Six Tips for Better Songwriting
How to make your music yours
You had been learning your instrument for a while. Maybe you had gotten lessons and could eek out “Stairway to Heaven” well enough that the employees of Guitar Center don’t get irritated with you. You had a poster of your favorite band in your room and, gazing at it one morning, you thought maybe you can do that as well. Maybe this was last month or a decade ago when you decided to try your hand at writing a song or two but for some reason, nothing you write seems to jive with you. It all sounds derivative or cliche or… just not you.
First of all, bear in mind that when you’re first coming out of the gate writing a song, you’re probably not writing a banger. The fact that you were able to compose anything already sets you a cut above the rest, so congratulations are in order there. But I get it, my friend… I get it to the point that I went to a music school for four years just to figure it out. You want to do better, you want to unlock that potential that you know is inside you. The artist’s life is a long journey, filled with lessons that don’t translate from person to person, and you will in time find your voice. In the meantime, here are a few easy tips on how to better actualize yourself in your music.
Have a basic knowledge of music theory — but not much more. Music theory is a bit over-hyped. When you learn a system inside and out, its construction invariably becomes a number game. This is fine when you’re talking about business models, microchips, and other industries that require efficiency and function, but music is not one of those things. Knowing too much about music takes all the fun out of it: you’ll spend most of your time deconstructing the song without actually listening to it. If you try to apply four years of music school in a song, it’s going to turn into a hot mess.
That being said, what you should have is a enough knowledge in music theory to roughly understand what’s happening in a Steely Dan song. That’s about all you’ll need to be able to understand what you hear, yet still keep the mystery and surprise of some music fresh and inspiring. Google up standard chords, scales, and intervals if you haven’t by now. This is the basic language of songwriting and you can learn it fairly quickly even if you’re a casual player. Everything else comes from practice.
Learn all about seventh chords. I feel like the reader probably knows what a seventh chord is, but let’s make sure we’re on the same page. Think of your basic three-note chord: three tones stacked on top of each other in alternating degrees of a scale. You have your root (in a C major chord, this is the C), then two notes above that you have your third, then two above that the fifth. Stack one more note on there and you have a seventh. The beauty of the seventh chord is how greatly it increases your options for sound and tension. A standard three-note chord only has a few flavors but adding a fourth note to that chord blows open the texture and function of the chord you’re playing with. Seventh chords will open up your songs to new worlds of chord progression, melody, and mood and a well-placed seventh chord will catch someone’s attention like the chili powder in a curry.
Stop with the I-V-vi-IV. Can we all stoooop with this chord progression already? And it’s evil partner in crime: the vi-IV-I-V, which is the exact same progression just starting at a different place! This insistent trope has plagued the past generation of popular music. It has done more to homogenize genres into a gelatinous mold of meaningless drivel than MTV did in the 80s. I’m fairly certain that the AI script that produces our modern pop stars keeps arriving back to this chord progression because it sells the most copies with the least amount of effort. You are not an AI and music is not an electrical circuit. Celebrate your inefficiency! Don’t be seduced by the devil, my friend, and exorcise his path from your soul.
Build a good bridge. You’ve sung your chorus twice by now. People get the point and they might be starting to check out. Reel them back in with an awesome bridge. This is the part in the middle of a song where you can let loose for a while with a soaring melody, a kickass solo, or an intriguing change in pace. The contrast of your bridge to the rest of the song will make it stand out, pulling your listener back in at an opportunity where they could have hit “skip.” Now the listener is engaged in your song again, enough that they might have to play it again.
Don’t fish for rhymes. You just wrote a line that you really love but it ends with the word “orange.” Now you’re scrambling for a line that will work with it and your options are very limited… but you really want to use that line! Don’t be seduced by the devil, my friend. This is not a bridesmaid’s dress, you can’t manufacture an ugly line to make the one next to it look prettier, and the hot garbage you wrote to rhyme with your inspired line is going to ruin the entire verse — if not the whole song. Step back, swallow your pride, and rewrite it so that it flows, makes sense, and can be sung without tying your tongue in a knot. Lyrics must function before they can do anything else and bear in mind: a lot of good songs don’t rhyme at all.
Know when to bail. Your song started with a small moment of inspiration, one that you tended to like a budding plant in a garden. With care and talent and passion you fed and watered this seed and now you look upon it, half-grown and full of promise, to see that it might just be the worst song you’ve ever written. The verse sounds tired, the chorus makes you cringe, and there’s this one spot in the melody where your voice always cracks. What are you even singing about?
You have a monster in the making, one that you know should not exist, but you’ve spent so much time and effort trying to turn it into something redeemable. This is sunk costs. It happens. Don’t be tempted by the devil, my friend, throw that song in the garbage immediately! Music is a celebration of inefficiency! God in heaven forbid that be the song that makes you famous and you have to sing it every day of your life.
My friend, you are on the road to a higher state of mind. You have the means through which to take your thoughts out of your head and put them in someone else’s. This is a crucial method of communication that us kooky artist types need to have to compensate for our absence of social skills. Use this power wisely and effectively, and infect your listener with ideas and moods that could very well shift their paradigm into something a little brighter and a little more enlightened. Tap into that neural empathy and leave your mark, however subtle and subconscious, in the human collective. Go forth, my friend, and write music that doesn’t suck.