Nothing but a polite smattering of claps - a fucking clap smatter! A response so spectacularly underwhelming, it leaves you with nowhere to run.

Meanwhile, another songwriter wipes the floor with a song that sounds like it fell from the sky. WTF!

Where does this leave you? I got three words.

1. Apples
2. Horses
3. Divorce

1. Apples

Comparison, for example apples with oranges, can be a strenuously soul-destroying occupation. It's a right royal joy robber and if there's one thing that little undie-packer Marie Kondo has taught us, it is to do things that spark joy. And music is a place of enormous joy! Think of the most fun place you have in songwriting and go there. Often.

There will always be better songwriters, better songs and better musicians than you. And in turn, you'll be further down the track than countless other folks. Reframe comparison into admiration, a spur to up your own game.

Relish the influences and interactions you have with other songwriters and musos. It's a grand party to be at and you'll learn far more from rubbing shoulders than isolating yourself. Ask other songwriters how and what they go through. Most are happy to share their stories.

Use close listening to your favourite artists to dig deep into subtleties and nuances in their songs because now you have experience of buckling down to write your own, with variable success, you have a stronger appreciation of how much it takes to cut through the noise.

Use selected reference tracks in your recording process to support and extend your decisions. Be influenced by music you love and stretched by practitioners more advanced and experienced than you.

2. Horses.

I was on the same bill in a concert that the Topp Twins were MC'ing, where Linda told the highly excited audience they would be handled like horses. My, how the audience loved it! Being told what to do and how to behave by confident consummate performers - also expert horsewomen in their own right!

Do the same with your songs. Any time you play a song - live or recorded - for an audience, your song either will or won't connect. It's not the audience's fault if it doesn't.

The audience needs to be able to relate to your song, to feel something that you've encapsulated and delivered musically. They need to get it and you need to lead them, like horses, to where the 'it' is.

Finding out how to clarify your ideas and communicate them effectively in song is your job, and if you are not getting the impact you want, then luckily, you - the songwriter, can try other techniques. The onus is on you and your writing. 

So write, write often, write with other people, learn as much as you can about songwriting, and use a feedback loop to improve and make adjustments. 

3. Divorce.

You are not the song. If a person doesn't love - love - love your song, it doesn't mean they hate you. Some songs are strong and some are dogs. Build your catalogue and acknowledge that while your personal experiences and values may be tied up in artistic self expression of songwriting, to an audience songs are theirs and all about them. 

Plenty of songwriters write about characters and mashups of their own and other folks' life events. The balance is the level of specificity of detail to create clear, unique images against the universal emotions and topics of the human condition. Too specific can get bogged down in lyrical minutiae while too universal can often come across as bland or inauthentic. 

The more you get involved in songwriting, the more objective you can become about which songs land and less defeated by the ones that don't.  Remember, it's a highly asymmetrical business with gazillions of misses to a hit single, so volume is key.

Thanks so much for all your questions and queries. Keep them coming and I'll do my level best to answer.

Talk more soon
Charlotte

ps if you want to take your songwriting to the Next Level, please join us at the Next Level Songwriting Retreat this summer in beautiful Tahora. There are only five places left!!

pps if you struggle with singing or can't play for peanuts, don't let that stop you writing a song. Read this.

​

The consequence of being stuck in that bog is stasis. All that energising momentum lost.

Luckily in the same interview, Elliott hands you the secret sauce - the very thing he was great at,  which was creating interesting, heartfelt and unique sounding songs. Not talking about it  - strangely involving though he could be, but doing it and what he spent the most flying hours on was playing guitar and piano, singing, writing and recording music and schlepping it. 

While I don't advocate his model of self care, his suggested ethos of unleashing your imagination, listening to what it has to say and turning that into your own big beautiful songs makes a great deal of sense to me.

For those of you all bogged down, come back to fundamentals - play a lot, write a lot and make the strongest set you can.

Or take one step towards that.

Talk more soon
Charlotte Yates  
​ps application are now open for the Next Level Songwriting Retreat Jan 22-25 2001

But like any rule of pop music, there are always exceptions and when the rule of common time is challenged, it makes the song stand out instantly. There are two main ways of doing this – one is to set the time signature of your song in an unusual (for pop) time signature like Pink Floyd’s Money which ticks along in a groovily unsettling 7/4.

The other way is to change part of the song into another time signature for a short while and that’s what I want to point out today. This is like changing the key of the song – it’s just as attention grabbing for the audience - and it also has a great musical theory handle. It’s called metric modulation when the songwriter changes the metre or ‘beat' of the song from one time signature to another within the song.
 
You’ll be completely aware of this when it happens -  it will literally make you move differently and a cracker example of it is in Hozier’s Take Me To Church.
 
The song starts off in a lilting 3/4 for the verse but when it gets to the line
                     
                          We were born sick – You heard them say it, 

we jumped into one bar of 4/4 before switching or modulating back to 3/4 for the rest of the verse.
 
Further metric modulation happens at the chorus when the song rocks out in pop’s standardly glorious 4/4.
 
Now why do this mucking with the timing? Well, it’s a great lever to pull because it grabs the audience by the scruff of the neck and says listen to this! That element of surprise can highlight a particular lyric line (which is what happens in the verse) or it can create real contrast between sections (which is what happens when we reach the song’s chorus).
 
Another example is in Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, where she jumps from 4/4 to a bar of 2/4 on the verse lyric 

                                             I hated you, I loved you too, 

which snaps us to attention.
 
And in the chorus we jump bar by bar almost imperceptibly from 4/4 to 3/4 to 2/4 to 3/4 underneath the lyrics
 
                                       Heathcliff It’s me I’m Cathy I’ve come home
                                         and I’m so cold let me in your window.
​

Development is about choosing ideas, tune fragments, snatches of lyrics, titles and techniques from your ideas file and figuring out how to use them, how to weld them into new songs, or a decent sized song-like chunk anyway!

Development involves decision. It involves your musical tastes and personal preferences – both artistic and stylistic. To follow one idea, you wind up discarding others. What you decide to do on one day won’t necessarily be what you choose the next. That’s the beauty of a regular practice.

But here’s the exciting part - what you do with the basic ingredients – all those song ideas and triggers that you’ve gathered  - will be utterly unique and completely individual. No one else can write a song exactly like you. There is no template!

Development is the process of moving from an idea to a draft or more likely a series of drafts. The more often you do this, the more intuitive it becomes.  Remember the end result may appear effortless, simple and elegant – but appearances can deceive!

Things can get pretty messy in development! And they should do – you’re testing new connections, and newsflash – they won’t always work. You should expect plenty of dead ends. So don’t get too attached to your first or any idea. They may not ‘work’ or be the best fit for the song. You have to be able to let things go and come up with a different approach, preferably multiple approaches. Give yourself options.

Assessing what works or not is initially your decision. When you’re in the thick of it, keep recording what you’re doing, saving all drafts on your phone or Save Copy As in your DAW or on your laptop. Write stuff down so you can mix and match. It’s easy to forget small variations that may come into play further down the track. Don't worry if what you produce isn't perfect.  You’re building right now.  Refinement comes later.

Some of the things you’re looking for: do things stick? Does a piece of music catch your ear or a couple of lines stand out in your journal? Does something hit you in the eye from the list of titles you’ve kept? Run with that and free write as long as you can.
​
Does the chord progression you’ve started feel really good to you? Can you sing something - anything - over top of it? Can you sing three different things over top of it?  Record them and then start adding lyrics.
Can you take the linear melody you’ve started with and try some skips or a leap up or down and see where that goes? Vary the rhythm a little or lot and record that. Can you change a couple of notes? It may not seem like much, but small motifs or groups of notes (2 – 8) are the raw material of great melody.

Lyrically, are you saying what you want to say? Are there five other ways you could do that? One of these will be ‘better’ than the others. So the more the merrier. Are you being the observer in the song or should you be the subject of your story? Try both approaches and record them. 

One of my clients recently sent three options per line for a song. One line looked unusual on paper but was very difficult to sing, and hard to make out. Even though he loved what he had written, it didn’t fit with what words actually need to do in a song, which is to be sung. Decision made.

Remember you are also developing several things simultaneously. There’s interplay between rhythm and melody, harmony and melody, melody and lyrics, verse and chorus. Which is partly why pieces like this can come across a bit ‘here’s the magic formula’. Trying to ‘explain songwriting’ as a purely sequential process isn’t the point. Nothing could be further from the truth. Your creative brain doesn’t travel in a straight line! Go for trying as many things as you can.

In one of my own collaborations, we discussed how my first lines weren’t hitting the spot. They were ok. Just ok. But rather than being asked to write them again, my songwriting partner said ‘Write 10 verses’.  What a breath of fresh air!

Wishing everyone the best of health during lockdown
Talk more soon
Charlotte Yates

​

 
I can always tell when my partner has been writing a short story because something in the house has been tidied to a freakish level. Today, the linen cupboard is so ordered I’m too scared to put away a single pillowslip for fear of misfiling, so I’ll just leave this small pile of folded laundry here to discuss later….! This is how I know something’s a-brewing on her laptop.
 
But is it really procrastinating when you suddenly see things you have to do rather than knuckling down to the scary blank page? Or is it part of a ritual – a preparation phase that you knowingly use to mull ideas over or nut out the ‘gnarly bits’ in a song?
 
Turns out that many famous writers of all genres have favourite rituals they use and techniques they employ to spur them on. Some are extraordinarily elaborate – author James Clear has an assistant reset and withhold all social media passwords until he finishes a scheduled writing session, rendering him incapable of a single, sneaky scroll. He’s very big on choice architecture.
 
Others are very simple  - Ernest Hemingway stood while he wrote, working from dawn until midday when he visited his local bar to get smashed. His mantra while writing The Old Man and The Sea was ‘done at noon, drunk by three’.
 
Jerry Seinfeld’s famous strategy to write daily was to put a large red X on a wall calendar for every day he wrote jokes. Eventually, there were multiple X’s in a row lining up like links in a chain.  His mantra was ‘don’t break the chain’. Note nothing about whether the jokes were any good – just that he was writing daily and this increases the probability of the jokes getting better! Which brings me to the next point.
 
Creativity is all about probability. There are no guarantees that you’ll write a good chorus or a brilliant melody in a particular session. Your session is all about trying things out and exploring your ideas and connections. Which is why it can be daunting and contributes to you procrastinating. The outcome is always uncertain, which is why doing ‘must do’ tasks – those which have a determinable end result - can be very comforting, and actually supports your creative process.  If you mow the lawns, the result will be a mown lawn. If you tidy the linen cupboard, you’ll be able to find the sheets and towels.

But if you sit down to write a song, you can’t predict what the song will be or even when it will be finished. Songwriting is not a linear journey. It’s generally full of twists, turns and cul-de-sacs before you wind up with something that you’re happy with. No wonder you’re procrastinating!
 
The answer is do or get whatever it takes for you to show up and increase that probability of writing a good or even a great song. Whatever ritual you need, whatever support structure works for you, grab it with both hands and hold it close! If you’re not sure, take time to explore what works best for you, what feels ‘right’ and develop your own creative process. It will be as individual and unique as the songs you write.
 
Today, I’m starting a new technique in my own songwriting by using a series of song prompts from Ed Bell, a songwriter and songwriting coach whose blogs and articles I’ve enjoyed reading. He’s just released a couple of new books – The 30-Day Speed Songwriting Challenge & The 30-Day Music Writing Challenge – and I’m going to quietly work through them to see what falls out. And I’m telling you to keep myself accountable! See you on the other side!


Best wishes to everyone for the summer and I hope you have a great Christmas and a very Happy New Year, 

Talk more soon

Charlotte