How To Write Songs

Category: writing

  • A Songwriter’s Main Struggle and How to Fix It

    Every songwriter has 2 main struggles: Struggle #1: To consistently make work you are proud of. Struggle #2: To have lots of people listen to and love your work. One […]

  • 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. […]

  • My 6 Favourite Books of 2021

    Top 3 Fiction A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik I snuck this one in in the last week of 2021, and was overwhelmingly grateful to have the sequel, ‘The Last Graduate’ […]

  • George Saunders, Janis Ian, and Paul Simon—Where Meaning Comes From in Story

    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 […]

  • Drunk in the day – and other tips on writing well

    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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • Why write it as a song?

    It’s a question I ask of myself all the time. Why write this idea as a song, and not as a poem? A short story? A blog post? An angry […]

  • 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. […]

  • 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 […]

  • Metaphor in songwriting is alive and well, thanks.

    Many years ago, while living in LA, I heard a Big Shot Industry Dude (cue Beethoven’s 5th…) say: “Songs shouldn’t have metaphors in them. I can’t think of a good […]

  • Writing Tips from George Orwell

    One of the most incisive essays I have ever read on the art of writing is the short and stunning piece, ‘Politics and the English Language‘, written by George Orwell […]

Weekend Songwriting Intensive - January 4-5

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