How To Write Songs

Tag: austin kleon

  • 6 Songs That Taught Us How to Write Songs

    One of the best ways to learn how to write great songs is to learn from great songs and songwriters. In this video, songwriter Ben Romalis and I take 6 songs that each taught us a crucial principle or technique about writing great songs. Drawing from a range of inspirations from Radiohead, Tom Waits, to…

  • How to Successfully Network as a Songwriter—my answer to a slightly petulant question on my YouTube channel

    I was recently asked a question on my YouTube channel that went something like this: The most important part of building a career as a songwriter is building a network, establishing good contacts, and schmoozing. Could you please tell us how you did that? I’ve actually made it significantly more polite than the question was…

  • My Favourite Blogs

    Here is a list of my favourite blogs right now. I have all of these saved as shortcuts on my iPhone homepage, and recommend them with much clapping and whistling. 1. The Whippet, by McKinley Valentine. What is it? From McKinley herself: Science, history, weirdness and 0% contemporary politics because oh my god sometimes you…

  • Can you learn to be obsessed?

    There is so much advice out there for writers about the importance of habit and ritual in your creative practice. But lately, I have become—frankly—a little suspect of it. The insistence on habit as the conduit of creative output is embodied by the American painter Chuck Close, who famously said, “Inspiration is for amateurs —…

  • 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…