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by Keppie

How to use simple chords to write great songs

If you want to learn how to write a song, understanding how chords work is essential and in this video we look at how you can create interesting and impactful chord progressions using the basic concept of HOME and AWAY functions.

This fundamental piece of music theory is a valuable tool for songwriters of all levels, and requires nothing more than the basic major and minor chords of a major key.

Key Takeaways:

  1. The ‘I’ chord, also called the tonic, is our ‘home’ chord. It has the most weight of all the chords in a key. We can think of it as the center of the solar system in the major key.
  2. All the other chords are ‘away’ chords; they create tension, where returning to the tonic feels like resolving. It is the musical equivalent of a full stop.
  3. Since the tonic creates the strongest resolution, leaving the tonic OUT of a Verse section, and then using it as the first chord of our Chorus will actually create an incredibly strong impact. It is like night and day.
  4. By leaving the tonic out of the Verse, the impact of introducing it as the first chord of the Chorus is amplified. It can really make the chorus pop, and feel like it is landing with so much power and impact.

For 3 other variations on how to use simple chords to create great songs, check out our mini course, ‘The 5 Most Powerful Songwriting Exercises…Revealed!’ right here:

by Keppie

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.

by Keppie

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.

by Keppie

Breaking down FLOWERS by Miley Cyrus

There’s no better way to learn how to write a song than by deconstructing songs that capture the attention of millions of listeners worldwide; and Flowers by Miley Cyrus has certainly done that, becoming an international hit and breaking Spotify records with over 100 million streams in the first week. So in this video we put Flowers under the microscope and examine what elements make it so appealing to so many people.

by Keppie

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.

by Keppie

Free Songwriter Split Sheet

Co-writing is such a creative, fun, and often essential part of songwriting; we go into great depth on it in our Udemy course, The Art of Co-Writing and Collaboration.

One part of a great collaboration is an open and honest agreement on how to share the ownership of the song’s copyright (hint hint: split it evenly if the song was essentially written from the ground up together). 

However you land on your splits, having a written document of your agreement is essential.

Here, we offer you a standard written split sheet that you can print and use in your co-writes. Make sure all co-writers sign the sheet, and retain a copy for their records.

Registering the copyright of a work is a different process, but this split sheet gives you a written record of your agreement that you can refer to when it comes time to formalising your splits when registering copyrights.

by Keppie

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.””

by Keppie

14-Day Songwriting Challenge: DAY 3

#3. A list.

This poem is unbelievable.

Some Things I Like

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

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by Keppie

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

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by Keppie

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 novel combinations between seemingly unexpected things; to refract the familiar through a prism of new light.

Let’s get to it.

What is a Metaphor Collision?

Metaphor Collisions is an exercise that takes two small lists of random nouns; we then make random collisions between a noun from List 1 and a noun from List 2, and then very quickly spend 2-3 minutes expanding on the collision, developing the new idea that emerges when we compare one thing to another (that has never been compared before!). 

How it works.

Step 1. 

Create 2 lists of random nouns, each with 5 nouns in it. [Remember, a noun is a person/place/object/thing. We know it’s a noun because we can put the words ‘the’, ‘an’, or ‘a’ before it: The ocean. An idea. A collision.]

List 1 can contain any noun at all, concrete or abstract—and works well when there is a smattering of both!

List 2 should exclusively contain concrete nouns—tangible things or objects that you could actually hold, touch, smell, see or hear (as distinct from abstract nouns, which are concepts or ideas. For example: a conversation, personality, freedom). 

Why? Metaphors come alive with imagery, and concrete nouns are the stuff of imagery. When one side of the metaphor is guaranteed to contain imagery, your efforts will generate great rewards.

Here’s an example of 2 lists:

List 1: hospital, haircut, conversation, history, cancer

List 2: river, canyon, ferrari, church, violin

This is a brilliant random word generator. It has a concrete noun generator, as well as a general noun generator (as well as all sorts of other categories which are extremely fun to play with once you’ve got the hand of the basic form of Metaphor Collisions). 

Step 2.

Make a ‘THIS is THAT’ collision, by picking one word from List 1 and one word from List 2. 

For example: “His history was a canyon.”

Note that I’ve added in the pronoun ‘his’, and also picked a tense, ‘was’. This gives the metaphor a sense of character and story. You can pick your pronouns, and experiment with tense. The essence here is the metaphor collision between ‘history’ and ‘canyon.’

Here comes the important bit, where all of the action happens. You’re now going to spend 2 minutes expanding on the metaphor that you have just created. Write a sentence or two that explain and describe how one thing is like the other. 

For example: His history was a canyon—As we got closer, I started to get dizzy at the edge of everything I didn’t know about him.

Tip: remember that a metaphor is when we say ‘x IS y’; a simile is when we say ‘x is LIKE y’. Metaphor is a much more potent and intense kind of language. For the moment, stick with metaphor. 

Step 3.

Continue making random collisions and expanding them for 10 minutes. See how many you can do. Aim for at least 3. 

More examples from these lists:

Her haircut was a church; her natural joy became burdened by the weight of its seriousness.

The conversation was a river; and I was drowning in the undertow of the private jokes I didn’t understand.

The hospital was a violin; a cacophony of high-pitched sounds, but with a highly composed orchestration of doctors, nurses, and machines, every component coming together in the end. 

A few things to notice.

  1. Notice that I am using novel combinations. I am deliberately avoiding any combinations that I have heard before. It’s possible you might get the word ‘love’ in List 1, and the word ‘flame’ in List 2…for the moment, avoid those tropes. 
  2. Notice how I am using words and phrases in the sentences that relate back to the original metaphor image. With ‘river’, I am very deliberately using the words ‘drowning’ and ‘undertow’. With ‘violin’, we have ‘cacophony’, ‘high-pitched’, and ‘composed orchestration’. Using words related to your metaphor is where a metaphor really comes to life. 
  3. Notice that I am not mixing metaphors. When I am expanding the metaphor collision using language related to the metaphor image, I am deliberately avoiding dipping into other metaphors. Mixing metaphor tends to feel chaotic, and ultimately dilutes the power of a single, strong, well-developed metaphor.
  4. Notice in the sentences that I am always coming back to the ‘target idea’—what the sentence is really about. When I say ‘the conversation was a river’, this sentence is really about the conversation. That’s the target idea. The ‘river’ is my metaphor, which is to say, it’s the color that I am using to paint the sentence, but ultimately the most important idea is to describe the ‘conversation’. With the last example, I have deliberately referenced ‘doctors, nurses, and machines’ to make sure that the target idea is never lost inside the metaphor. 

If I had instead written something like:

The hospital was a violin; a cacophony of high-pitched sounds, but with a highly composed orchestration of melodies and rhythms, every component coming together in the end…

…we would lose sight of what the target idea is. We get so tangled up in the metaphor that it starts to sound like we are simply describing a musical performance, not a hospital. Metaphor collisions (and metaphor is general) works best when we apply the metaphor language back to specific elements of the target idea.

How to Use Metaphor Collisions in Your Lyrics

  1. You will find that you come up with ideas and expressions that translate very quickly into lines of lyric. Just like with Sense Writing, you can collect the gems in a separate document, and use them later. You don’t need to take the whole collision, either. Often I like to jettison the actual ‘x is y’ statement, and just keep parts of the expansion; ‘drowning in the undertow of the private jokes’; ‘burdened by the weight of seriousness.’
  2. This is a brilliant brain training exercise, that attunes your perception to see and develop novel combinations in unexpected ways. Even when the individual collisions don’t yield specific lyric ideas, sometimes the most ridiculous ones are the ones that have strengthened this ability the most! ‘The burrito was an aeroplane’. Figuring out the connection creates incredibly strong neural pathways!
  3. Once you have practiced Metaphor Collisions with truly random inputs, you can also start to lightly curate your lists, to direct the results to more emotion-based ideas. The random word generator also has an ‘emotion’ filter. If you fill List 1 entirely with emotions, then you get something like this:

List 1: sorrow, remorse, disappointment, love, anticipation

List 2 (random concrete): sweater, bulb, desktop, flower, hair

Love is a sweater.

Sorrow is a bulb.

Disappointment is a flower.

It truly makes the mind hum with possibility.

Many thanks to my teacher, friend, and mentor Pat Pattison for introducing me to this exercise.

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