8 Songwriting Tips I Wish I Knew Sooner

great songwriters spend a lifetime collecting tips and tools and techniques and learning how to apply them to their songcraft and in this video I want to share with you eight songwriting tips that will not only Unleash Your creativity but will also hopefully save you precious time and energy so that you can write great songs sooner and faster number eight especially is something that is quite counter-intuitive but once you learn what it is your songwriting will forever be changed for the better hi friends my name is keppy and if you're new to the channel I'm a professional songwriter and I've also been teaching songwriting for the last 13 years I started my teaching career as an assistant professor at the Berkeley College of Music and I was lucky enough to even have John Mayer as one of my personal songwriting mentors and on this channel we take our Real World experience as songwriters and teachers and help other songwriters get great so let's dive into the eight songwriting tips I wish I knew sooner number one is find the title at your earliest possible convenience in Nashville which is of course one of the songwriting capitals of the world songwriters there will habitually carry around what they call a book of titles or a hook book and when songwriters in Nashville get together to do co-writing they will very frequently get out their hookbooks and share titles with each other those titles will often be six words or less and are titles that are inherently interesting or memorable in some way they're usually titles that have some kind of concept story attached to them but not always it might just be a phrase that is somehow compelling or interesting that just makes you think it makes you go gosh I wonder what a song with that title might be about not all songs need to start that way of course sometimes we write to figure out what we're writing about we might be free writing or sense writing or just kind of loosely writing lyrics with no specific idea of exactly what this particular song is about we're looking for it but here's the thing if we commit to the idea of finding the title at our earliest possible convenience we can turn that little Searchlight on in our brain and even as we're free writing we're constantly searching for that little phrase that contains the essence or core of the idea or image or feeling that we are getting at as we are exploring an idea the benefit of finding the title at your earliest possible convenience is it really anchors the song in a specific thing it says this song is about this thing and not about X Y or Z which is a really important part of the songwriting process because great songs tend to go narrow and deep rather than shallow and wide they tend to focus on a singular emotion or moment or situation and go deeply into that idea rather than trying to do too much and actually diluting the impact of the song the very famous and celebrated songwriter Jimmy Webb in his book Tunes myth talks about it this way this is not a song idea 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 if however you add the following sentence I want to call this song Problem Child then you have an idea even though the song may not end up being called Problem Child another way we can think about it flowing on from that Jimmy Webb idea is that the bra good idea of your song is like a house but what we're really looking for is the door that we are going to walk through to get into that house we need to find a specific angle of Entry a specific point that we are going to enter that house through and that is going to provide us with that central point of gravity that anchor that is going to help us understand what is this song doing and what is it not doing and then it also helps us when we've got lots of different lyrics and ideas figure out exactly what belongs in this song and what we can actually save for a different song tip number two is all about writing great choruses this is a really simple but very effective tip and the tip is this whatever your title or a hook is repeat it at least twice inside the chorus of course there are going to be exceptions to this but for the most part if you actually look at great choruses that are really memorable and really catchy in any genre what you will find is that the chorus has this internal repetition of the hook or title there is going to be a line that repeats at least twice inside the chorus a really effective example of this is what's called book ending where you actually repeat the repeating line as the first line and the last line and here are some really famous songs across a genre and across time that follow this technique Stop This Train by John Mayer Chandelier by SIA Stay With Me by Sam Smith and even as I looked on the charts today and today we are in the month of May in the year 2023 I can see that there is a rising song on the global charts which is the song Daylight by David Kushner and when I peek inside that lyric I see the same technique at play we have book ending of a repeating line inside the lyric of the chorus the bigger concept here is actually important to mention briefly which is the idea that a chorus is more than just a section whose lyrics repeat chorus is not just a different sounding verse that you then repeat which might sound obvious to you but it was not at all obvious to me and took me years and years to figure this out or to really understand what the essence of a chorus is that makes it different to a verse where verses are Exposition right they show us who is speaking to whom they are speaking what is the situation or moment in which the song is taking place where is it taking place when is it taking place establishing the essential problem tension or conflict of the song the chorus is really the bit where we are putting neon lights around a central message a core idea a peak emotion and one of the most effective ways that we can put neon lights around an idea like that is through repetition the sort of basic threshold for a hook to become a hook is that it needs to repeat tip number three is to amplify reality in a song that is really a three to four-ish minute vehicle for you to express an ID the idea will be clearer and more direct and more impactful if you cut out a lot of the language that we might use in Daily speech so if I were just talking to a friend I might say something like sometimes feel as if I wish I could just take my fears and anxiety and cast a magic spell that turns that fear into like a positive force so what I need to do when I'm writing lyrics is edit out all the words that act as qualifiers or conditions on an idea so I want to cut out words like sometimes it feels as if it seems as though it's as if I just want to say the thing as directly and clearly as I can so it's much more effective to say I'm going to cast a spell that turns fear into fuel in Stephen King's wonderful book on writing he actually defines writing in a beautiful way he says writing is refined thought and I would add to that and say song writing is Amplified reality so cut out words like sometimes maybe it seems as if and you will find that your writing becomes a lot more clear direct emotional and Powerful tip number four Focus a disproportionate amount of time on the first line of your song First Impressions matter in all aspects of Our Lives of course and you will find that in songs that are charting and in genres where the lyrics matter which is actually most of them that the first lines do three main things the first thing they do is avoid cliches and generalities the second thing they do is they will introduce straight away the essential problem tension or conflict that is driving the songwriter to write the song in the first place let's see a few more examples of this from across time and genre the problem is all inside your head she said to me that's an example from Paul Simon's song 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover and it's such a great example of this in action so we know that there is a problem that the protagonist is ruminating about but we also know that there's a bit of conflict between these two people that they are in some kind of conversation in which she is frustrated with him so there's already a little bit of relational conflict going on and it's just the first line I know that you think I shouldn't still love you which is a dido lyric from her song White Flag and again this is an oldish song at this point but was an absolute Smash Hit for her and I love this line I think that it's a beautiful example of an absolutely killer first line we know so much from this first line we know that this is a song about someone who was in a relationship with someone that relationship has broken down the protagonist of this song is still pining for this other person and this other person is basically saying it's time to let go there is so much drama there is so much conflict there is so much tension we know what this song is about from the first line let's even take a heaps more contemporary song so I'm opening the global charts on Spotify again today May 2023 one of the songs that I see there that was number two for many many months is a song Kill Bill by scissor the first lines of that song are I'm still a fan even though I was salty hate to see you with some of the broad know you happy P so those first lines are establishing a relationship and we can clearly see that there is a tension problem or conflict that exists between the voice of the narrator of this song and the person that she's speaking to in this song the third thing that first lines tend to do in great songs is they create a direct setup to the hook in the chorus you can see this working in the Ed Sheeran lyric first time so the chorus of this song is all about his first times with his lover and the hook of this song is really I can't wait to make a million more first times let's take a look at the first line of this song I thought it'd feel different playing Wembley so you know playing Wembley might not be the most relatable detail for most of us but what you can see here is what is he doing he's setting up a first time the whole concept of this song is first times and he starts with one of his first times what he's describing is a first time that was totally grandiose incredibly epic but also was not something that he shared directly with his lover but there is this incredibly tight connection between starting the song with a first time that then leads inevitably towards the hook of the song which is all about his first times with his lover tip number five choose the right point of view for your song point of view is essentially the pronouns that we use to describe the different characters in the world of our song but the most important thing to understand here is that using different pronouns can radically alter the emotional tone and quality of your songs lyrics and let me show you this through example so let's say I have a line of lyric that is something like this you left me standing there all night that lyric is angry it is sad it is passionate it's a bit accusatory and that really comes out of this point of view that is in direct address it's me talking to you let's look at the same lyric idea where we use different pronouns for the characters in this story she left you standing there all night it's just a change of pronouns but it feels like a completely different story right the whole emotional tone here it is caring and concerned and compassionate it feels like this song is no longer about me blaming you for doing something mean to me it feels like this song is sung from the perspective of a friend talking to another friend in really sympathetic compassionate tones if we look at charting songs in almost any genre 90 of those songs are going to be written in direct address not every song in direct address is angry and sad it can also be really happy and loving and passionate it can be all sorts of things what it is is extremely intimate but there's definitely certain songs and topics and themes and things that we might want to write about that are going to actually be more emotionally relatable if we actually experiment with different points of view in the example that I was just is demonstrating the question is do I want this song to feel angry and bitter and accusatory the answer might sometimes be yes that might be exactly what I'm going for but it might also be the case that the particular story I'm trying to get out might actually be more relatable if we pick different pronouns if we tell this story from a different point of view I've created a free pdf in a link in the show notes which you can download right now which outlines the four different points of view with examples so that you can print that out or have it on your computer anytime you like as you're working through different variations of your song tip number six is a Melody tip save the highest note of the song for your chorus and this very strongly relates to me to another overarching principle of good songwriting that I think about a lot of the time which is that if everything Sparkles nothing shines and High Melody notes are very sparkly and very shiny they take up a lot of attention but if we're creating Melodies In Our verses and pre-choruses that are hitting these high notes that are as high or higher than the notes in our chorus what happens is we steal the Limelight we dilute the impact of The Melody of our chorus one of our main jobs as songwriters a lot of the time is to put neon lights around the central idea the core concept and really the hook of the song and high notes do a really good job of spotlighting a moment so if we are shining bright spotlights all over our song it really reduces the ability of a listener to hear those Neon Lights those Sonic neon lights around our hook in the chorus so save your highest note for the chorus tip number seven is really a songwriting process tip and the tip is this quality in songwriting is really a fact factor of quantity said otherwise write more and more often because if you write 50 songs in a year as opposed to five songs in a year your best five songs out of 50 is going to be better quality than if you belabor five songs and only five songs during that year so write more and write more frequently tip number eight do not mistake generic lyrics for universally relatable lyrics this is the tip that is a little counter-intuitive because it seems logical that if we are motivated to write songs that have Universal appeal that we should make those lyrics General so that more people can relate to them but this is the Paradox of songwriting that actually all great songwriters know the Paradox is the more generic and general you make your lyrics the less relatable they become it is actually a well-known truth of great lyric writing that the more specific and detailed and personal your lyrics are the more relatable they are it actually becomes more Universal when you harness something that is more honest and authentic through the expression of your unique perspective and your unique experience of the world and as the late and great songwriter Leonard Cohen said we seem to be able to relate to detail we seem to have an appetite for it our days are made of details and if you can get a sense of another person's day in details your own day of details is summoned in your mind in some way rather than just a general line like the days went by you don't want to say the tree you want to say the Sycamore if you want more tips on how to transform your ideas into specific detail and compelling imagery check out this video right here thanks for sticking around and please let me know in the comments if there are any other songwriting tips tools or techniques that have had a really big positive impact on your songwriting I'm always Keen to hear from you alright guys happy writing see you next time

Channel: How To Write Songs

Views: 85,118

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Id: zuP1YVs6m7M

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2023