Songwriting prompt of the week

Here is the 3rd (of 4) songwriting prompts for the Songwriting Groups I run (if you want more info on the groups, please check it out here).

I’m sharing the prompts here so anyone can join in (though of course, if you want the community, the deadline, and the feedback, jump into a group!).

Here is this week’s prompt:

Open a novel to a random page. Incorporate the first full sentence on the page into your lyric, either in full, or adapted.

Let it cross pollinate with you and your world. How does it connect? What does it make you think of? Does it remind you of anyone you know? How do they make you feel?

Top 5 Songwriting Exercises for Coming Up With Great Song Ideas: #5—Chorus Writing Prompts

What a Chorus is not

I have some important news about a Chorus—news that took me way too long to properly understand:

The Chorus of a song is not just the bit where the lyrics repeat!

If I had realized this a little sooner in my songwriting career, it would have saved me 10 years of learning the hard way.

One other thing that the Chorus is NOT:

The Chorus of a song is not just a summary of the main idea.

Thinking of it as the ‘summary’ idea is likely to lead you to write in generalities, or lead you to an idea that is the ‘average’ point of your story, emotion, or image. 

So what IS a Chorus?

The Chorus of a song is: the RESPONSE to the problem (or conflict, or tension) explored in the verses.

The Chorus houses the peak emotion, the central idea, or core message.

‘Peak emotion’ is critically different from ‘summary idea’. One stands at the top of the mountain; the other is halfway down.

So what kinds of responses are there?

  • The chorus is what most needs to be said.
  • The chorus may be the question that most needs to be answered.
  • The chorus may be the realization or insight that has been learned.
  • The chorus may be the decision that has been made, or the action that will be taken
  • Most importantly, the chorus is not just ‘another idea’, or even a ‘summary idea’, but it is a response to the problem exposed and developed in the verses. 

Chorus Writing Prompts

Below are a series of writing prompts, designed to drill straight to the core idea, central idea, or peak emotion of a song idea. 

Think of these prompts as jenga pieces; you need to push on each one to see which ones move. They won’t all move; but we need to push anyway.

How to use the prompts

The prompts are most effective when you have a song idea on the go; maybe you’ve written a verse or 2, or just some lyric sketches, but you have in your mind a sense of what this song is about, perhaps even a clear scene, situation, or moment in your mind, but no chorus lyrics.

Spend 2 minutes on each prompt. Even if it feels like it isn’t moving much, stick with it for 2 minutes. 

  1. So I realized…
  2. So I decided…
  3. So I’m going to…
  4. That’s why I always say…
  5. What I really need to tell you is…
  6. I’m scared that…
  7. What I really want to happen is…
  8. What I most want to know is (phrased as a question)…
  9. You make me feel…
  10. If I am a ________ then you are a ________ (use metaphor).

A few tips

  • Use for the Verses too: A lot of the writing you do for these prompts can make great lyrics and ideas for the verses too! You are not contractually obliged to use them exclusively in your Chorus. What you will often find, however, is that some of them drive to the emotion heart of your song idea, and are touching that core element that is essential to the Chorus.
  • Look for a Title: as you are exploring the Chorus writing prompts, keep a little searchlight on in your mind that is always looking for a title. It may not happen, but simply turning that light on will help you identify it if it arises as you are writing. This is a useful lens to use when reading over what you have written at the end of 20 minutes. 
  • Writing the Chorus first: Lots of songwriters will write the Chorus of a song first, before writing any of the Verses at all. This is a fun and effective way to write. You can try it out here too, by using your writing to the prompts, plus a strong song title, to craft your chorus, and then expand the Verse lyrics out of the Chorus idea.
  • Repetition is fine: Don’t worry if you find that you are repeating yourself in several of the prompts. Each prompt is a slightly different angle or lens to explore your song’s central idea through. Remember the jenga! Push each one, and see how it moves.

Happy writing.

Download a free copy of the Chorus Writing Prompts PDF here.

Songwriting Prompt of the Week

Today is the second fortnight of the Songwriting Groups I run (if you want more info on the groups, please check it out here).

Here, I’m sharing the prompt from today, as it is a little more unusual than the prompts I normally send.

[The prompts I normally send for Songwriting Group are short phrases, designed to catalyse an idea, rather than anything pedagogical; things like “dangerously close”; “making the bed”; “Babylon hairdo” (Yes, that was actually a prompt…!)]

Here is today’s prompt:

Write a song based on a place, where the place features as a central image of the song.

For example, “The River” by Bruce Springsteen.

“Ladies of the Canyon”, by Joni Mitchell.

Here are some suggestions on a way into this:

  1. Spend 10 minutes Sense writing about one of these places (got the PLACES section of the prompts); OR
  2. Pick a city or town that has special significance to you, and write about it; OR
  3. Where were you when a significant event occurred (either directly to you, or something that impacted you)? Describe the place in detail, and make the place an important aspect of your lyric writing.

Enjoy!

PS – Here is the song I wrote for this prompt! My partner and I agree on most things. There’s one where we don’t: The Stanwell Park Overpass just south of Sydney (aka Sea Cliff Bridge).
I think it’s beautiful.
He thinks it’s awful.

Top 5 Exercises for Coming Up With Great Song Lyric Ideas: #4—Metaphor Sense Writing

Metaphor Sense Writing is a combination of Exercise #1 (Sense Writing) and #2 (Metaphor Collisions).

It’s a way to take a novel combination of ideas—the sun is a bride; aging is a church (for example)—and expand the connection between the two ideas, filling it with rich language that furrows into the rabbit hole of the metaphor.

Here’s how it works.


Step 1. Find an interesting metaphor!

(Use Exercise #2 for this).

Metaphor works best when it is a novel combination of ideas. 

When we make a metaphor, we are using one image as a lens through which we are seeing and describing some other thing. The lens is the metaphor: it’s the colors we are using to paint the picture. But the picture itself is what we are actually describing. 

If I say, “the sky is a mouth, spitting rain and screaming thunder,” my lens is ‘mouth’. That’s the color palette I’m using to describe the sky. The sky is my target idea. 

Metaphor is all about showing something familiar in an unfamiliar way. Its magic sparkle is all in its power to surprise (and delight) a listener.

So when starting with a metaphor, aim for something novel rather than something we’ve heard before.


Step 2. Build a word palette for your metaphor image.

Spend 5 minutes creating a list of words and phrases that are closely related to the metaphor image. Aim for a variety of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and phrases.

For example, let’s say my metaphor is: “her temper is a hurricane”.

Hurricane is a metaphor image.

Here’s my word palette:

Thunder, Lightning, Crash, Swell, Tide, Tidal wave, Flood, Electricity, Surge, Strike, Crack, Crash, Rain, Hale, Clouds, Dark, Grey, Cold, Humid, Air is thick, Eye of the storm

You can use a few extra resources to help you build a rich palette:

  1. Use an online Idiom Dictionary. Use a few different search terms around your metaphor.

For ‘hurricane’, I would also search: ‘rain’, ‘storm’, and ‘weather’. 

  1. Use the ‘related words’ filter on rhymezone.com. 

Sometimes the list can have a few random things in there, but often will throw up lots of useful language related to your search.

  1. Get yourself a hard copy of the Roget’s International Thesaurus. The internet has not yet replicated the awesomeness of this resource, and it is by far the best thing for this job. For a deeper dive into this resource and how to use it for this job, check out this YouTube video from our channel

The aim here is to give yourself lots to choose from, and especially to give yourself options beyond the first and most obvious words associated with your metaphor. 


Step 3. Spend 10 minutes Sense Writing using your metaphor as the prompt.

Write in full sentences (prose). Dip into your word palette, using those words and phrases by applying them to what you are actually describing.

Here’s an excerpt from mine:

The clouds of her mind gathered, darkening in her eyes. Her words were lightning, striking out at the nearest touch point – her voice swelled and spilled, and you hardened like ice. You could sense her humid thoughts, invisible but making everything heavy under them. For days afterwards, her dark mood rumbled on the horizon of your life…


How to use Metaphor Sense Writing in your Lyrics.

  1. Write a Metaphor song

‘Metaphor songs’ are a ‘type’ of song that is entirely based on a strong, central metaphor. The lyrics to these songs almost always express the central metaphor in the Chorus or refrain, and use language related to the central metaphor throughout the rest of the lyric to express and explore the different dimensions of the idea and emotion.

Let’s take a look at one here. I have highlighted all the language in the lyrics that is drawn out of the strong, singular metaphor at the center of the song, ‘Love is Rocket Science’. 

Rocket Science

By Lori McKenna

They say it ain’t complicated
Any fool can understand
Until the fuse is lit and
It blows up in your hand

It all looks good on paper
Step by step, you follow the plan
In the sky watch the desperate vapor
‘Til it blows up in your hand

Love is rocket science
What comes up it must come down
In burning pieces on the ground
We watch it fall
Maybe love is rocket science after all

Not if, but when you crash and burn
Somehow you survive
But you’ve touched the hem of heaven
For a time you felt alive

Love is rocket science
What comes up it must come down
In burning pieces on the ground
We watch it fall
Maybe love is rocket science after all

From the distance in the twilight
Love is such a beautiful thing
Dry your eyes beneath the night sky
And I’ll hold you, I’ll hold you
I’ll hold you like a dream

Love is rocket science
What comes up it must come down
In tragic pieces on the ground
It’s worth it all
Maybe love is rocket science

Here are a few other well-known songs that use the same technique:


  1. Extract the stand-out lines

In spending a little longer on developing a metaphor idea through Metaphor Sense Writing, sometimes you will write a sentence that never would have happened if you weren’t following that trail of crumbs through the forest.

I found myself writing this the other day, while exploring the metaphor, ‘the teacher was a map’:

…she showed me that although the curriculum was the main highway we were traveling, that the best learning I would do would be on the side roads of experience outside the classroom.

Would I write a song about a teacher? Maybe yes (there are some absolutely gorgeous songs about teachers), but also, this line alone stood out to me:

“On the side roads of experience”

That line alone was worth the 10 minutes it took to get there, and it’s important to note: I never would have gotten there if I wasn’t exploring the metaphor. 

Now that I have the line, I can leave behind the initial metaphor. I’m not contractually obliged to use it at all. It’s often the discoveries along the way when we are Metaphor Sense Writing that are the treasures to keep.


  1. Twist an idiom

Here’s a slightly different approach to this exercise. Instead of using a novel combination of ideas, actively seek out a familiar combination, but use Metaphor Sense Writing to add something new and original to it, that turns the familiar into something worth seeing again.

Let’s take something like:

 “eat your words”

There’s a metaphor here that has to do with eating/food.

In spending 10 minutes creating an ‘eating’ word palette, and exploring the metaphor, I wrote:

“Hungry enough to eat our words”

I suggest using an idiom dictionary, either an online version, or even better, a physical version (I use this one), to explore idioms based on a metaphor image. Spend 10 minutes on it, and see what new trails of thought you end up with. It’ll be worth it, I promise.

Here are a few to get you going:

Handed on a silver platter

(word palette: food/serving/restaurant)

In the line of fire

(word palette: fire/war)

Live like a king

(word palette: king/castle)

Go off the deep end

(word palette: pool/swimming)

For more on this, check out Exercise #3.


20 Songwriting Prompts

Wanna know how to write a song?

Start with one of these 20 songwriting prompts that will kickstart your creativity and fuel your songwriting on any given day.

And a huge THANK YOU to the 20,000 subscribers of our YouTube channel who have supported us, inspired us, and contributed so generously to our growing community of musicians and songwriters.

Happy writing.


14-Day Songwriting Challenge: DAY 4

#4. Listen deeply.

This task is excerpted from the wonderful book, ‘The Art of Noticing,’ by Rob Walker:

“The composer Pauline Oliveros was known, among other things, for a practice she called deep listening. This evolved in part from her experience performing with a couple of other musicians in an abandoned cistern in the state of Washington, fourteen feet underground. The group shared a weakness for bad puns and titled a 1989 CD of their recordings in the space Deep Listening. 

But the extraordinary reverb in the cistern really had forced the musicians to listen with deep and extraordinary care to their environment. Thus the performances (there was no audience) prompted them to think in new ways about the relationships between the sonic and the spatial. This led to the Deep Listening Band, Deep Listening workshops and “retreats,” and eventually the Deep Listening Institute. Oliveros later explained that the practice developed into something that “explores the difference between hearing and listening.” 

Hearing is a physical process involving sound waves and the body. We know about it because it is easy to study; listening, the interpretation of those sound waves, is harder to quantify. 

“To hear is the physical means that enables perception,” Oliveros continued. “To listen is to give attention to what is perceived, both acoustically and psychologically.” 

Oliveros’s version of listening encompasses remembered sounds, sounds heard in dreams, even imagined or invented sounds. Elsewhere she referred to auralization (a term borrowed from architectural acoustics) as a kind of sonic corollary to the visual spin we tend to put on imagination. “Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound,” she asserted, one that encompasses “the whole space-time continuum of sounds.” 

Well before arriving at the term deep listening, Oliveros had experimented with many of these ideas, and notably produced a short but influential 1974 text called Sonic Meditations, offering various sets of rather poetic instructions:

“Take a walk at night.” 

“Walk so silently that the bottom of your feet become ears.” 

Most of the highly inventive prompts also involve making sounds, particularly in groups, consistent with her belief that musicality shouldn’t be restricted to musicians. For example, “Choose a word. Listen to it mentally. Slowly and gradually begin to voice this word by allowing each tiny part of it to sound extremely prolonged. Repeat for a long time.” 

You can piece together and modify some of Oliveros’s suggestions to explore deep listening without worrying about compositional goals. Here is one approach to experimenting with the kind of expansive listening that she advocated, borrowing from a few sources, but most notably a “meditation” that was part of a 2011 Deep Listening Intensive in Seattle. Think of this as a means of exploring your aural identity: 

In any space you wish, “listen to all possible sounds.” When one sound grabs your attention, dwell on it. Does it end? Think about what it reminds you of. Consider sounds from your past, from dreams, from nature, from music. 

Now think of a sound that reminds you of childhood; see if you can find something reminiscent of that sound now. Dwell on what you find. Stop here or follow the instruction of that 2011 meditation for as long as you wish: “Return to listening to all sounds at once. Continue in this manner.””


14-Day Songwriting Challenge: DAY 3

#3. A list.

This poem is unbelievable.

Listen to it, the whole way through (listen to the recording here as well as reading it. The experience is beautiful.)

Now: write a list of things you like. 


Get a free copy of the 14-Day Songwriting Challenge eBook

14-Day Songwriting Challenge: DAY 1

#1. Getting past the rust.

Write literally the most cliched lyric you can think of.

Really squeeze that juice. Just write the most trashy, obvious, cliched thing you can muster. String together cliches. Write the cheesiest love song you can.

Google “cliches you should avoid”, and then unavoid them.

Aim for a Verse and Chorus.

Set to music if you have time.

Meta: Today, we are clearing out the gunk. Letting the rusty water run til the clear stuff comes. For more on this (a 2 min, and very excellent read), check this out


Get a free copy of the 14-Day Songwriting Challenge eBook

Top 5 Exercises for Coming Up with Great Song Lyric Ideas—#3: Twisting Cliches

Clichés are everywhere. 

They are encoded into the way we think and express ourselves in such a pervasive way that we simply don’t notice they’re there. Yet there they are, when you’re feeling “under the weather,” or if someone “paints you a picture” of dinner last night; when you’re just “killing time,” or perhaps instead “time flies”…all cliches.

Cliches are useful. They come preloaded with meaning. The problem is that they are dull.

So how can we use clichés in a way that exploits their pre-loaded meaning, but rescues them from their mediocrity? 

Strategy 1: Replacing

  • Find a cliche with an image inside it, or a word that is easily replaced.
  • Make sure that the rest of the sentence still sounds like the original cliche.

The aural fireworks happen because of the element of surprise—something familiar with something new inside of it.

For example: We fight like…rust and rain.

What else do we fight like (the key here is: anything unrelated to cats and dogs…)?

Maybe we fight like: 

  • tree roots and concrete
  • secrets and loose lips
  • a toupee and a sudden breeze

Any of these is not only more interesting, but the very fact of subverting the expected image shines an even brighter light on your alternative combination.

Song Example

I wanna drive you…wild, wild, wild

From ‘Wild,’ by John Legend


Strategy 2: Extending

  • Take the image that is being used in the cliché, keep the image, but elaborate on it using words and images that are related to that image.

For example: I was drowning as the conversation flowed

The cliché of “flowing conversation” is extended by adding in more water imagery, which is the base image that gave us the cliché in the first place.

Another example: Hungry enough to eat our words

You can see that by elaborating on the image contained within the cliché, the image itself comes back to life. We now re-see the image as it was originally intended.

Song Example

Taylor Swift and Liz Rose did a beautiful job of this in Taylor’s song, “All Too Well”:

It was a masterpiece til you tore it all up


Strategy 3: Inverting

  • Turn a negative into a positive; or
  • State the opposite of the known cliche

For example: The grass is never greener

Song Example

Time won’t fly

From ‘All Too Well,’ Taylor Swift and Liz Rose.


Strategy 4: Swapping

Strategy 4 relies on the cliché using two images, or using verbs that can also easily become nouns, and vice versa.

For example, let’s take: There’s no time like the present
And turn it into: There’s no present like time

You can see that this twist relies on the word “present” having two distinct meanings, which work in both contexts. The best way to find these is to brainstorm or research as many clichéd expressions as you can, and testing out whether an inversion will yield anything juicy like this.

One more. Let’s take: Storm in a teacup
And make it: A teacup in a storm

Even though the meanings of the specific images don’t change, the inversion creates a new image with a fresh connotation.


Strategy 5: Contrasting

  • Add to the cliché by using a contrasting image (even by combining two clichés into a novel combination).

For example: I’ll make short work of being long gone

The key here is finding clichés that contain one main image, then using the opposite or contrasting image to recast the original. When we talk about opposites or contrasts, we can think about things like: future/past; day/night; fire/water; best/worst.

Songwriters in the past have used this technique to generate snappy titles:

“The Night We Called It a Day” (Thomas Adair and Matt Dennis)

“The Last Thing I Needed Was the First Thing This Morning” (Gary P. Nunn and Donna Farar, recorded by Willie Nelson)

“Full Moon and Empty Arms” (Buddy Kaye and Ted Mossman, recorded by Frank Sinatra)

This strategy runs the risk of getting cheesy pretty quickly, so approaching it with sensitivity and nuance is required to prevent the cheese from overwhelming the platter.


Strategy 6: Verb object

  • Change the object of the active verb
  • This relies on clichés that have an important verb as part of their construction.

For example, we can take: Play the devil’s advocate
And make it: Play the piano like the devil’s advocate

Or: Break the ice
Becomes: Break him like ice

And Taylor on the subject:
Break me like a promise

From “All Too Well”.


You don’t need to avoid cliches. 

They are too valuable, too pre-loaded with meaning to abandon altogether. Instead, we can take advantage of the meaning they carry with them by twisting them into new shapes and colors. In fact, by altering them ever so slightly, we not only end up bringing the dead back to life, but the element of surprise acts like a switch on the ears of your listeners.

The images you choose will be bathed in the special light of surprise.


Get a free copy of the 14-Day Songwriting Challenge eBook

Photo credit: Instagram (Taylor Swift)