How To Write Songs

Category: Writing Prompts

  • 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…

  • What can any songwriter learn from ‘Flowers’ by Miley Cyrus?

    We are fascinated by what makes songs ignite the imaginations of millions of people around the world. In this case, Flowers by Miley Cyrus has this week broken the Spotify records for number of streams in the first week of its release (over 100 million). In this video, Benny and Keppie break down the song,…

  • 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.…

Weekend Songwriting Intensive - January 4-5

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