If you want to be a good songwriter, I’ve got a really good piece of advice for you. Listen way more than you talk. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s a multi-layered idea, but I will share it with you.

First, I want you to grasp a really important fact. I am in a massive community of songwriters, numbering well into the thousands, and after varying degrees of career success, virtually none of them still play the first songs they ever wrote. Why does that matter? It gives some perspective that professional songwriters have always used their early composing experiences for growth and development and that with continued writing practice, they got better and better. That should not only motivate you that work and practice will give eventual results, but also awaken you to the fact that you may be falling too much in love with your own early writing.

It’s really important for me to share this powerful observation with you. Whenever I attend song evaluation events, at songwriting workshops, song pitches, songwriting guild meetings, master classes, either as an evaluator or an observer, I tend to see the same thing over and over again. The moderators and panel members at these events usually have incredibly insightful things to say about the songs that they review; the same sorts of things that I tend to tell students about their songs when I’m asked to evaluate them. If each songwriter who submitted a song were to carefully listen to the feedback they are receiving, they could almost instantaneously accelerate their songwriting development. They are given numerous golden recommendations of things that they could do to make their songs better, hookier, more commercial or sellable. Continue reading »

When you ask yourself, “How do I learn songwriting or become a better songwriter,” the answer just might take you outside of traditional pathways. The goal is to achieve a naturalness to the variety of musical choices you can make so that you can say what you feel about any subject and put it into a musical context that touches the people who hear it as a song!

I was just speaking to a prospective student who expressed a feeling that I have heard over and over again for as long as I have been coaching songwriters. He said that he took college music theory and composition classes, and even did well enough in the classes to get A’s, yet he is totally unsure how to apply any of what he learned. Why do you think that might be? It is certainly the way almost every student I’ve ever spoken to feels about formal training.

In order to successfully apply what is taught in music theory classes in college, you need to be able to separate what you learn from the era and genre in which that device was originated. I often express to students that there are only seven notes in a scale, and seven chords in a key, and that they are the same ones used by both Mozart and Ozzy Osborne. The trick is to see the big, big picture, and not be sucked into the fact that you might be learning the music theory through the vehicle of a Cantata by Bach. If you get stuck in the formatting of the classical approach that you are studying, you may never be able to feel how that technique might cross over into usefulness for a Rock, Pop, Folk, Country, or Jazz song in the 21^st Century. Continue reading »