10 Tips for Songwriters is a collaborative Ebook that I’ve put together with the help of 17 other fantastic composers and songwriters. Here’s an extract from the introduction:
Introduction
At my songwriting blog, www.songwright.co.uk, I often interview songwriters. I find one of the best ways to get yourself inspired and excited
about songwriting is to find out how someone else does it.
That’s what this book is all about.
It was written by 18 successful songwriters who wanted to share their 10
tips for songwriting.
Have they all written commercial hits? Have they had their songs performed by famous singers, or
sold a billion records? No, for the most part they haven’t, but what sort of a way to measure success is that?
These 18 people have all proved themselves successful at writing songs. They wrote them for a myriad of reasons, to express themselves, to earn a living, to impress their friends, for a songwriting community, to practice their craft or simply because they could.
Each of the contributors has their own way of writing songs. There are writers here who start with the lyrics, and others who start with the music. Some are theory experts, others wouldn’t know a bar line from a bass clef. Some know their way around a recording studio, others can just about manage a cd player.
Each one has contributed their 10 tips for writing songs – the 10 things that they think should matter most to songwriters. Some agree on the basics, others have very different priorities. Some you might think are stating the obvious, others might be saying something you’ve never thought of before.
But I know that no two readers will agree on which are the most important tips here.
So, you can read the book all the way through, or you can flip to a random songwriter and find out what they have to say. Either way, it is my hope that you’ll find something interesting or inspiring on each and every page.
I’ve found talking to songwriters one of the most rewarding things I can do for my own songwriting, I hope you do too.
This 46 minute long piece was composed by members of Cafe Noodle and edited by your truly into one huge composition. The brief was to use the title to create a piece in D minor at 75 bpm.
I’m really pleased with the result and am truly blown away by the talented musicians involved.
Spinning the Compass
I’ve started a series of posts talking about the writing of my solo album, and sharing some of the demos I recorded.
In my last post, I made a plea for contributions to a free ebook I’m going to call ’10 Tips for Songwriters’.
The idea is that I ask a load of songwriters to contribute their top 10 songwriting tips to take up a page of the ebook. We’ll then have a collection of individual takes on songwriting that we can flick through and take inspiration from – a hundred pages (hopefully) filled with a hundred individual approaches to the songwriting craft.
The idea with this blog is to provide inspiration and ideas to help songwriters. Music theory, chord progression ideas, possibly structures, lyric writing strategies, I’ve written about all sorts of songwriting related things. In the past I’ve interviewed a few songwriters, and I’ve found that asking other songwriters to talk about their craft is one of the most interesting and inspiring things to do.
My next little project is going to be a free ebook called ’10 Tips for Songwriters’, and I could use your help to make it happen. Essentially what I hope to create is a selection of helpful and inspirational tips by songwriters, for songwriters.
Each page of the book would contain 10 tips contributed by an indie songwriter (as well as a brief biog, photo and link to the website of said songwriter).
The idea is to share as much songwriting wisdom as possible – you should be able to flick through the book, soaking up ideas and inspiration for your own songwriting.
If you fancy contributing, drop me an email: tomslattermusic AT gmail.com
I’m an atheist, I admit it. I used to say I was an agnostic, but as I’ve gotten older and read more and thought more about religion, I’ve decided that every one is humankind’s creation. I’m cool with my beliefs, but I wonder if society really is, especially among those who, like myself, think of themselves as artists.
My uncertainty stems from the countless interviews I have read with songwriters, most of whom claim that their songs do not come from within, but rather from without, either as gifts of god or as creations of a force greater than humankind, creations that can only be gathered by those who pay attention. I disagree with these conceits, and let me tell you why:…
Our assignment was based on a “Random Song Generator” — basically three columns of words…the first is the person, the second is the place and the third is the action. Choose one word/phrase randomly from each column and go forth to write! Hint: My assignment was “siblings, ages 9 and 11,” “in a coffee shop”, “stealing something.”
His post is a list of tension and release related elements in songwriting – you can find more detail on each of them elsewhere on his site (and on this one!) – but it got me thinking about how tension and release can be found in the rhythmic elements of your songs.
Gary talks about hooks in songwriting, and how you should “a melodic/rhythmic shape that ends in such a way that the restatement of the hook acts as a resolution for the end of it.”.
Kylie!
The song ‘Can’t get you out of my Head’ is a great eample of this, a call and answer phrase with the first half rising in pitch (tension) and the second half falling (release).
The rhythm of the hook is also interesting – it employs a very simple but effective piece of syncopation.
La La La La La La La La
The first three ‘la’s’ are on the beat, the next three off the beat, and the last two on the beat again. This gives us a simple layer of tension and release – notes on the beat are ‘at rest’, the syncopated, off beat notes add a hint of tension, before resolving straight away with the final two on-beat notes.
Any ideas?
I think there’s a much longer and interested blog post on the idea of rhythmic tension in sognwriting, which I’m not going to write at the moment. Instead I’ll end by asking for your input:
How can we add rhythmic tension and release to our songs?
My initial ideas:
Small hints of syncopation in your riffs/hooks
Unexpected phrase length eg. Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles
An extra bar – eg. 5 bars in the bridge where the rest of the song is based on 4 bar sections
A half-time section where the rest of the song is double time.
What keeps a listener listening? If you can’t answer that you’ll be relegated to the dust-heap of music history, along with all the other songs that listeners got bored with. The answer to the question? It’s tension, then release, that keep listeners listening.
It’s a great post and well worth reading. If I was going to add to it I would say, as I often do, that the whole V to I tension has been done to death and is best avoided, particularly in the major scale. My preference would be to try something modal fo example the tension between F and E minor in E phyrgian.
This week I exchanged a few emails with a singer-songwriter named Shannon Hurley. She recently moved from LA to Nashville, and as a consequence her songwriting became less country.
I know, that sounds counterintuitive. I’ll let her explain:
Shannon: My songwriting changed in the most unexpected way. Instead of wanting to fit into the country genre, I went further out of the realm. I find that I quite like being the “indie-pop” songwriter in a city of country music. I am enjoying the experimentation of electronica, downtempo, chill-pop, etc. and blending them into my singer-songwriter world.
Tom: When and how did you start writing songs?
Shannon: I wrote my first song when I was about seven. It was called “Georgia Moonlight”. I remember exactly how it goes, and if someone paid me $1,000 then I will sing it. I even have the cassette tape I recorded it on..Maybe I’ll put it up on podcast for my own embarrassment
Tom: Music or lyrics?
Shannon: Both! They seem to happen for me at the same time. I often sit at my piano and start noodling around until a lyrical phrase and a melodic idea come together.
Tom: Have you got any tricks or tactics to come up with new songwriting ideas?
Shannon: Lately I have been enamored with bringing up different loops in Garageband. That’s the way “Life is Strange” (from my new project Lovers and Poets) started. A fresh groove is a great way to create a new song.
That particular loop I used in “Life is Strange” is just one of the basic “club” beats that comes with Garageband.
Tom: Your songs are very American, and very traditional. Are you ever tempted to go crazy and throw in five key changes then break into a 7/8 groove?
Shannon: Hmmm, probably not. I am not big into progressive meter changes or progressions that seem to go in random directions. I like simplicity, and all my favorite songs are easy to sing and play. The Kinks, The Who, Tom Petty, and The Beatles all had some great songs with only 3-4 chord changes. But who’s to say that I’ll never throw in an extra beat or an unpredictable chord? I will if the song calls for it. I’m just a slave to the song!
Tom: Personally I always over use certain chord progressions or keys – I have way too many songs in E lydian for example. Have you got any songwriting clichés you over use?
Shannon: I think every songwriter has little ticks and idiosynchrosies they rely on. Either you can fight it and try to go in entirely different direction, or you can use it to your advantage and it can become your “sound”. I don’t want to admit what I think is my weakness because that “weakness” may be what is drawing some listener into my music. But I know what I have to work with, and I am aware that my muscle memory is to play a certain way on the keyboard..but sometimes I will test my comfort zone and go off in a completely new songwriting direction.
Tom: The sample of Lovers and Poets sounds very different to your solo songs. What’s the idea behind this new project?
Shannon: I feel like my solo material is very personal and autobiographical. It’s also more organic with a full band sound. Lovers and Poets is more fanciful, and not based in reality. Instead, I chose to write about fictional situations or skewed the truth in some way to create alternate endings to things that have really happened to me. “Life is Strange” is a half-truth; I fell asleep at the wheel of my car in South Park, Colorado after playing keyboards for the band I was in at the time (called Jyemo). We had gotten through a sunrise set on the 4th of July. All I remember is listening to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, and then I was in the air, then the air bag inflated, shards of glass were everywhere, and I rolled a couple times in slow motion. I thought I was in heaven. Luckily I was unhurt (except for a case of shock) but it was the catalyst for the song. I heard Ralph Murphy speak here in Nashville, and he said there are no regrets in songwriting.
We can create our own truths, and things that didn’t happen, we can make them happen in our songs. So I thought, well, what if I wasn’t driving alone? What if I had a passenger..somebody I loved..and what if one of us died in the accident? And I wanted to be vague, like you can’t tell which of us had died. Or both. And I really wanted to tell a story of how fragile life is, how random life is.
Well shoot, I didn’t mean to end up on such a morbid note. On a more positive side, “The Things We Do for Love” is a song I wrote as a tribute to one of my favorite bands- Belle and Sebastian. So there, I hope readers feel warm and fuzzy now- I know B&S always does that for me!
PS. I’m always interested in interviewing songwriters about what makes them tick. Drop me an email if you want to talk about your songwriting at tomslattermusic AT gmail.com
