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Some lyrics arrive like lightning. Most don’t. Most begin as something much less impressive: a half-formed image, a title you’re not sure about, or a feeling you can’t quite put into words. The problem is, many songwriters assume that if the lyric doesn’t flow, the idea must not be good enough, or that they should…
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I’ve put together a short-and-sweet playlist of lyric-writing tutorials today. The tutorials are designed to show you—quickly and practically—that lyric writing is not a mysterious gift reserved for a special few. There are learnable tools, techniques, and exercises available to anyone with the desire to improve. Each tutorial selected focuses on a different aspect of…
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Power positions are lines of lyric inside your song (and any song you listen to) that naturally command more of a listener’s attention. Because of where they sit in the structure of a section, they are bathed in natural spotlights – a listener will hear them louder and clearer, feel the details you put there,…
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Our next Songwriting Sprint is coming up, and I thought I’d share one of the 4 prompts from the current 8-Week Sprint. You’re welcome to try this yourself, and if you want the structure, support, and accountability of deadlines, feedback, and community—join us for the August Sprint! Listen Like an Anthropologist Prompt You are going…
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Why Finding Something to Write About Is One of the Biggest Songwriting Challenges One of the most persistent challenges songwriters face isn’t finishing songs—it’s knowing where to begin. Whether you’re writing your first song or your hundredth, the same questions often appear whenever you sit down with a blank page: Where do I start? What…
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One of the prompts inside our current Songwriting Sprint is the “3 + 3 Chord Challenge.” The idea is deceptively simple, and we want to share it with you so you can feel its immediate impact in your own writing! The Challenge We are focusing on chords – and I warmly invite you to take…
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You know how to find it. There’s a storytelling mistake that shows up in songs all the time. And it has nothing to do with rhyme schemes or chord choices. It’s this: We bury the most interesting idea. This came up inside one of our live feedback sessions this week — the real, live, slightly…
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Using Song Maps has been one of the most transformative tools I’ve ever learned to take any idea I have, and know how to find a pathway to finishing that song. What’s a Song Map? A Song Map is really very simple: it’s a plan for how your song will start, develop, and escalate. It…
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Writing emotional lyrics doesn’t have to be hard. Discover how lyric structure shapes feeling—and how to break free from 4-line verses.
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I was in Queenstown, New Zealand last week with my best friend from high school. We were there before setting off on a 3-night hike on one of the ‘Great Walks’ of New Zealand — the Kepler Track. Queenstown is stunning — right on a lake, wrapped in mountains, with a kind of Swiss-village energy…