A common complaint that many songwriters have is that they’re unable to finish their songs. You can easily avoid this by ensuring that you have a clear concept before trying to develop your song idea. In this article, we’ll talk about how having a concept is the first step in the songwriting process.
In the case of songwriting, a concept refers to having a general idea of what you want to write. Famous songwriter Jimmy Webb provides a great example in his book “June Smith”, as follows:
“I want to write a song about someone who goes through acute mood swings from euphoria to emotional exhaustion. I love this person and want to address the song to him.”
A song concept can also just be an interesting angle of approach. For example, “I want to write a love song about a person I want to marry but I’m going to address the song to the person’s father who’s refusing to let me propose.
By establishing your concept, it will help you when you’re writing your song map later on in the last step of the process.
In the meantime, click here to download a free PDF song map template that will help you finish every song you start:
A Song Concept Isn’t a Song Idea
It’s important to note that having a song concept is not the same as having a song idea. In order for a concept to be an idea, you require a title.
To follow up on the previous excerpt from Jimmy Webb’s book “June Smith”, the songwriter said the following:
“If, however, you add the following sentence: ‘I want to call the song Problem Child,’ then you have an ‘idea,’ even though the song may not end up being called ‘Problem Child’”.
Conclusion: Part 1 of The Songwriting Formula – The Concept
It’s important for us to establish our concept during the songwriting process. This allows us to have a solid base upon which to build our song. In addition, it also ensures that we don’t lack a sense of direction in our songwriting.
Do you have folders full of half-finished songs? This is a common problem and you’re definitely not alone. In this article, we’ll go through a songwriting formula I’ve learnt that has allowed me to know whether a song idea will work, and write better songs faster.
This formula is all about finding a writable idea. A writable idea is the combination of a concept, a title and a song map. We’ll go into each of these individual components in the later sections of this article.
For now, click here to download a free PDF song map template that will help you finish every song you start:
When you have these 3 components together, it gives your song structure and a plan. This ensures that you don’t feel as if you’re just groping around in the dark during the songwriting process.
Part 1 – The Concept
In this case, having a concept means having a general idea of what you want to write about. Jimmy Webb provides the following as an example of a song concept in his book “Tune Smith”:
“I want to write a song about someone who goes through acute mood swings from euphoria to emotional exhaustion. I love this person and want to address the song to him.”
It’s important to note that just having a song concept is not enough to make a song idea. In order to have a song idea, you must have a song title.
Part 2 – The Title
Having a song title does two important things. Firstly, it provides your song an anchor – otherwise popularly known as a hook. This is important because coming up with a song idea is all about limiting your options and possibilities. Aside from that, a title also ensures that you have a target for all of your lyrics.
For example, the song “First Times” by Ed Sheeran is a song about him celebrating all of the daily first times he gets with his partner. In the first line of the song, he describes the first time he played Wembley Stadium. This creates contrast to all of the first times he talks about in the song with the love of his life.
A title gives you destination, which in turn gives you direction. That being said, this doesn’t mean that you have to stick with the same title throughout the songwriting process. What’s important is that choosing a title gives you momentum and it’s that momentum that will help push you forward to further develop your song.
Part 3 – The Song Map
A song map is having an idea in your mind about how you could approach this title from at least two different angles, where the meaning and emotion will grow as the verses progress. The concept plus the title need to contain a clear way in which your song idea will develop.
As an example, let’s look at the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams. Below is the song map we’re able to extract when we examine the lyrics:
Verse 1: How happiness feels
Verse 2: The idea of obstacles to happiness is introduced
This is actually a really useful song map for writing songs to convey a clear mood or emotion – which is very common in film and TV songs. We can even replace the emotion “Happy” with any other emotion to create a different song.
Below are two examples of universal song maps which you could use:
Problem -> Intensification -> Escalation: A great example of a song that uses this song map, is “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room” by John Mayer. The concept of this song is “A relationship that is on the brink of collapse”, and the title is “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room”. The song starts with the narrator sensing that there’s a problem between the two of them.
This then turns into them starting to pick fights with each other, followed by the two of them trying to hurt each other. We can see from the progression of this song’s story that it clearly follows the song map Problem -> Intensification -> Escalation.
Situation -> Context -> Consequence: For this song map, we tend to start in the present moment. This is followed by us trying to zoom out from the situation to provide some context on the present moment. The final part is where we introduce the consequences of the situation that was introduced. Often, the introduction of the consequences is the emotional heart of the song.
A great example is “The House That Built Me” by Miranda Lambert. In this song, the situation that’s presented is Miranda knocking on her childhood home door. Then, we’re given some context as to why this action matters to her. Lastly, the emotional consequence of leaving her childhood home is made clear in bridge.
Conclusion: An Easy 3-Part Songwriting Formula
Although this songwriting formula is useful, it’s important to remember that by no means is it the be-all-end-all of songwriting. There’s no one right way to write songs. However, knowing this formula will provide you with something to go on when you feel stuck during the songwriting process. This way, you can put an end to unfinished songs for good.
If you would like more details, explanations and examples, then be sure to check out the video now
Turn your inspiration into beautiful songs with step-by-step guidance through two professional songwriting methods. By the end of this course, not only will your tool belt be stocked; you’ll have a plan and a method for finishing your songs – all of them:
The song “Let It Go” from the Disney musical Frozen is a song that solves an age-old problem that songwriters face: how to repeat something, but make it get more interesting, not less interesting. So, whether you’re into Disney or not, take a moment to read this blog post and learn the crucial songwriting tricks that “Let It Go” uses.
Repetition is a fundamental element of songwriting. Listeners don’t just enjoy hearing something repeated; they need it. It’s the repeating part that draws them in, creating an emotional connection with the song. However, the challenge lies in ensuring that each repetition feels fresh and emotionally resonant rather than becoming stale or predictable.
For example, if you tell the same joke again and again using the same punch line, the joke gets increasingly less funny. Similarly, if each of your verse sections use the same words or imagery, then your song will become less interesting and get less of an emotional reaction.
This is a problem that many songwriters struggle to overcome, and it’s something that “Let It Go” solves very well.
Analysing “Let It Go”
Before we jump into some techniques we could use to overcome this problem, let’s take a look at how “Let It Go” does it.
“Let It Go” is not only the title of the song, but also its hook. In line with that, the phrase is repeated multiple times throughout the song. However, instead of becoming dull, the phrase “Let It Go” means something different each time it’s sung. Below are the different meanings of the hook throughout the song:
Letting Go of Expectations: The first time Elsa sings “Let It Go,” she sheds the weight of other people’s expectations, revealing her true self and powers to the world. She is letting go of the person she’s expected to be.
Letting Go of Limits: In the second instance, she lets go of her own self-imposed limitations on her powers. She’s no longer bound by rules, and she’s eager to explore the extent of her abilities. This shift in meaning helps the emotion grow and gain power, rather than lose it.
Letting Go of Relationships and the Past: Finally, in the third iteration, we understand that Elsa is actually letting go of the past. She is severing her identity and becoming someone new.
Each time Elsa sings the same words, they take on new layers of meaning and emotion, creating a captivating story that resonates with listeners.
Technique #1: Title Strategies
The first technique we can use to create interesting repetition in a song is title strategies. This means that we should try to choose a title that can be re-colored from different angles.
Instead of looking for just any memorable or interesting phrase, look for phrases that could be approached from different angles. We can apply this thinking even as we’re brainstorming for titles by asking ourselves:
Are there at least two angles from which I could approach this title?
Are the two angles able to be related to the core idea of the song, but not take the same approach?
Once we’ve decided that, then we can use the different angles as different parts of our song. For example, take the phrase “No one but me”. We could approach the phrase as follows:
All alone, there’s … “No one but me”
No one has answers…”No one but me”
I don’t need … “No one but me”
The 3 different meanings can all be used as different song sections, which would then serve to further deepen our song’s story.
Another important part about this process is to try and structure your thoughts in the form of a song map.
And to download a free PDF song map template, click here:
Technique #2: Trigger Lines
The second technique involves the use of trigger lines, which are the lines immediately before the repeating chorus. These lines “trigger” the meaning of the chorus into something new with each iteration. They’re called trigger lines because their proximity to the hook or chorus or title of the song triggers its meaning into that repeating thing
To give you a clearer idea of how they’re used, the trigger lines from “Let It Go” have been highlighted in the image below:
One way to use trigger lines is to reverse engineer them. First, ensure that you have your title and a song map. You also need to have a clear idea as to the different ways that you’d like to approach the title. Then, start at the end of a section and work backwards to write your trigger lines.
Sting has previously talked about this in a Sodajerker podcast. In it, he talks about reverse engineering his sections from the titles or from the important lines that he wants to put at the end of sections
Conclusion: Let It Go – A Lesson in Songwriting
Disney’s “Let It Go” demonstrates that the art of repetition in a song is not magic, but the result of carefully crafted technique. As songwriters, we should learn from songs such as these and consciously employ these techniques to create songs that people will listen to over and over again.
If you would like more details, explanations and examples, then be sure to check out the video now
Level up your songwriting with five radically practical exercises used by professional songwriters around the world:
Clichés are great. They’re relatable, well-known and convey what we need to in a short and sweet way. However, because of all these same traits, they can also come off as dull and overused. In this blog post, we take a look at pairing – a method to flip around clichés to turn them into something new.
Pairing requires us to think of clichés as predictable word pairings instead of just famous phrases that we know. Some examples are “Hot and cold”, “Soft and hard” or “Up and down”. These are all pairings that very much make sense, as we’ve learnt them since we were children.
Predictable pairings need not be confined to only images. We could also use predictable rhyme pairings such as “Pain and rain”, “Love and above” and “Fire and desire”. The pairing method involves replacing a part of the predictable phrase with a different word, so as to create new and unexpected pairings in the process. So, for example, replace the word “Cold” in “Hot and cold” with something else.
If you’d like to experiment with this method, you can download this free PDF eBook entitled “The 5 Best Songwriting Exercises for Writing Great Lyrics”:
How to Practice Pairing
Take a phrase such as “If you are a bird, then I am the ___”. Then, fill in the blank with ten different kinds of words.
At the start of this exercise, you might come up with predictable words to fill in the blank with, such as “Wind”, “Sky” or “Clouds”. However, this isn’t a problem as it’s good to get the more predictable words out the way first, so that we can come up with more creative and interesting pairings later.
As an example, a cool word we can fill in the blank with is the word “Rifle”, to form the phrase “If you are a bird, then I am the rifle”. This paints a picture of a sort of toxic relationship between two people, as one exists to the detriment of the other. In fact, this line is actually used in a song called “The Bird and The Rifle” by Lori McKenna.
Conclusion: Flip Method #6 – Pairing
Crafting great lyrics takes time, effort and practice. Although it requires some extra thought from us, it’s still important to use the methods we’ve learnt such as pairing, to create lyrics that are both distinct and relatable.
So many songwriters default to clichés when they write their lyrics. This is completely understandable – after all, clichés are well-known and relatable. However, they are also uninteresting and stale. In this blog post, we’ll discuss a simple technique we call “Swapping”, that can be used to create new phrases from old clichés.
Swapping is when we take a cliché or idiom that has two words or images in it, and actually swap their positions. This method relies on finding clichés that actually make sense when you swap them around.
If you’d like to experiment with this method, you can download this free PDF eBook entitled “The 5 Best Songwriting Exercises for Writing Great Lyrics”:
Examples of Swapping
Let’s have a look at the cliché “There’s no time like the present.” If we swap around the words “Present” and “Time”, we instead get the phrase “There’s no present like time”. Whilst the original cliché refers to how we should live in the moment, the swapped one instead implies how precious time is.
Another interesting cliché we could look at swapping is “Storm in a teacup”, which means a great outrage or excitement over a trivial matter. This can be swapped around to “Teacup in a storm”. The swapped version of the cliché paints for us a picture of someone who is able to maintain their calm no matter the situation. However, because we’re already acquainted with the original cliché, it still feels relatable despite meaning something entirely different.
Conclusion: Flip Method #5 – Swapping
Swapping is a really creative technique that can allow us to entirely change the meaning of clichés whilst still maintaining a semblance of their original form. This not only challenges our listeners to think differently about things, but also helps us find ways we never imagined to express ourselves with.
Turn your inspiration into beautiful songs with step-by-step guidance through two professional songwriting methods. By the end of this course, not only will your tool belt be stocked; you’ll have a plan and a method for finishing your songs – all of them:
Clichés are an integral part of songwriting, but they can sometimes become stale and lose their impact. In this blog post, we’ll discuss inverting – which is one of the ways we can switch up well-known clichés, and create memorable lyrics.
Inverting a cliché involves taking a familiar expression and presenting its opposite. It’s like turning a negative into a positive or a positive into a negative, which can lead to interesting results. For instance, consider the cliché, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” By inverting it, we get, “The grass is never greener on the other side,” which presents an entirely different meaning from the usual cliché.
You could even try to add some depth into the cliché as you’re inverting it. Take the cliché “Actions speak louder than words” as an example. We could flip it so that it instead reads “Actions cower in the shadow of words”. This not only allows to bring new meaning to the cliché, but also adds greater depth by creating more imagery.
However, it’s to be noted that this will not work for all types of clichés. If a cliché has no clear opposite to it, or would just sound strange inverted, then this method wouldn’t be suitable to use.
If you’d like to experiment with this method further, you can download this free PDF eBook entitled “The 5 Best Songwriting Exercises for Writing Great Lyrics”:
Examples of Inverting
The following are some examples of inverting popular clichés:
Cliché: Think outside the box Inverted: Think, confined in the box
Cliché: I’ve got my plate full Inverted: My plate is empty
Cliché: There are plenty more fish in the sea Inverted: The fish are sparse in the sea
Cliché: Lost track of time Inverted: Keeping track of time
Conclusion: Flip Method #4 – Inverting
Inverting clichés allows us to take a different approach to breathing life into our lyrics. By doing so, we ensure that our songwriting isn’t plagued by overused, and boring phrases. Thus, creating memorable but distinct lyrics.
Clichés are well-known and relatable. In fact, that’s a large part of the reason that we as songwriters even use them. However, because they’re so well-known, they’re also often stale and overused. In this blog post, we’ll talk about how to add depth to your clichés by extending them.
The process of extending clichés involves taking a familiar expression and adding new words or images that are directly related to the original idea. For example, consider the cliché expression “The conversation flowed.” By doubling down on water imagery, we can extend the cliché and instead say “As the conversation flowed, I started to drown in the undercurrent of everything I didn’t understand.” This not only reinforces the water imagery but also subverts the expected meaning of the cliché.
Even a short extension could help shed new light on an old cliché. We could say “The conversation flowed like honey.” Instead of conjuring up smooth, easy dialogue, we now envision a slow, drawn-out exchange that oozes with depth and complexity. By extending clichés, songwriters can challenge a listener’s assumptions, thus keeping them engaged and intrigued.
If you’d like to experiment with this method further, you can download this free PDF eBook entitled “The 5 Best Songwriting Exercises for Writing Great Lyrics”:
How to Practice Extending
In order to practice this, you could Google search the term “Common clichés”, and see what comes up. Then pick a cliché and try to extend it.
As an example, we could pick the cliché “Ate our words”. Instantly when we see this phrase, we make a connection between eating, food and being hungry. Then, we could extend it by saying something like “We were so hungry we ate our words”. This way, we would have created completely new meaning out of a very familiar phrase.
Examples of Extending
An amazing example of extending is Joni Mitchell’s song “Case of You”. The following are some of the lyrics from the chorus:
“You’re in my blood like holy wine Tastes so bitter and so sweet I could drink a case of you darling And still be on my feet”.
By saying she could drink a “Case of you”, she extends on the idea that she thinks of this person like alcohol. Not only that, but she also implies how in love she is with them by saying she would still be on her feet after drinking a case of them. In actuality, it’s impossible to drink a case of any alcohol and still stay standing.
Another artist who is great at doing this, is Taylor Swift. In her song “All Too Well”, she says the line “We were a masterpiece until you tore it all up”. At first, she says that “We were a masterpiece”, which is just a cliché way of saying that something was beautiful or amazing. Then, she extends on this by saying “Until you tore it all up”, which then paints a picture of someone entirely destroying something, implying that the relationship ended badly because of them.
Conclusion: Flip Method #3 – Extending
Clichés don’t have to be entirely avoided. If we instead use them as launchpads and practice extending them, we’ll be able to provide so much more meaning to our songs, thus making them far more memorable to our listeners.
Turn your inspiration into beautiful songs with step-by-step guidance through two professional songwriting methods. By the end of this course, not only will your tool belt be stocked; you’ll have a plan and a method for finishing your songs – all of them:
The importance of studying your heroes is often overlooked by most when learning the art of songwriting. Through this blog post, you will learn why studying your heroes is important, as well as how to use what you’ve learnt from them in your own writing.
Merely learning how to play your favourite songs is a great start to your songwriting journey, but that doesn’t mean you should stop there. You also need to actively pick them apart and observe why the songwriters make the choices that they do. Examples of aspects which are useful to analyse in particular, are chord progressions and melodies.
To illustrate this, let’s have a look at the song “Someone Like You” by Adele.
By observing the chord progression of the song, we can see that she avoids the tonic chord in the pre-chorus of the song. This makes sense, as it’s the job of the pre-chorus to build tension. Through only bringing back the home chord in the chorus, Adele really makes it bloom and stand out.
In addition, if you learnt to sing the song or picked apart its melody, you’ll find that she never sings a note in her verses that’s higher than the first note of the chorus. She does hit a high note later on again in the chorus in order to build it up, but she never allows the melody notes of the verse to go higher than the chorus. This helps build anticipation and really put a spotlight on the chorus.
This active process of taking things apart and putting them back together allows us to grasp the components that make a song unique and memorable.
You can find out more about other exercises to improve your songwriting in the free PDF ebook, “The 5 Best Songwriting Exercises for Writing Great Lyrics.” Click on the image to download:
Turn Imitation into Emulation
After analysing songs from your heroes, it’s important to graduate from imitation into emulation. This entails not only mimicking the surface aspects of our heroes’ work but also seeking to understand their thinking and perspective. In short, we should not seek to merely look like our heroes, but instead seek to see like our heroes do.
As we embrace their artistic mindset, we begin to cross-pollinate ideas from various songs and generate our own unique artistic voice.
If you’re interested in looking for some specific examples on how we can emulate instead of just imitate, then check out our video entitled ‘6 Ways to Steal Great Chord Progressions’
Conclusion: Study Your Heroes
Becoming a great songwriter is a process that requires lots of determination, hard work and persistence. Studying your heroes is one of the great ways you can improve your songwriting, and ensure you get closer to your vision of your creative aesthetic.
Consider the commonly known cliché “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”. It’s very relatable because it’s known so well, but at the same time, that makes it predictable. And when something is predictable, it becomes boring. In this blog post, we’re going to discuss another method we can use to flip clichés, that is known as magnifying.
Magnifying a cliché involves focusing on a particular aspect or detail rather than using the cliche itself. This creative technique allows you to shed new light on familiar themes, thereby allowing your lyrics to resonate with listeners in unexpected ways.
If we listen to Roxy Music’s 1975 hit song titled “Love Is the Drug”, we can hear the line “Love is the drug and I need to score”. When we magnify a cliché, we don’t just outright say the line “Love is the drug”. Instead, we expand further on things like what kind of drug, what the drug does to us and how we feel our relationship with this drug is.
If you’d like to experiment with this method further, you can download this free PDF eBook entitled “The 5 Best Songwriting Exercises for Writing Great Lyrics”:
An Example of Magnifying
An amazing example of magnifying can be heard in Lorde’s song titled “Writer in The Dark”.
In this song, she uses the line “I still feel you now and then slow like pseudoephedrine”. Through this, Lorde is magnifying the love-is-a-drug metaphor in a unique way. Not only does she tell us specifically what kind of drug it is, but she also tells us the effect that the drug has on her.
By choosing pseudoephedrine instead of a glamorous drug like cocaine, it shows how she feels about their relationship, and paints this picture of her trying to recover from a fairly inane thing.
Conclusion: Flip Method #2 – Magnifying
Magnifying clichés presents a powerful tool for creating depth and originality in songs. By zooming in on specific details, songwriters can avoid clichés and instead write lyrics that stand out while being relatable.
A common struggle among beginner songwriters is the notion that they can only write about experiences that have personally happened to them. Here, we discuss how to walk the fine line between truth and fact when songwriting.
Although they sound similar, the reality is that you can actually convey truth without describing all of the facts. As songwriters, our job is not like that of journalists – we don’t have to write the autobiographical truth of things. Instead, our job is to capture the emotions of moments or situations, and this grants us creative license to bend truth if necessary.
For example, referencing the specific details of a pet’s death may diminish the impact of grief in a song. Instead, focusing on the emotional essence of loss can resonate more powerfully with others who have experienced similar emotions.
How to Balance Truth and Fact
There is no easy answer as to how we should go about balancing truth and fact. However, below are some methods that will help you in excluding the details in moments that might result in diminishing the truth behind them.
Sense Writing
In sense writing, you use all of your senses to try and describe a moment you have in your mind. For example, if you wrote about your pet dying, you could write about things like:
How did it make your heart/ muscles/ lungs/ skin/ fingers feel?
How did your perception of the world change?
How did the light alter?
Through using the details of that day, you’ll be able to create a song that is relatable to anyone who has experienced that kind of loss, while also conveying the truth of what happened.
You can find out more about sense writing and other exercises in the free PDF ebook, “The 5 Best Songwriting Exercises for Writing Great Lyrics.” Click the image below to download:
Using a Persona
Writing using a character or a persona might sometimes help us in bringing out core truths that we might not be able to express in our autobiographical selves. Examples of famous songwriters who have used this technique are Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Jason Isbell.
A more modern example is the song Bury a Friend by Billie Eilish, as she has previously talked about how the song was written from the perspective of a monster under a bed.
Conclusion: Balancing Truth and Fact
Remember that you shouldn’t be limited to autobiographical facts when writing a song. After all, the old adage “Write what you know” doesn’t just mean “Write the facts you know”. It also means “Write the emotions you know”.
Turn your inspiration into beautiful songs with step-by-step guidance through two professional songwriting methods. By the end of this course, not only will your tool belt be stocked; you’ll have a plan and a method for finishing your songs – all of them.
