Songwriters are tortured, half-alcoholic troubadours who have to write about their painful life experiences. . . right?
Nope!
I just worked with three very happy, well-adjusted songwriters in my first-ever Wednesday Writing Workshop. Every Wednesday in October 2021, we met online for two hours to practice the skill of songwriting. No booze needed!
None of us had ever written a hit song, ever. All of us have written words and tried to set them to music. That’s enough of a qualifier!
In weeks 1 and 2, my songwriting students worked with my friend Ed Vallee. Ed has released albums, performs with me in a trio called The Co-Eds, and writes regularly. He’s great at it! First, we played some writing games like writing as much as possible in a few minutes, creating lists of single-syllable words, and writing about inanimate objects. The whole focus of the session was to come up with raw material for lyrics. Dan wrote about a coffee cup. Sarah wrote about a “dark green disguise.” Eric wrote about spooky Halloween! All of the writing was surprisingly deep and interesting.
In Week Two, we started with music first — a reverse of our process in Week One. This was tougher, but we rallied. We used programs like HookTheory, UnfinishedSongs.com, and royalty-free sites like Purple Planet to find music to inspire. Below, a new song called You Threw My Love On the Bathroom Floor.
Most common response: “I didn’t realize it was this easy to write songs!” Yup.
In Week Three, our ECMS friend Halley Elwell took us on a group writing excursion. Halley is a highly regarded singer/songwriter/teacher in Portland ME who sells songs for sync (say that three times fast!). She charged us to come up with a title first, then write to the title. Our title was . . Planets.
That led to lots of ideas:
And once we had a lot of ideas, everyone started contributing lines and verses, until we had this:
NOW what? Now it was time to turn those lyrics into a song. Before our final meeting in Week Four, I used Logic Pro to create three different song ideas. based on the “Planets” lyrics. The goal was not to finish a song completely; we were just seeing how the lyrics could be turned into very different types of songs depending on who was doing the arranging and what inspired them. pats self on back I don’t think I did too bad a job. ;)
So, now what? The journey from idea to song is as easy or difficult as you want to make it. The “hardest part” is different for everyone. For these songwriters, the lyrics came surprisingly easy. The music was harder, because none of them play instruments. But, using online tech like HookTheory and UnfinishedSongs.com, even that problem got solved. The takeaway: They now know how to write a song. . and they’re going to write more! pop champagne*
Submit a video (click below) and we can write songs together!
