Songwriting

There’s a version of songwriting that happens entirely inside a laptop. A loop gets loaded, a chord gets drawn into a piano roll, a vocal gets recorded before the melody…

Not every poem wants to be a song. Some resist it — the line breaks are too private, the silence between words too load-bearing to survive a chord underneath. But…

There is a version of every song that is better than the one you are currently working on. There is also a version that is worse. The problem is they…

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Cyril Northcote Parkinson was writing about bureaucracy in 1955, but he might as well have been…

Rhyme is one of the oldest tools in human language, and also one of the most misunderstood. Most people think of it as a simple binary — words either rhyme…

The moment you sit down with someone whose instincts are faster than yours, whose ear catches things before you’ve even registered there’s something to catch, you have a choice. You…

There’s a moment in “A Day in the Life” where the song simply stops being the song it was and becomes something else entirely. The verse-based, reflective narrative dissolves into…

There’s a moment in almost every great pop song where the music opens up — where something that felt like anticipation suddenly becomes release. We call that moment the chorus,…

Your instrument is lying to you. Not maliciously — it simply has opinions. The guitar has favorite shapes, comfortable resolutions, fret positions that feel inevitable. The piano has its own…

Creativity is often discussed as though it arrives unbidden — a visitation, a gift, something you either receive or don’t. But spend any time reading about how working songwriters actually…