Category: Creative Practice
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Songwriting Group Info and Registration
The idea to offer access to a songwriting group to others comes directly from my own experience in my songwriting group, which I have talked about here on the YouTube Channel. My own songwriting group is the primary reason I wrote more than 20 songs last year, and have written almost 10 songs this year (we’re in May 2022 right now!).…
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6 Songs That Taught Us How to Write Songs
One of the best ways to learn how to write great songs is to learn from great songs and songwriters. In this video, songwriter Ben Romalis and I take 6 songs that each taught us a crucial principle or technique about writing great songs. Drawing from a range of inspirations from Radiohead, Tom Waits, to…
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How to Successfully Network as a Songwriter—my answer to a slightly petulant question on my YouTube channel
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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The 3 Things I Did This Year to Write Over 20 Songs
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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How do you actually get better at songwriting?
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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The Best Method for Writing a Good Song
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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Can you learn to be obsessed?
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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Wintering
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…