Tag: Taylor Swift

• February 17, 2023

  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…

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  January 15, 2023

  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:     …

• December 13, 2022

  Top 5 Exercises for Coming Up with Great Song Lyric Ideas—#3: Twisting Cliches

  Clichés are everywhere.  They are encoded into the way we think and express ourselves in such a pervasive way that we simply don’t notice they’re there. Yet there they are, when you’re feeling “under the weather,” or if someone “paints you a picture” of dinner last night; when you’re just “killing time,” or perhaps instead…

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  August 12, 2022

  Writing better lyrics with metaphor magic

  In this video, I show you how to write songs—and specifically lyrics—like Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, and John Mayer. There is a particular type of song and songwriting that these three songwriters have in common—it’s a way to write songs that lots of songwriters use: metaphor songs. I start by defining metaphor, and share the…