Song Doctor Blog
Read about how to write better songs
 Repetition is endemic in contemporary song. Not only is it an important feature, but in popular music, it's a defining feature. It totally dominates rhythmic arrangements, but it's also rife in harmony with repeating chord progressions, melody with it's motifs and phrases and song form (verse-chorus) before we even take a good look at the lyrics. Yet this very clear and present device can lead to disparaging comments by audiences and musicians alike, where repetition is confused with banality, a lack of originality or even juvenilia. To counter this, consider how repetition does indeed bring joy to songwriters and listeners both, and contemplate how you can work it more effectively. Firstly, music and the capacity to appreciate or create it is present in every single human cultural group. It's part of us. As humans, we are the ONLY species to entrain. That means we can synchronise to a rhythmic source outside the body. We can clap or nod our heads or march or dance to repeated, evenly spaced beats. We join in. And if you change the tempo, we can (mostly!) lock in and go faster or slower. And we do this from a really young age. We like it. Secondly, we can synchronise single discrete pitches (notes) into chords by harmonising our voices. Oof! We like that too. Rather than banal, harmony and synchronicity - two forms of repetition - are highly evolved in humans. Thirdly, all human cultures have developed certain music making tools - instruments - from wooden drums to reed pipes, Moog synthesisers to hurdy-gurdys, with which we make sequences or patterns of melody and repeat them. Repeating rhythm, harmony and melody with our voices, our bodies and our cool tools has evolved - it's been selected for. You can be perceived to be technically 'shite at music' but still appreciate all these things, simply because you are a human. Fast forward to current songwriting practice and the balance of high level repetition with variation and release is a multi-billion dollar industry. Not only are the individual components of songs repeated, but the more popular the song is with an audience, the more they want it repeated. Songwriters who can use repetition deftly not only enhance memorability of a song, but can supply nuanced expression, to highlight and intensify certain emotions, from disenchantment to erotic fervour. There's joy in repetition indeed. From simply repeating a word for rhetorical importance, often the title, to making sure the words of repeated chorus still make sense after the second verse has shoved the song's plot along, repetition is constantly contributing to connecting with listeners. From repeated vocal hooks, like David Bowie's stuttering 'ch-ch-ch - changes' or David Byrne's 'fa-fa-fa-fa' syllable repeats in 'Pyschokiller' to Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine's 'I know I know I know I know...' repeat 26 times, repetition can really and truly make a descriptive point! How can you use layers of repetition to give your songwriting more impact? Lemme know. Talk soon Charlotte  ps We had a great time at the NEXT LEVEL Songwriting Retreat in Tahora over the weekend. Thanks to all the songwriters that came and gave it their all: Juliet McLean, Nick Feint, Farley Hokopaura,Tim Jardine, Hanne Jøstensen, Nycki Proctor, Rachel McAlpine, PH Lim, me and Nancy Fulford. Love your work! Thanks to Debb Stewart, Kerry Turner and their mate, Alix for the lovely catering and cossetting at 3 Bullock Farm, Tahora.
The next event will be a FIRST LEVEL Songwriting Retreat over Labour Weekend, 22-25 October 2021. And you can book now! pps Songwriting School, my online songwriting weekly tuition session, is on it's way next month! Get into it here.  Illustrations by Leanne Shapton The free filesharing platform WeTransfer runs a series of creativity profiles and while waiting for an upload, I spied a story from resident New York illustrator Leanne Shapton. Stuck in COVID apartment duress with her daughter, this 46 yr old woman outlined her transition from cooking illiteracy to not-so-bad-more -than-getting-by-preparer-of-food-for-the-whānau in her essay/exhibit, I Could Drink A Case of You: A Joni Mitchell Grocery List. Initially cringingly bad at cooking even the basics, Leanne catalogues her culinary progress and memories alongside lyrics from albums devoured during lockdown and presents a charming series of illustrations of Mitchell's lyrics that specifically mention food or drink. There's a ton and in terms of highlighting sensebound writing, you couldn't really get a better archive. You can taste and smell these words from 'Singapore slings' to 'muffin buns and berries by the steamy kitchen window'. Truly food for thought! Which brings me to the (almost related) topic of feedback.! I frequently come across songwriters wondering how to get it or how to avoid it or how to recover from the results of feedback that may be well meaning but has effectively crush their will to live.  In this article for Bandzoogle, I cover why it is important to utilize feedback as part of your songwriting took kit, but discuss how to curate a feedback loop that's relevant to your career stage. Needs vary wildly depending on where you are in the songwriting ecology. You can learn to be strategic about developing a supportive and open feedback loop and save yourself a lot of grief! Finally, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2021 if not before. with very best wishes Charlotte Yates ps the Next Level Songwriting Retreat @Tahora 22-25 January has sold out. However, you're welcome to contact me about going on the wait list. It's gonna be a great start to 2021! pps Songwriting School is coming soon!! 
When you start to write your own songs, you may think that because songwriters have been using many of the same words in so many songs, there’s no room at the table for anyone else. Important words - especially those simple, clear, really useful ones - like love, you, I, us, me, heart, always, eyes, night feel well thrashed. How on earth do you make your mark? Strategy Two is to use words differently. There are many ways to do this but here's three. 1. Context How you set common conversational phrases up in a lyric can make them virtually pop. The lyric immediately before or after becomes almost a wrap-around balance of familiar vs. surprise. Exhibit A - Fiona Apple In her song Shameika, the first line sounds utterly conversational and normal usage but it's a great set up for the second line where the lyric come alive with the unexpected postpositive adjective (invisible) and an internal rhyme (teeth with streets). Both lines scan exactly the same, rocking along at 4 dactyls apiece. I used to walk down the streets on my way to school Grinding my teeth to the rhythm invisible Exhibit B - Prince The phrase 'moon-June lyrics' is a dig at the Tin Pan Alley perfect rhyme pair that stumped songwriters resort to. But it depends on the context. Here's Prince using it in Sign O' the Times and you barely notice because the set up is so deft. Sister killed her baby 'cause she couldn't afford to feed it And we're sending people to the moon September my cousin tried reefer for the very first time Now he's doing horse - it's June. 2. Imagery The power of metaphor can revitalise words you need to use. Finding new ways to describe love is always a challenge! Exhibit C - Lori McKenna Here Lori McKenna creates a pretty picture in her song Rocket Science. Love is rocket science What comes up it must come down In burning pieces on the ground We watch it fall Maybe love is rocket science after all. Exhibit D - The Weeknd And The Weeknd is so struck he can't feel his face in this memorable love twist, Can't Feel My Face I can't feel my face when I'm with you But I love it, but I love it, oh I can't feel my face when I'm with you But I love it, but I love it, oh 3. Rhythm Singing and speech have a great deal in common but melody allows the extension, compression and dilation of words to shift emphasis and underline emotional impact. Singers spend lungfuls of time on vowels and luckily 90% of contemporary songs are in the first person, so that's a lot of chances to sing I! Exhibit E - Whitney Houston with Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You. Greatest vowel allocation rhythm presentation ever!
Talk soon,
Charlotte ps Only one spot left on the Next Level Songwriting Retreat 22-25 January in Tahora. Come get busy!  One problem that can confront songwriters is the balance between simplicity and originality.
Simplicity is fundamental for lyricists. Simple words tell it straight. You, me, I, love, we, good, hot, skin, heart, girl, lips, kiss, time, gone, sad bad The words are unequivocal, clearly understood by most folks who speak the language the songwriters do. They're easy to sing. They cut to the heart of the matter. What could be simpler than I will always love you, help! or let it be? The issue is that songwriters have been using the same words in so many songs, it can feel like there’s no room at the simple table for anyone else. There are two strategies that songwriters have to get around this (either consciously or intuitively): use different words or use words differently. And yes, I’m hugely simplifying things here, but it might be a helpful framework when you’re stuck down the well. Strategy One is: Use Different Words. The reason this can catapult your songs into the realm of unexpected and delighted surprise is that stretching your vocabulary carves up conceptual space more precisely according to linguist Geoffrey Nunberg. It can also push you into using words that are more specific and relevant in particular situations your lyric describes. Therefore, it can make your song more authentic. It can mean Prince using Corvette instead of car. Or rather than Bob Dylan saying jobs, he says Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters’ wives. Or Eminem on pushback, You think I give a damn about a Grammy Half of you critics can't even stomach me, let alone stand me Different doesn’t necessarily mean difficult. Changing just one word in a song can be the difference between raw or wild - both could be useful but one might work better. It can be adding an adjective like yellow dress, leather jacket, Venetian mask, Spanish leather. However, it can also mean atmosphere instead of air or oxygen instead of air. The syllable count goes up but that might not be a bad thing. It might make your song fresh as mint sauce on a roast lamb! The tactic here is making friends with your online thesaurus. Full of visual prompts, it can shower your frontal cortex with words you hadn’t considered - all good song fodder. Sure, stay local to stay vocal, but if you’re feeling your songs are cheesy or that it’s all been said before, sharpen your chisel and try some synonyms. Thanks so much for all your feedback and queries. Keep 'em coming! Talk more soon, Charlotte ps to level up your songwriting, come to the Next Level Songwriting Retreat I'm presenting 22-25 January in Tahora. We have just two places left. Jump in! pps thesongfoundry.com's Ed Bell's just released a very practical book you may find helpful called How to Write A Song (Even If You've Never Written One Before and You Think You Suck).
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. Today's blog post is in answer to a reader's question. She wondered whether to "include interesting jazz chords" in her songs, but worried it would limit the number of capable musicians available to play them. Or should she "simplify them?" The chords - not the musicians!  I think there's no particularly right or wrong answer here, but I would like to offer two framework to think this through.
This first is who are you writing your songs for? If you already have a significant audience who have enjoyed your previous work live, online or on air, then there's an level of expectation on the style of music you'll produce. Established artists will very often moonlight or do side projects, but their audience will very often follow them into another genre because the relationship between audience and artist is already well formed. Julia Deans singing opera in the Hawke's Bay earlier this year did not hurt her long held career as a rock chick, and neither is Troy Kingi going to suffer by recording his 'Folk Album' currently. He has enough sales and awards to warrant experimenting further down his stated path of ten albums in ten genres. But if you have no label or long term audience to attend to, then my advice is write what you want to play. If you love ska, then eat it up with an upbeat! Your commitment to the songs will be stronger, your process more productive, your chops more sound and your enjoyment will be infectious. An audience feels that and so will other musicians. Musicians don't just want to play the best paid gigs - although how nice a thought is that! Musicians want to play - that is connecting with other true 'soldiers of song' - in that fine, fine time on stage in front of a live audience. It's different from streaming live, different from rehearsal and from recording. If the quality of songs and performance is high, it doesn't matter what the genre is - it's the bus you wanna be on! If you love playing 'jazz chords', use them write great songs you're proud of. Then enthusiastically seek out musicians to help play and perform them. Preferably, play with people who are better musicians than you - it ups your game and will encourage you to write even stronger songs. (On a personal note, I'm usually now the least fluent musician technically when I play live in an ensemble. It makes me work harder to keep up, and I utterly look forward to those bigger shows!) The second framework to consider is how do the chords you choose serve the song? Are they providing enough harmonic support for your melody to take shape within the verse-chorus structure? Is the harmony operating as infrastructure to the lyric? Is there enough accessibility, yet some welcome surprise that keeps us hooked into the vibe, the story, the message of your song? You can write terrific songs with only one chord while at the other extreme you sink the entire ship in a mass of fusion confusion that loses the listener by the end of the intro. There are also certain conventions and signifiers that indicate roughly what genre your songs sits in. Using chords extensions and non-diatonic chords for more complex harmony is considered part of the jazz grab bag, but pop music is a magpie's lair and plenty of current artists from Adele to Khalid are working wonders incorporating diminished chords, major sevenths, minor ninths and thirteenths into their hits. And it comes across as effortless. Your own sense of aesthetic and musical taste is a huge influence on the type of songs you create. But the clearer you are about what you want your song to project, then all the elements that go into writing that song need to interconnect and align to present that vision. This includes the chords and their progressions. The decision to include a particular chord is not dissimilar from the decision to include a particular word. Does it fit the song? If not, then outski! But having a broad palette of chords at your fingertips is a great resource for any songwriter, because then the choice is truly yours to make. Talk more soon and thanks for the questions! Charlotte ps Chord Spice is one of the sessions in the Next Level Songwriting Retreat held at beautiful Tahora over Jan 22-25 2021. We'll be talking more about song harmony, how to progress your progressions and add to your chord catalogue to level up your songwriting.  One of the ways to contribute to your song's rhythm is to intentionally stack the patterns of stress in your lyric's syllables. Oh yes, words are unspeakably groovy! The very word 'rhythm' comes from the Greek word for 'flow' (so does rhyme fyi, but that's really no surprise). If you're writing songs in English, this particular language puts little stresses on particular syllables. The stressed syllable sounds a bit higher, louder and longer. -NA- For example a word like banana is heard as ba na The middle syllable is the stressed one, nudged higher, longer and a little louder. You lean on it. The syllable - not the banana! Hearing where the stresses land becomes important for lyricists to take note of. Otherwise, you can put the wrong em-Pha-sis on the wrong sy-Lla-ble. That reduces intelligibility, feels forced at worst, or just contribute to a sense of 'off'. Not a sensation you want to create for your audience. Professional songwriters will often line words up so there are stress/unstress schemes within song sections, much like rhyming templates. Not to be bound by some arbitrary rule-a-rama, but to align all the macro and micro elements of song structure to mesh like a mother! Thus, the song rolls off the singer's tongue and into your heart. Finding where the stressed and unstressed syllables are in a word is pretty solid. Say it out loud. Or get a first language English speaker to, if you're not sure. (irl or online). Finding where the stressed and unstressed words in a sentence is a little trickier because the meaning in context can change how certain words are stressed. It's the difference between Help! I need somebody and I really need your help or I really need your help and I really need your help. This figuring out where the stresses land is calling scanning. The reason you want to do this is to match the stresses in the lyric with the stresses and important 'positions' in the song's music. Not all positions are equal! Songs will often exaggerate the natural 'music' of speech. So both rhythm (how long a note is and where it lands in the bar) and pitch (how high or low the note is) plus volume contribute to underlining the importance of particular words and syllables. It also depends on what you're trying to say in your song. But take a leaf out of Dolly Parton's large song book, especially this one covered by Whitney Houston. The sentence I will always love you becomes.....  The emphasis on I ( long, high and loud, mate!) and you (long, loud and given lots of decoration) is extremely underscored musically. One is in no doubt which words the songwriter wanted our focus on.
So there are actually two kinds of stress to notice. One is the cadential stress - what happens in words when we speak them naturally and the other is rhetorical - what are the important words in the context - here it's I and You. Give prominent musical positions and attention to the natural accents and the critical words in your lyrics and you're off to the races! Or risk squashing the banana! Talk more soon and I'd love to know what you'd like to read about so please send in suggestions and I'll have a go at covering them. best wishes and good health! Charlotte Yates ps applications are now open for Next Level Songwriting Retreat Jan 22-25 2021 pps if you'd like to get up close and personal online with your songwriting project, I'm now working with Soundfly as one of their mentors.  Elliott Smith live @ the 70th Academy Awards ne of the features of my lockdown was guiltfree Youtube roll -around -scroll- around for alternative viewing and listening pleasure. And I clicked on a poor quality snip of songwriting breakdown by the late great songwriter Elliott Smith, a softly spoken man with a signature style. He released several fine albums and had significant success as a songwriter and performer before his untimely death at 34 in 2003. His song Miss Misery featured in the closing credits of the film, Good Will Hunting, was nominated for an Oscar, and it led to him playing live in a white suit at the 1998 Academy Awards.This was my belated introduction to his seemingly simple guitar playing, wistful lyricism and sometime surprising chord progressions. For someone who said he'd never be a big rock star, this was pretty close to the fire. There were more records and touring, and a persona that seemed to confuse interviewers, with lots of footage to watch. Unfortunately, it didn't end well, but he left a very rich and thoughtful legacy well worth being submerged in. If you can cope with the really grainy footage, you can see the underlying strengths that this artist brings to the show from playing every day to focusing on his own way of approaching chords and strumming, using implied melodies rather than riffs per se and a bunch of other tactics and building blocks that contributed to his songs and sound. And he pursued it diligently. I found that his interview excerpt on songwriting, creativity and comparisons relevant. 'I think it's pretty easy if you just relax and quit thinking about what you think other people want to hear, you know. If you can keep finding new things that you personally like about music and put it into the blender and see what comes out. And if you like it, there must be something good about it... I think ...you just gotta give yourself a little confidence to do what you personally like, not get all bogged down with what you think people wanna hear.....If you see someone playing music they really like, it's really compelling regardless of what style it is.' And there's a fundamental - to 'not get all bogged down' . When there's so much information easily accessible about music in general, about recording and songwriting, about the nuts and bolts of the business in all its funked up portrayal, the extremely likely outcome of consuming all that is to most definitely get all bogged down, right up to the tip of the last hair on your head!  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  Each song comes with its own rhythmic imprint of how many beats are in each bar. In music theory speak, this is called the time signature. In written music (sheet music or notated score), that gets popped at the front of the piece represented as something that looks like a fraction which indicates both the number of beats in each bar and the type of beats they are. The most common time signature in Western music, particularly for popular or contemporary music is 4/4, which means 4 crotchets or ‘quarter’ notes in each bar or ‘measure’. It’s so common 4/4 is often referred to as common time or C. A whopping 94% of pop songs are in 4/4 ( blame it on the blues) and that reign doesn’t look like ending particularly soon.  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.  These changes in metre allows the songwriter to manipulate the lyrics and melody to fit in as she wants creating a unique sounding song. There’s no having to wait for the end of the bar – no extra or unwanted space. Metric modulation can be a really exciting way to make your song stand out. If this is something you think will work for your song, just make sure the time signature changes on the first beat of the bar and that once changed the metre stays in the new time signature from then on, until you switch back. May you all have a great time working on this technique! Best wishes Charlotte  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 |
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