by Ed Bell | May 24, 2018 | Inspiration, Lyric Tools, Music Tools
Songs prompts, oh, song prompts. If I’m honest, I have mixed feelings. I don’t really do writing by numbers. I get nervous around anything for songwriters that sounds like spoon-feeding. And I think the most important thing a songwriter – well, anyone –...
by Ed Bell | Jan 15, 2018 | Lyric Tools, Music Tools
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...
by Ed Bell | Jan 11, 2018 | Music Tools, The Creative Habit
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...
by Ed Bell | Nov 22, 2017 | Lyric Tools, Music Tools
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...
by Ed Bell | Nov 7, 2017 | Lyric Tools, Music Tools
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...
by Ed Bell | Oct 4, 2017 | Inspiration, Lyric Tools, Music Tools
One of the most exciting things about creating new things is that there are lots of ways of creating new things. As I talk about in The Art of Songwriting, a song is made up bit by bit and piece by piece. It doesn’t really matter which bit you start with. It doesn’t...
