Lyrics « Songwright

Songwriting isn’t lyric writing, even for Bowie

This morning on the today program I heard an interview with Nick Troop, a songwriter who claimed to be doing a psychological study of songwriting to investigate psychological health or… something.

A brief investigation took me to Nick’s websites, and the first thing to point out, as Nick does, is that his analysis is not [...]

Songwriting Sketches – The Exorcism of Marjorie Grace

For the 50/90 challenge I’d thought I’d try something different and write a set of lyrics before I composed any music. Usually, I write lyrics and music at the same time, starting of with melody ideas and a mixture of possible lyrics, nonsense verse and random ‘la’ and ‘doo’ sounds. This time I forced myself [...]

Ultimate Songwriting Lessons – Songwriting Hooks and Songwriting Meat

I just stumbled across this video, via this post.

It’s from this website.

First off, let me make clear that I have a very low opinion of sales pages like this one. I know they’ve been shown to work, that they’re ‘good marketing,’ but I really don’t like them.

However, don’t take that us an opinion of the [...]

Quick Tip – Don’t be a Slave To Songwriting Convention

Marking students coursework at my school, I came to a song that I gave almost full marks to.

One reason for the high marks was the song’s fantastic, subtle playing with songwriting conventions.

- The Bridge – The bridge happens after the second chorus, right? Not according to my student. Instead she put it between the 2nd [...]

3 Great Songwriting Posts

There are plenty of good songwriting bloggers out there, so I thought I’d share some of the good writing out there.

I’ve been known to complain about songwriting er… writing. My biggest gripe is those posts that confuse songwriting with lyric writing and imply that all you need think about are the words you use.

But of course lyrics, while [...]

Songwriting by Numbers part 1 – Title and Lyrics

Welcome to the first in a series of articles in which I’ll write a song ‘by numbers’.

What do I mean by that? I’m going to write a song as an exercise to illustrate a lot of common songwriting points. I’m going to go through it step by step, one element at a time.

Now, songwriting is [...]

Songwriting Worksheets

In my everyday life as a music teacher, I tend to design quite a lot of worksheets.

In my online life trying to share songwriting ideas, I’ve never put this skill into use. Until now, that is.

You see, a written worksheet can be a very useful thing. As songwriters we’re often scribbling on random bits of [...]

Second FAWM song

‘Black water’

[audio=http://www.wellwrite.co.uk/songwright/tomslatter_blackwater.mp3]

First draft lyrics:

Treading water, wound in my side
Overboard in the dark of the night
grinning faces threw me to my doom
and now my arms and legs burn with the strain

Threw me right in, cursing my sins
here alone, I’ll admit that they’re right
All the traces, the things that I’ve done
I thought I’d get away with [...]

Stealing songwriting techniques from Cole Porter’s Anything Goes

I briefly mentioned this song in a recent post. This isn’t the best performance of it, but it will do for our purposes (here’s another recording).

There are some songwriting ideas worth pointing out (and stealing).

1. The lyrics

In olden days, a glimpse of stocking
was looked on as something shocking,
now heaven knows
Anything goes.

Do I really need [...]

How to write a melody that works

Everyone composes from different starting points, whether with chords, melody, lyrics or a tiny snippet of an idea recorded months earlier. Sooner or later you are going to need a melody, but thankfully there’ a suprising consensus on what makes an effective melody. So much so that it’s possible to list common features:

1. Note choice. [...]