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The 10 Co-Writing Commandments For Songwriters (Revised for 2021)
Co-writing: The art of sharing your heartfelt ideas with another person and trusting the two of you will create songwriting magic. This can be tremendously rewarding and often frustrating. But there are some guidelines to make this experience more often than not a great one. If Moses came down from the mountain with a tablet for his top co-writing commandments perhaps...
The Music Lab: Verses Are The New Chorus
One of the most noticeable style shifts in songwriting over the last few years is the emergence of chorus-like hooks in verses. For the longest time, if you had a memorable and “hit” sing-a-long chorus you were golden. Your chances of finding an audience for your songs were pretty good. Even if you were the Beatles, Garth Brooks, Van Halen, or...
Why You Should Be Writing More Conversational Lyrics
One of the questions I get most often when I mentor songwriters is “Why does everyone tell me I need to write more conversational lyrics?” While there is no “one size fits all” answer to how your lyrics “should” be written, there is a reason that people give you that advice. When I’m having that discussion with people, they invariably...
Melody Writers: Do You Have Your Wind-up Working?
What’s one songwriting component that separates the promising newbie songwriter from the seasoned pro? How much punch the chorus packs. Specifically, when the chorus hits, does it impact the listener? This is one of the main things I work on with writers in my SongTown Melody MasterClasses. Often their choruses show up un-announced and begin without the listener even knowing they’re...
Free The Angel: Supporting Your Song’s Big Idea
There is a famous quote by Michelangelo that says “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” That is a beautiful description of what songwriters must learn to do. We get a song's big idea and we see the “angel” inside it. So we carve and carve until the whole world can see...
How Do I Submit Songs As A Songwriter To The Music Business? (Updated- 2021)
There seems to be a lot of confusion out there over the question "As a songwriter, how do I submit songs to the music business?" The truth of the matter is that there is no one way to "submit" songs to the music business. When you simplify the "song submission" idea, there are basically three categories of song submissions that...