Songwriting

There’s a particular discipline in erasing yourself from a song. Not your craft, not your instincts — those stay. But your perspective, your vocal habits, your pet chord moves, the…

There’s a moment in listening to a great song when the words feel inevitable — as though no other syllable could possibly land on that beat, as though the melody…

The most interesting thing a song can do is lie to you. Not through bad writing or vague metaphor, but deliberately — a narrator who believes their own distortions, who…

Every genre is a conversation that started before you arrived. When you walk into the middle of it and start talking without knowing what’s been said, you’re not being original…

Kurt Cobain is dead, and his music is immortal, and somewhere in the cultural sediment those two facts got fused into a single narrative: that the music required the suffering,…

There is a moment, usually somewhere between waking and fully conscious, when a melodic fragment surfaces in your mind unbidden. It plays once, then again. By the time you’re in…

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…