How Do I Write A Song?

by Paul Mowbray

Move the song as quickly as possible to a complete listenable form using dummy lyrics if necessary. Record it and listen to it in different environments. Decide what works and what doesn't. Change it. Repeat this process. Observe the rollercoaster ride of the revision process of feeling, commitment, judgement, change, etc.. Songwriters sometimes finish tunes ten years later. Sometimes ten minutes later. They share this process with other artists.

Study a vast amount of high quality material. Understand what is going on in terms of form, melody, harmony, rhythm, and lyrics. That's a big order. Never ends. The building of an understanding of what others have done successfully is your big library of options when you are writing. You will remember the solutions at all kinds of levels. You are not copying, you are responding with your own original work.

Try ideas and finish them. Then play them for others. Do this right away. You have to complete the cycle. Write and perform 100 songs to get 10, don't be working on one great song while planning 100.

To do the above three points you're going to have to put in a fair bit of time writing songs and studying. Better work it into your daily schedule. The creative mind can work at all different levels almost all the time. So touch base with the writing regularly, even if you just budget 20 minutes a day for it.

Find out what other songwriters you admire have to say about songwriting. Read the literary critics and the poets you like. Find the music and art and life that inspires you.

Do whatever it takes to develop your awareness--now I am thinking, now I am judging, now I am running with the creative rush, now I am emotional, now I am analyzing, now I am brainstorming; now I am enjoying the taste of coffee. With awareness comes the power to let go, to move in and out of the necessary states.

You are developing your creative intelligence. It is akin to your intuition. You are following your nose and your gut about what seems right to you. When something feels wrong it usually is, when something feels right it usually is. It's all you have to go on in getting down that lyric and that groove anyway. So make decisions fast and try them out. Be a ruthless reviser of what you've got down. What was really happening usually only comes to our understanding later, if at all. We don't really know anything. But we can write songs.

Songs are about something, expressive of life experience. When you are deciding options about melody, lyric, harmony, groove, etc., always remind yourself of what the song is about and see if you can creatively make what you are doing further support the song. What the song is about is not something you will be able to put into words, but it will grow or wither depending on how you treat it.

Writers will often express discontent with songs that others consider their masterpieces. So don't be a perfectionist. On the other hand, experience that too. I mean what is a perfectionist to you? An idealist? A romantic? A realist?

I like a good wine. Don't become a raging alcoholic though. Poets talk about wine a lot, all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Chinese. Now I'm not advising drinking to help with the writing. There's a great Malbec I would recommend though.

Be competitive. Pick a song you really like and then write one like it only better. Harold Bloom the literary man thinks that all great art is a competitive, maybe subconscious misreading of art that came before it. Or that's my misreading of him anyway.

Emotions can fool you. When you feel very strong emotions about a song you may think that others will too. They may not. Probably won't. It is a pretty complex process to arouse strong emotions in others, requiring the traditions and skills of the trade. And most people don't like to be manipulated either. And when they do it's a sick thing.

Seek out and nurture friendships with others who write and/or appreciate good songs.

Separate the elements. Whistle the tune for melody. Play it with one finger on the piano. Play the chords on a piano, a guitar. What are the chord voicings? Drum the rhythm. Recite the lyrics. Always write them down. Write down the music. And have the song performed by a tuba orchestra with William Shatner singing if possible.

You can't please everybody. That's why you have to just do it a lot and observe. You will start to know and get a feel for who will like what song, or hate it. And you will start to develop a group of songs that you feel are you strongest work, as well as a group of songs that you feel are decently crafted. And that changes. Sometimes to really reach someone with one song is as big a success as writing a song that lots of people like.

When you are writing, write; when you are not writing, live. Study and learn. It's all about truth, wisdom, humour, beauty, and your personal development. It's hard work.

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." Shunyru Suzuki said that.

"I'm just paying my rent in the tower of song." Leonard Cohen said that.
 

©paul mowbray, 2008