Author: Marty Dodson

  I'm a very goal oriented person. I need to see the end goal so that I can figure out how to get there. I like to break down my big goals into bite sized pieces and check things off my list. There are so many elements of getting a song recorded...

  Almost all of the people I write with are trying to get their songs recorded and make a living by doing so.  It is easy to get so caught up in the pursuit of something commercial that I lose sight of the reasons I started writing songs in the first...

  I've been a professional songwriter for more than 20 years.  In that time, I've learned a lot by making lots of mistakes.  Here are some tips that can help you learn to write better songs WITHOUT making the same mistakes I made. Write From Your Heart - Edit With Your Head If...

  I believe that it’s never too late to be what you might have been. I was in my mid thirties when I started trying to write professionally. A friend of mine just landed a starring role (Her first) in a movie with some HUGE actors at age 49. I...

  Verb tenses changing, or going back and forth in a weird way.  This is one of the mistakes I see most often when critiquing song lyrics. Switching between past, present and future can really mess your lyric up if you are not super clear about what is going on. Let someone...

Letting Go... Last week when we were trying to go to Spain, my wife and I got to the airport at 9:45 AM. Our flight was supposed to leave at 12:20. We got a little snack and waited at our gate. Then, the trouble started. They kept delaying our flight...

I write with a number of young songwriters and I can’t count the times that I have referenced an older song (80’s or 90’s) and discovered that they had never heard the song and in many cases, had never heard of the artist either. This isn’t shocking to me –...

  Your songwriting rhyme scheme helps the listener keep up with where they are in the song. You want to keep the rhyme scheme consistent across all of the verses and consistent across all of the choruses if the choruses change. Not doing so makes the listener feel unsettled. Your hook or title...

A couple of weeks ago in New York City, I found myself doing some things I never dreamed of doing. In fact, I never set out to do them. They just needed to be done and I was the only one in the room who had the skill set to...

  Now that a number of SongTownians are getting songs pitched and some of them are being put on 'hold', I wanted to talk about what a hold means and how to act when you get one. First of all - what is a hold? A hold is when an artist or...