Songwriting

Are you a REAL songwriter? I can’t count the number of times someone has said to me “I’m a songwriter – well not a really, because I haven’t had any cuts.” Believe me; I felt the same way early in my career. Have you felt like you needed to somehow qualify or justify yourself in…

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 you try to…

There’s a number of common songwriting errors that complicate the lyric and confuse the listener. If you want to leave your audience scratching their heads (not recommended), try these techniques for songwriting confusion. Switch your pronouns around. Include several female characters in your song and then use the pronouns “she” or “her”. This gets them…

Following your dreams… When I was 19 years old, I decided to leave my small Alabama hometown and strike out on a journey to the Big Apple: New York City. It took a combination of naivety and hard-headedness, I suppose. After all, I didn’t know anyone in New York City, and only had a grand…

The heart of SongTown is helping you write YOUR best song. At the end of the day, that’s all any mentor or guide can do for you. I can connect you with many of the top people in the business, but if you don’t have a GREAT song, it’s not going to help you. If…

We get lots of music business questions in SongTown and how publishers and songwriters split royalties is a common one. So, I thought I’d answer it in today’s post. The business side of music is not as complicated as it seems.  Here are the basics of writer/publisher deals and how money is split. There are…

“I’ve got nothing to write a song about today.” I remember standing outside Darius Rucker’s tour bus saying these words over the phone to a friend. She had just asked me what I was going to write with Darius that day. Here I was outside Chicago, having flown there to meet up with the tour,…

Co-Writing songs is a lot like dating. It takes work to find and develop good co-writing relationships. And, not every date is going to work out. So, you keep kissing frogs until you find a prince, metaphorically speaking. If you treat songwriting relationships like REAL relationships, you can avoid some of these mistakes that I’ve…

Want to become a Master “Songwriting” Yoda? Here are my top 5 tips! 1.Believe As creative people, we tend to be self-doubters. It’s what drives us to look inward, to constantly question life around us, and, if channeled properly, will drive us to write great songs. It’s perfectly natural to struggle with believing in ourselves…

I remember sitting in my small, cramped writing studio in Nashville 10+ years ago chasing this crazy dream of songwriting… One day I was co-writing with my two best friends and co-writers, Sonny LeMaire and Shane Minor. We’d been writing together for two years, mostly because we loved hanging out with each other and creating…