusion, patience, hope, determination, oasis, shiver, miles, fade, speed….

It’s okay to go off on tangents as I think of my words. They may be useful to me, or they may spark rhyme pairs and content ideas that become useful later on.

The next step is to brainstorm for some rhyme pairs for these new word ideas.

Road; soap, go, show, load, glow, cold, snow…
Asphalt; big haul, track, brick wall, fast…
Tires; wire, drive, fly, pry, hour, lure…
Illusion; confusion, solution, fusion, proven, knew him

and so on…

As I consider my outline, I can guide my rhyme ideas in those directions. Notice I avoided more cliché rhymes like ‘fire’ and ‘desire’, trying to go beyond the obvious to grab some really original content.

That’s all there is to it. Just spend a half hour and you’ll find your worksheet growing to a size big enough for a whole song.

‘The Brain’ is a process that visualizes our associated information instead of just listing it in paragraph form or column form. It just might spark some new ideas and clues to the organization of those ideas.

It’s pretty neat, and if you want to try it out, you can download it for free for 30 days. Just go to: http://www.thebrain.com/#-47

Have fun!

Andrea