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I was recently asked a question on my YouTube channel that went something like this: The most important part of building a career as a songwriter is building a network, establishing good contacts, and schmoozing. Could you please tell us how you did that? I’ve actually made it significantly more polite than the question was…
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A great chorus is more than just the bit where the lyrics repeat. This video dives deep into the craft of finding and writing great chorus lyrics. We look at what a great choruses really do (beyond merely repeating), and look deeply at one of the most important concepts in great chorus writing: RECOLOURING. We…
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In a recent newsletter by one of my favourite writers, George Saunders, he writes of one of his characters in a short story, The Falls: “A story has a surface dimension (let’s call it the overstory) and another, deeper, dimension (the understory). The overstory, in this case, is whether Morse will save the girls. That’s…
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…because an awesome person you didn’t know before creates a beautiful graphic recording of a video you made, not knowing who would receive it, or whether it would be helpful: As I was checking in on Instagram the other day, I saw that Chris had tagged me in a post, and saw this incredible drawing.…
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In this video, I share the three pillars of my creative practice that ensure I write even when not inspired, and have given me the structure to write over 20 songs this year. Producing lots of creative work is more often about the habits, practices, and environments that we build, rather than about inspiration alone.…
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Writes William Zinsser in, “On Writing Well”: …you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up. You must know what the essential tools are and what they were designed to do. Extending the metaphor of carpentry, it’s first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly to drive nails. Later…
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Professional songwriters often need or want to write in specific genres. This video explains 5 different ways to understand and emulate musical genre. This video was made for a Songwriting class I teach at Collarts in Melbourne, Australia. A major project during the semester is to write a song to a specific brief provided by…
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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…