How to Come up with 100 New Song Ideas
Here’s an important truth about coming up with new song ideas: you should write about what interests and inspires you, not what some internet listicle tells you to. So if you were expecting a 100-item list, I’m sorry to deflate your dirigible. Instead, I’m going...
Why You Should Study The Classics
When I was 17, I ordered a copy of Beethoven’s Complete String Quartets from Amazon. Amazon was pretty new back then, and I remember opening the packaging and pulling out this thick blue book and thinking how cool it was to own a big chunk of history. It was the first...
Idea, Style, Hook: The Holy Trinity of Songwriting
They say the best things come in threes: The Hanson brothers. The Little Shop of Horrors backup singers. The examples in this paragraph. And songwriting has its own Holy Trinity too: idea, style and hook. I’ll explain, but first let’s be clear on what these three...
Prosody in Songwriting 101
Life is full of interesting questions. Why is the sky blue? Can Russian Twitter bots really swing an election? And where do broken hearts go, Whitney? Where? But today, let’s try answering something more practical: What is prosody? And why should you spend the next...