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A student emailed me this question today, and I thought it was beautifully simple, direct, and honest. Here is the answer I gave her (unedited): The basic ingredients to getting better at anything are all the same: deliberate practice. The ‘deliberate’ part of that is key, though! Simple repetition of something is not enough to…
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From a recent interview with John Mayer: “Whenever I want to write a big song, I can’t. And by “big” I mean spatially…the glacially large space inside the heart, that’s when I get writers block…trying to write a song to fill the entire galaxy. But if I write a song about the size of a…
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Here is a list of my favourite blogs right now. I have all of these saved as shortcuts on my iPhone homepage, and recommend them with much clapping and whistling. 1. The Whippet, by McKinley Valentine. What is it? From McKinley herself: Science, history, weirdness and 0% contemporary politics because oh my god sometimes you…
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Hi friends, I’ve recently made a short series of quick videos that cover two of the most beautiful modes in songwriting: the Mixolydian mode, and Dorian mode, as well as how to use that knowledge to pick out the most beautiful chords, in a chord technique called Modal Borrowing. Here is the series this far.…
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I made a quick video on my YouTube channel about the Mixolydian mode. In less than 10 minutes, you will: Understand modes Learn the most usable 3-chord progression to start writing in the Mixolydian mode Hear two contemporary songs that are written using the Mixo mode Enjoy!
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It’s a question I ask of myself all the time. Why write this idea as a song, and not as a poem? A short story? A blog post? An angry rant to a neighbour? What function does a song serve that draws me to it as the vehicle for an idea? One answer is that…
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When I teach lyric writing, the first concept I introduce in any class is the power and impact of sense-based language. I usually start with a sort of psychological magic trick: I read a list of words, then ask people to recall as many as they can. Without mentioning this to the class, I have…
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There is so much advice out there for writers about the importance of habit and ritual in your creative practice. But lately, I have become—frankly—a little suspect of it. The insistence on habit as the conduit of creative output is embodied by the American painter Chuck Close, who famously said, “Inspiration is for amateurs —…
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It always feels as though the seasons do not change gradually, but instead, that the sun takes a sudden jerk around its solar orbit, turns a sharp corner, and within a week the days are shorter by 3 hours, the evenings are cold, and the shadows are long and languid throughout the day. My relationship…