How To Write Songs

Category: Song Starters

  • 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…

  • 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: 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: Thinking…

  • 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,…

  • Free eBook: The 14-Day Songwriting Challenge

    Get a free copy of the 14-Day Songwriting Challenge—a series of daily writing prompts designed to take less than 30 minutes, and to focus your creative energy.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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 2

    #2. Starting in motion. Write a verse (with lyrics and melody). Instead of I V vi IV (the most used 4-chord progression in pop music of the last 40 years), try IV I V vi. In the key of C, this would be:      F    C    G    AmIn the key of A:     …

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • Top 5 Exercises for Coming Up with Great Song Lyric Ideas—#2: Metaphor Collisions

    This exercise is one of my all-time favorites. It is the fastest way to show yourself that you are capable of coming up with totally original, unique ideas and ways to express yourself that no one has ever uttered before. More importantly, this exercise trains your brain to see the world like a songwriter—to make…

  • Top 5 Exercises for Coming Up With Great Song Lyric Ideas—#1: Sense Writing.

    In this series, I’ll go through my all-time Top 5 Exercises for generating lyric ideas, whether I’ve got a song idea going already or not.  These exercises don’t require inspiration. They mostly require 10 minutes and a pen. Just like anything in life, you can get better at writing great lyrics with practice. I hope…

  • Starting with loops is one of the most enjoyable and effective ways to spark new ideas and breathe life into your songwriting process. In this video, we write a whole song from scratch using loops as inspiration – featuring the sample-based instrument ‘Chromatic’ from LANDR. Save 30% now with this coupon: GETLANDRWRITESONGS30OFF LANDR Studio includes…

  • Examples of Sense Writing

    The first exercise I run in any lyric writing class is called ‘Sense Writing,’ which is essentially the same as Pat Pattison’s Object Writing (which you can find out more about here). I’ve written before about Sense Writing, and recently put out a YouTube video that explains it, which you can watch here: It’s one…

  • Modes Made Easy for Songwriters

    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!

  • 120 Sense Writing Prompts

    If you’re already familiar with Sense Writing (aka Object Writing), feel free to skip ahead to the prompts below. If Sense Writing is new to you, here’s a little primer. What is Sense Writing? Sense Writing is a timed 10-minute writing exercise, in which you take a prompt, and use that prompt as a gateway…

  • Can you really teach someone to write better songs?

    I so often get asked whether it’s really possible to teach someone how to write a song. There still seems to be a mysterious veil of magic and witchcraft about it, that is very fuelled by interviews with songwriters talking about channeling the muse. It turns out that songwriting is really like anything else. You…

  • Songwriters on songwriting

    I’ve been baffled lately that there aren’t more songwriters in the world who write about writing. Luckily, there are centuries worth of novelists, essayists, and other author types who have written so lucidly and honestly about the craft of writing, its messiness, its need for discipline. (Some of my favourites are On Writing by Stephen…

  • Lyric Writing Masterclass March 16 2020

    Can songwriting actually be taught? Can your lyrics actually improve, or are you just born Bob Dylan? Author Ann Patchett beautifully writes: “Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?” Great writers know that while we must always “leave room for the…

Weekend Songwriting Intensive - January 4-5

Ignite 2025 with an immersive weekend of songwriting, led by Keppie and Benny.