Song Doctor Blog
Read about how to write better songs
 Content alone in a lyric may not be enough to sustain a listener’s attention throughout an entire song, without a strong enough melody for the words to ride on – no matter how important the topic. It’s worth investing time developing a melody that allows your lyrical idea to fully register with the audience. So how do you write a tune that folks can remember irrespective of the lyrics? One that you can play as well as sing, one that is immediately recognisable covered by a glockenspiel band or a choir, a bagpipe as well as a thumb piano? The answers lie in the way that melody takes words and frames them in a different time and space. Melody can change the amount of time we spend on certain words (rhythm) lengthening or shortening the length of notes or ‘space’ – by changing the pitch between words (intervals), up or down. This makes song so different from speech. And yet, there are parallels you can take advantage of. Melody isn’t made up of random notes anymore than speech uses random words. There’s as much grammar in a tune as there is in a paragraph. The notes in a well written melody are organised into small groups called motifs. A motif is a group of 2, 3, 4 and not many more notes that played in that way, that order together make the tune easily identifiable. Like a mugshot. You hear the motif, you know what song it is. Like the three notes that make up Paul McCartney’s Yesterday motif. ( First bar, right hand, G-F-F). Once you get a motif, you can REPEAT it. A very good idea – repetition is the songwriter’s friend. The more times you repeat the motif within a song the more easily it will be remembered. You can repeat it at the same pitch or another.
You can vary the motif by LENGTHENING or SHORTENING the notes within it. You can make it change direction by INVERTING it, making a mirror image of the motif. You can ADD notes, extending it. And later in the song, you can CREATE A NEW ONE, usually for the chorus. Contrast is another very good songwriter’s friend. If you already have some lyrics written, really think about how a motif would work with your most important words or phrase. Start by saying them out loud in a few different ways. This will give you a really basic idea of the rhythm you might use and an inclination of where the pitch naturally rises and falls. Use your phone to record yourself. Once you’ve got something you like, try shifting it out of your normal speech pitch pattern by using steps (one note up or down), skips (a third up or down) or a leap (a fourth or more) between words. Remember, you can break words up with a motif, like in ‘SOME-WHERE over-the-rainbow’. Somewhere gets split in half by an octave because the songwriter wanted to really draw our attention to the idea of longing for this magical place. Tying your motifs together in musical phrases also allows you to link with lyrical phrases. If a four line verse has a rhyming pattern AABB, ie the first two lines end rhyme with each other and the second two lines rhyme differently but again with each other, making your melody do something similar can really lock in the idea for an audience. One of my favourite examples of this is Cruise Control by Headless Chickens. The first two lines are matched with the same repeated musical phrase repeated and end rhyme and the second two lines have a new rhymes and a new melodic phrase. Sometimes days seem to move just like a big fat man A Sometimes days seem to end up where they first began A I’ve got my TV tuned to channel you B Because there’s nothing else that I can do B The song then repeats the first melodic phrase with the chorus as a refrain, which ends on the title. Nice work. Maybe I should have set my heart to cruise control This idea of changing melody with changes in lyric idea is called topic movement and it’s a winning technique for stopping endless lists of lyrics with no direction that can really clog up your listeners’ ears. Professor Andrea Stolpe of Berklee School of Music expands on this here. One final note is looking at contrasting the delivery of words per second for an audience. High speed, high energy lyrics need careful delivery to hit the spot for a first time listener and one of the ways songwriters can meet the hunger for surprise, sass and audibility is highlighted in this song by Lizzo, Jerome. It starts Motown style with the chorus which uses a dotted sustained two note motif on the lyric, title and hapless subject Jerome, with variations, before the verses crank up the pace. Enjoy and take note of the contrast. Talk more soon Charlotte ps bookings are now open for the Tahora Songwriters Retreat held over 17-20 January (Wellington Anniversary Weekend) 2020.
A big issue for aspiring songwriters is imagining how on earth they can actually get any time at all in their busy lives. But once you wrap your head around making writing a habit, you find it much easier to get on a roll generating more material more readily. All good.
Aligning what you actually want to do with your songs can help clarify how much time you can spend on writing them. Is it to make your first album? Get something down for your son’s wedding in March? Write your first original song for your band to play at a gig next week? Each of these situations puts a different spin on the schedule. The endpoints are reasonably clear and have associated deadlines – which many folks are used to responding to. A little trickier to manage but no less valid to pursue are the more nebulous drives to write, like ‘I want to finish a song I’ve been writing for years’ or ‘I’ve always wanted to write songs – I’ve diaries full of poems and lyrics’ or ‘I feel this urge to write songs since my baby was born/ marriage broke down/ kids left home/etc.’. No particular deadline or clear outcomes, but I’ve met plenty of people who have experienced such a profound compulsion to write songs that it can surface a little unexpectedly to friends and family. How do you incorporate that satisfactorily into your everyday life if you’ve a family, a job or a business and all the other commitments of adult life? I get it. It can be a real head spin. One of the things that can trip us up is that when you’ve been successfully ‘adulting’ for a while, you’ve got pretty good at some things by now – driving a car, making a garden, getting teenagers from a to b in one piece, earning an income, building a deck – all sorts of full on skills you take for granted. Now, exploring this songwriting lark can push you back to L-plate status. And that’s a graunch!! When I work with teenagers or young adults, they’re a lot closer to doing the one thing they excel at – learning something for the first time. Adults get more frustrated more quickly and are less like to try things out just because. But ‘just because’ is the perfect antidote to ‘it can’t be done’ or more importantly ‘I can’t do it as well as I want too.’ So here is something to try. Book whatever schedule you can manage - once a day or once a week. Choose something you can honestly manage. Here’s one for 15 minutes a day that made NZ author Pip Adam write a book that garnered her a $50,000 prize. But to help yourself get past perfectionism, use a warm up routine at the beginning of each session. For example, if you’re able to write for an hour, spend 10 minutes on words and 10 minutes on melody. Take some time to free write or do some destination writing, just for 10 minutes. Then play around with scales and melodic phrases, recording them on your phone. Try some new intervals in the melody – 1 to 3, 1 to 5, and 1 to 7. Vary the rhythm of the phrase. A long note, then two short and reverse it. Just 10 minutes worth. Then, spend 40 minutes developing any ideas you’re working on. Some lyrics become rhyming pairs maybe, a chord progression that might go somewhere might spark a groove. Try writing the second verse. And that’s it – the hour’s up. You don’t run the tank dry. You make it manageable. By starting off your session with routine warm ups, just like zumba or running, you can do the equivalent of stretches to get your ideas flowing before you move up a gear into writing your songs, time after time. Talk more soon Charlotte Yates ps Bookings are now open for Tahora Songwriting Retreat 17- 20 January 2020.
"Several years ago, I attended my son’s freshman orientation at Belmont University. He was headed into the Music Business program. During the parent’s session, one mother raised her hand and asked (In all seriousness) “So, if my daughter gets a songwriting degree from Belmont, she is pretty much guaranteed a slot on Music Row, right?” The Dean of the School of Music stood in stunned silence for a moment. Then, he said “No, getting a degree in songwriting doesn’t mean you are a great songwriter any more than a degree in art says that you are a great artist.” The woman then commented under her breath, “$120,000 is a lot to pay with no guarantees”. I’d like to reinforce the concept of asymmetric risk that songwriting or pretty much any other artistic pursuit brings – the relative number of hits to misses is astronomical. A particular song’s or artist’s ‘success’ is massively unpredictable. A so-called ‘normal’ job has one very appealing feature: your effort is directly proportionate to the reward you receive. If you’re a plumber, the more taps you fix, the more cash you earn. The flipside is that there’s a limit to how much money you can make - you can only fix so many taps in a day. You have to physically be there to fix the taps, but also, no one is really going to argue too much about the right way to fix a tap, or what a great tap is, or how great taps have influenced you since your adolescence or what tap was pouring when you had your first kiss! Taps and their repair are clearly definable. A tap works or doesn't so once taught, most anyone could fix a tap who completes the training.  A particularly great tapThis is what risk analyst and author Nassim Taleb calls a ‘non-scalable’ career. Richard Meadows outlines this clearly in his article The Barbell Strategy: How Not to Be a Starving Artist. Here, he explains, a baker can only bake so many loaves of bread on a particular shift. Artists, including songwriters, have no such upper bounds. Something idea-based can be sold over and over again with almost no extra time or effort. It can potentially be 'infinitely scalable.' Your debut album might sell 10 copies (three of which your mum bought) or 10 million, but the amount of work that went into recording may be just the same. Unlike getting a medical degree or a plumber’s trade certificate, there’s no set career pathway to a stable lifelong income guaranteed by learning about anything about songwriting.
So, just being musically literate and knowledgable about songwriting won’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to write a sure fire hit each week. This is why these dream crusher sentences fall out of your parents’ or partners’ mouths when you say you want to pursue songwriting more intensively: ‘what’s your back up plan?’, ‘make sure you have a second string to your bow’, ‘don’t give up your day job’ etc etc etc. I’m sure there are many more you’ve come across! However, maintaining a positive approach, spending time doing what you love and developing your own creative plans and goals will certainly help you bring your songs to life. As does enjoying the company and support of like-minded souls, rather than feeling like you’re working in isolation. Figuring out your own ‘risk level’ will help you move forward with your songs at a pace you determine. Talk more soon Charlotte ps download my free article here on more ways to mitigate the dream crusher vibe! pps if you want to get started moving with your songs, come to this workshop May 17-19  Most contemporary recordings of songs aren’t unaccompanied single melodic lines. They will sit in well-supported beds of chords played by supporting instruments or vocals, whose combinations can provoke deep emotional responses in us. Harmony is not just a musical metaphor - it really underpins the social aspect of what we’re doing.
From a songwriting point of view, having the ability to use a chordal instrument, like a guitar or piano – instruments that can play several notes at a time - is a powerful tool. The chords you use and the way they’re ordered (the progression) can point how a melody will literally come into existence. But before you flinch and say ‘but I’m a singer/drummer/saxophonist – are you saying I can’t write songs because I can’t play chords?’ – no, I’m not. I’m saying that learning chordal instruments even at a really basic level can enhance your understanding of what makes songs work. It introduces you to some secret infrastructure – let’s you look under the hood of your favourite songs and influences how you can write your own music more readily. If you’re a parent and your kid wants to play something, this is one of the reasons why learning either keyboards/piano or guitar is a really good musical starting point. They are one stop shops for creating rhythm, melody and harmony. If you’re a vocalist, singing harmonies is one of the most joyful things you get to do. And it’s no surprise that many of our most successful musicians come from backgrounds where collective singing was commonplace in their childhood, from church to amateur theatre to the marae. Creating chords from your vocals is also an interesting way to use what you’ve got to develop a song. Other entry points into what chord progressions can do are online chord generators like ChordChord and Autochord. But hang on a minute – won’t I be using the same chord progression as other songwriters? Quite likely, yes. You can’t copyright chord progressions, unlike melody and lyrics. Music education site Hooktheory.com undertook a detailed study of over 1300 songs charting on the US Billboard top 100 and found overwhelming that the most common pop song chord progression was: I –V- vi –IV The most common key was C major so this became: C-G-Am-F All over the internet are debates about the tyranny of this, the control that a handful of songwriter/producers have over popular music and the undue influence it gives them. I’ve linked two but you can google all pop music sounds the same and you’ll go down a rabbit hole for a while. What I want to do is show you how manipulating the ‘magic formula’ can quickly give you a myriad of combinations that can change the music you write by changing your chord progression, yet still use the same ‘alphabet’. I –V- vi –IV Look what happens when you alter the order of chords but still start with the tonic or root note. I-IV-vi-V I-IV-V-vi I-V-IV-vi I-vi-IV-V I-vi-V-IV If we stay in C major it looks like this, your options look more like this: C -F-Am-G C-F-G-Am C-G-F-Am C-Am-F-G C-Am-G-F The other thing you can do very quickly is vary the length of time you stay on a particular chord – there’s no rule to say each chord needs a whole bar of it’s own. Try two beats on the first two chords and four on the second two. Or whatever combination you may like to try. The point is not to feel stuck in a rut or trapped, but get comfortable shuffling chords around so they work for you and your songs to create the sound you want. Talk more soon Charlotte Yates ps To read more on chord progressions, here’s a more detailed article I wrote for Musician on a Mission pps To join me on a songwriting workshop, here’s a really great opportunity at Hanmer Springs, May 17-19.  So I'm working on a new song with French Kiwi producer Monsieur E and was excited to receive his first draft last week. The tempo was increased and this, plus a judicious edit, had lopped 20 seconds of the song taking it down from 3' 42'' to 3' 22". I liked the effect and commented that the 'sogginess' had been taken out. But exactly how long should a song be? Is there a preferred length for recorded music? While there is no doubt that songs are short form works in miniature, average song length has varied throughout recorded musical history and it is undergoing change right now. Firstly, songs are getting shorter. From 2013 to 2018, the average length of song on the Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3'50" to 3'30". Secondly, a significant number of hit songs (6%) were really short - 2' 30" seconds or shorter in 2018, compared with just 1% in 2013. Thirdly, this is happening across the genres. From rap artists Drake, Kendrik Lamar and Kanye West through Nicki Minaj and J Cole to current country artists Eric Church and Jason Aldean, the trend is well documented. The change in song length seems to be hand in hand with the change in music distribution with streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music claiming 75% of all revenue in 2018 compared with 21 % in 2013. Furthermore, Spotify pays the same fee per song - no matter what the length. Some artists are putting more songs on their albums, but that's by no means ubiquitous. There are arguments put forward about the diminishing attention spans of young people but delivery format has always played a part in popular music. The entire idea of an album of songs became really possible with the LP and when compact discs arrived at a whopping 78 minutes without a flip of the disc, album length increased. 1960's Motown radio mixes were short and to the point around 2' 30" or 2'40" so perhaps the reversion 50 years later to a more compressed song length has something to do with grabbing our attention now that we're inundated with content choices. And playlists maybe more critical than albums in the very near future. It is rare that I see newbie songwriters turn up with a bunch of tightly packed short songs. It's not unusual to have tracks of 5 minutes and more forwarded, and that's not the dance mix! While it's hard to be the judge of your own music, it's a good idea to learn how to get to the point in your song and not outstay your welcome. In fact, it's fashionable! Talk more soon Charlotte PS Had a blast working with these guys at Songwriters Retreat Akaroa!   I read this interesting article written by the American contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly on how he actually composes on a day to day basis. His work involves a great deal of travel, which can fragment concentration fairly quickly, but he also has to manage several projects at once, responding to commissions and their deadlines. While the commission is the 'prompt', first he starts by mapping out his as-yet-unwritten piece's 'emotional itinerary' to give his audience something 'challenging, engaging and emotionally alluring' to 'create an environment that suggests motion but that doesn't insist on certain things being felt at certain times'. He likens this plan to an inflight map which cycles between the overview (say London to Singapore) but then gives you the hyper detail of small towns of whatever country you happen to be over. Once he's got the map-document, it can 'be coloured in and detailed whenever you like'. But, fyi, this initial map or plan by design excludes the actual musical notes. His example was for a viola concerto he wrote which went like this: *Start with a familiar set of chords - a sort of musical home base *Then travel as far away from that as possible through rhythmic turbulence *Find the way back via a sense of music panic. Then comes in depth research, and then comes the notes and rhythms. What he wants is to create an emotional and sonic architecture that gives listeners 'simultaneous but radically different experiences.' The map-document might be on a table napkin or in a text but that, and all his research notes and whatever, go into a physical folder - a very specific type - three-flap folder that French school children use. On the top, inside each project folder is the original 'map'. There are computer equivalents but the visible slim folders accompany him everywhere around the world and act as immediate triggers to reflect on each project, generating ideas whenever, wherever. They're part of his response to what he call a 'certain poetry of discontinuity' meaning his focus is on the work, rather than the (his) constantly changing environment.  What I loved about this article is how specific this composer is about his process - it's definitely his own brand of physical and digital creation and storage, which deals with his own schedule, his artistic strengths and weaknesses. It reduces the amount of reinventing the wheel every time he needs to write music - there's no starting from ground zero, but most importantly, it defeats an important myth - the myth of the scattered genius artist, the 'wait-around-for-inspiration-to-hit' artist and the 'I'll-do-it-when' artist (when I'm not so tired, not so heartbroken, not so broke, not so busy etc etc ). It negates the myth that real artists aren't 'organised' or 'business-like' or 'good with technology'. This guy has planks in place to keep his music coming and growing and getting performance ready, despite his real life with all the dull and exciting demands it can have. He has a system that supports him, one that is bespoke, one that he has tailor-made so he doesn't waste precious brain space needed to make the good stuff up. What can you do to 'systemise' your songwriting so you can be more creative, when you want to be or need to be? Would love to hear your thoughts. Talk soon. Charlotte Yates ps Thanks to those who've booked for Songwriters Retreat 2019 at Akaroa. Excited to announce early bird ticket prices are staying open until 31 January 2019. Look forward to seeing you there!  At certain points of your songwriting journey, you're likely to encounter some fairly overwhelming feelings that can well upset your applecart. One of these is the fear of failure, and it's an important one to face off.
Sometimes, it manifests as the infamous inner critic - quite shouty, telling you to not to even bother trying because YOU'LL NEVER MAKE IT, so GIVE UP AND GO HOME! Or it's more nebulous, presenting as a sneaky feeling of worry or discontent, which produces a lethargic slump, quite effectively derailing any efforts you actually want to make with your songwriting. There's a reason we fear failure. Like many inbuilt fears, it's a protective mechanism, protecting us from the anxiety that comes with freedom and taking risks. But if you're trying to write new songs, or present new material to your band, a live audience or simply play an open mic, fear of failure can seriously limit us. It's 'safer' not to try anything new or different just because it might fail. It can strike major artists who have had significant success as well as rank beginners, and it's an enemy of creativity. We literally stop doing what we actually want to do, because we might muck it up. So how do we deal with it? I used to work with a festival director whose mantra if something didn't quite work was ' did anybody die?', and I think that's a pretty good place to start. The perception of what failure is is just that - a perception. Songwriting, like any other artistic practice, is full of 'failures' - ideas that don't quite work, demos that don't get listened to, competitions where songs aren't placed, bands that break up, funding applications that aren't successful, venue owners that don't return calls and albums that don't sell. 'Failure' comes with the territory, so get ready for it and reframe your perception of it. Artistic endeavour is also rife with countless stories of musicians and actors and writers who persisted through what could only be described as 'high rotate fail' to achieve their goals and dreams, from the Beatles to JK Rowling to Fred Astaire, whose first screen test at MGM read "Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Not handsome. Can dance a little." And Stephen Spielberg was rejected from the University of Southern California School of Theater, Film and Television three times! This is the second tactic. Be clear what success means to you by figuring out some goals. The more personal you can make them the better. A goal may be as simple as 'I want to write a song for our anniversary' or 'I want to enter my original songs in Rockquest this year' or 'I want to learn how to record my music' or more complex, like 'I want to tour the US next year' or 'I want to have my second album produced by ....'. This means you measure your outcomes against yourself, rather than the rest of the loud and noisy world, and your perception of success is intrinsic. Thirdly, songwriting demands 'failure' in many ways. The proportion of songs that are actually hits versus 'misses' is astronomical, but so are the number of choices available to us from chord sequences, melodic variations, vocabulary and production techniques. Give yourself the freedom to try as many choices as you can. Spending more time on songwriting with more 'attempts' creates an environment for incremental improvement, and success on your own terms. In the book Art & Fear, authors David Bayles and Ted Orland described this experiment made by a ceramics teacher. The ceramics teacher announced that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, grading time came and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity! It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat around theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. And I rather like Thomas Edison's wry remark after 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps. I failed my way to success. Rather makes the term for inspiration, a lightbulb moment, even more relevant! Talk more soon, Charlotte Yates ps Two opportunities for Song Doctor Mailer readers to learn more are 1. Use this code SONGDOCTOR10 for 10% off any Mainstage course on the online music education site, Soundfly. Great folks and great info on a wide variety of music topics. 2. Join us on our Songwriters Retreat Feb 5-9 next year in Akaroa for a deep dive songwriting intensive, fully catered and accommodated. Treat yourself! Early bird tickets available until Jan 5.  What does your audience want to hear?
Here are some questions to answer when you want to improve your material. Why do people like to listen to songs? What do they need from songs? What will make an audience listen to your song? How do you capture their attention and hold it? When many of us start writing songs, much of it is totally unconscious and self-expression is the name of the game. Rightly so! Sometimes, our songwriting is profoundly imitative, heavily influenced by our favourite artists. No surprises there! The audience is often the last thing on our minds. As a consequence, some songs might connect but others are way off the mark and we don’t always know why. While we have yet to identify a specific ‘music centre’ in the brain, there’s plenty of neural science that shows when we listen to music, there is increased blood flow to the areas in the brain associated with reward, emotion and arousal. Songs work when an audience is moved. When an audience feels something they care about deeply, you’ve made a real connection. Creating a strong and clear emotion with your song is a top priority for any songwriter. It doesn’t particularly matter what the emotion is – angst, joy, disillusionment, anger, sorrow, regret –we love them all, and at an intense level. Just don’t be boring! Choices you make about the chords you use, the trajectory of the melody, the groove and the lyrical content all contribute to the development of your song’s emotional appeal. Quite small shifts in a song’s construction can have a huge effect on the song’s impact. Anything from a slight tempo shift to changing just one of the intervals in the melody or simplifying the chord progression or adding that unexpected chord can heighten emotion. Of course, major surgery can help your song hit home too. Shifting the chorus to the front of the song for a change, dramatically increasing contrast in the melody between the verse and the chorus and adding (or deleting) a bridge can really spice things up. Substituting stronger words in your lyrics can up the ante in a song too. While erring on the side of simplicity, you can spot check your verbs – should you go or should you walk/stride/run/stagger/stumble? And your nouns – is she wearing a dress or a gown/skirt/bikini/shorts/jeans? Is she a Spanish lady/ a virgin/ a queen/ the girl next door? And adjectives can colour your world - is it a car or a little red Corvette, a big yellow taxi or your daddy’s Thunderbird? Once you start consciously trying to develop the emotional impact of your songs, test them on an audience who have never heard them before – open mic or your songwriting circle. You’ll soon know if your listeners are feeling it. Talk more soon. Charlotte Yates ps if you want to really deep dive into improving the emotional impact of your songs, join us in Akaroa for our Songwriting Retreat Feb 5-9.  Sometimes the ideas just stop. Where once there were multiple bursts of inspiration that you couldn't wait to scrawl on the back of a paper napkin, there's now a strange and eerie silence. At first, you don't stress. Could just be your GST return needs dealing to or one of the kids is sick. But then on it goes, and song-less days turn into weeks, maybe months. Never mind, you say. Summer will fix it - a good dose of beach/beers/bbqs and the tunes will start bubbling over again. But what if they don't? A special case of writer's block is the difficult second album syndrome. Your first release turned out to be a great debut - critically acclaimed, you are heralded as a worthy new voice and things really start to happen for you, but when the expectation of 'what's next' arrives, your pen stammers and your sessions are a little same old, same old. No matter what stage of your songwriting career you're at, at some stage you will experience some kind of stall in your creative process. What's worse than labouring at songwriting? Not songwriting at all. While songwriters are certainly not alone in this experience, there are more than enough one hit wonders out there to plead a special case. Here's a list of the things that many songwriters hit by writer's block have experienced.
This list comes from author Gary Ewer who has written an entire book on beating songwriter's block and I've included it because I took considerable heart from this list's specificity. It plots a multi-level landscape that many folks I know have encountered. While I'm not sure one ever actually avoids the block or stalls at some point, it sure helps to know what may be on the horizon and prepare to mitigate it. Forewarned, being forearmed. Exploring how to deal with songwriter's block - trying to start or to finish a song in this context – requires an understanding of the concept of creativity and this comes weirdly from a professor of business administration at Harvard University, Teresa Amabile, a researcher in creativity which she depicts as 3 intersecting circles - creative thinking, expertise and motivation.  The theory is each of these circles needs regular attendance and input to keep the wellspring of creativity full to the brim. Learning new chords or a new instrument, reading up on favourite artists, going to and playing live shows all up your expertise and capability as does a decent diet, enough sleep or just jamming with your mates. Feelings of positive self worth, resilience and just the joy and personal challenge (intrinsic motivation) of songwriting all contribute, but the least understood area is that of creative thinking - something that luckily, artists have in abundance - the ability to present novel, different and alternative solutions to problems or opportunities. It seems there's really is never one way to write a good song. And upskilling won't kill your muse - it will foster it.
best wishes Charlotte ps If you'd like to up your expertise in songwriting, there are still places available on the Wanaka Songwriting Clinic this coming Labour Weekend ( Oct 19-21). See you there! The number one complaint from aspiring songwriters I hear is that they struggle to finish their songs. There are so many folks out there with reams of lyrics and musical fragments languishing in diaries or on various recording devices just waiting to be completed….(cue music!) Some how. Some day. Somewhere. And here is the cure – write more. The cure to not finishing songs is to spend more time writing songs. It’s that obvious! The trick is to set yourself up so you don’t have to think or wheedle or force yourself to do this. Set yourself up so that you don’t have to treat yourself like a kid who doesn’t want to eat vegetables, and then feel bad afterwards because you didn’t write a song today, and therefore you are a REALLY BAD PERSON! The idea is to create a process that lets you write your songs. You give yourself permission, put some planks in place, and then, just like you clean your teeth, you write songs – as a habit. It becomes weird if you don't! None of this is hard – in fact, your life will feel a whole lot more better because you wind up doing something you REALLY WANT TO! It’s just about removing any vestige of will power that you have to summon up to write songs when you want nothing more than to faceplant drooling on the couch with Netflix. The process you create (and it’s pretty individual, even though there are some common themes) will support you to write more. When you write more often and you write more material, you give yourself the chance to deep dive into your songs, and you will finish them. You will write and rewrite, refine and create, critique and tweak. And I can, hand on heart, tell you that the profound pleasure that comes from finishing a song’s first draft – one you can show someone – is a mighty thing to feel. It is empowering.
When you read Pip’s story, you can see she has a long game, that she’s a realist, she’s thought about her goals, why she wants to write and the form she has chosen. But the very individual process she has set up for herself has supported her to treat writing as an ingrained habit, allowing a great deal of continuity. Note that what works for her may not necessarily work for you. Here are a bundle of processes and rituals that have worked for some of the most famous writers in the world to get you thinking what might! Without being formulaic, there are very practical issues you can consider to let yourself write more songs.
The point is that coming back to your process means that you will be write songs consistently, and that will build your ‘muscle’ and let you finish your work. What if you wrote one song a week? That's 52 songs in the next year. Or one song a month? (like Bjork does). That’s an album a year. Just saying. It's no surprise the first thing we cover in our Songwriters Clinic is how to set yourself up for successful songwriting. That's success on your own terms. It's something you can revisit at whatever stage of your career or lifestyle. And it's one of the kindest things you can do for yourself. Please feel free to share what some of your own process quirks are - I promise to keep them anonymous! Talk more soon. Charlotte Yates 021685 561 ps thanks for all those who have booked for the Wanaka Songwriters Clinic. Please note our early bird ticket price is only available until 22 Sep. |
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