Posts Tagged ‘Articles’

I believe that the scariest songwriting moment in songwriting is the moment before you start. Most of us have voices that play in our heads. Those voices often tell us that the task at hand “can’t be done”. “You aren’t good enough”. “You can’t handle this”…. you know the drill.   It is the rare…

The Horse & Writer Retreat A number of years back I got an invite from one of my favorite country songwriters, Skip Ewing, to go out to Wyoming and share my knowledge of songwriting at a camp for a week. The event was called Horse & Writer. We rode horses during the morning and worked on the craft of…

The chorus is often the most important part of a song.  It’s the piece that (hopefully) people will be walking around singing for years to come.  So, spending a little extra learning to write a better chorus will pay huge dividends.  Here are some things I always try to keep in mind. Make the chorus…

The set-up line is the line just before the title or hook of your song. It is probably the most under-valued yet crucial lyrical line of most songs. Yet, I am constantly reminded in my mentoring sessions of how few writers are aware of this element of a song. Here’s an example of a verse from “The Song…

I’ve enjoyed a 25+ year music business career that has exceeded my imagination by far. I wanted to pass on some of the things I’ve learned in that time period about keeping cuts coming over time. Here are the ways I have turned a couple of cuts into a bunch of cuts: Don’t develop a…

One of the biggest mistakes I see aspiring writers make is that of overlooking their peers. When we are trying to get things going with our writing, too many of us are so busy looking up that we forget to look around. There are people at your level right now that are easily accessible to…

People often ask me, sometimes skeptically, why I almost exclusively co-write instead of writing alone. I have some reasons that I find pretty compelling, so I thought I’d share them. 1) Not many people I know are world-class at melody AND lyric. There are plenty of people who do both, but doing both and excelling…

If I had a dollar for every time someone offered to let me entertain them for free in exchange for some songwriter exposure, I could buy a new car. I’ve had offers from TV shows, wanting me to grant them a license for my song for free so that I could “pad my resume’” and…

After receiving different song critiques of the same song from two different people, I often hear an aspiring writer complain that the critiques contradict each other. For example: the first person critiquing the song likes the second verse, but not the first; the second person, however, likes the first verse, but not the second. Usually, the…

Songwriting skills are like muscles.   The more you use them and challenge them, the stronger they get. Sometimes when I have a few spare minutes, I use these exercises to keep my writing muscles in shape. 1. Choose a song from the music charts and come up with a response to it. For instance,…