Songwriting

There’s a moment in Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain where the words stop meaning anything. The phrase — a fragment of a street preacher’s sermon, looped on two tape machines…

There’s a moment most songwriters know intimately, even if they’ve never named it: you’ve written a strong line, something honest and specific, and then you spend the next twenty minutes…

Some songs start as a feeling, a chord progression, a line that arrived in the shower. But a lot of the most durable pop and country songs started as a…

There’s a particular kind of exposure in sitting across from someone you’ve never met and being expected to say something true. Co-writing with a stranger compresses months of social negotiation…

There’s a moment in the editing process — usually somewhere around the third hour of staring at a song — when a writer defends a section not because it’s good,…

You’ve nailed the first verse. The hook is strong, the central image is vivid, and the chorus lands with the weight you wanted. Then you sit back down to write…

Robert Plant once described Led Zeppelin’s early records as a kind of excavation — digging through the American blues tradition and hauling it into a different century. What he was…

The first line of a song is doing something most writers underestimate: it’s making a promise. Not about the theme, or the mood, or the genre — but about whether…

Most songwriters write for a fantasy version of themselves. They hear the melody in their head — soaring, effortless, landing on a high note that feels inevitable — and they…

Every songwriting tutor will tell you to avoid clichés. They’re right, and they’re wrong, and the difference between those two positions is the difference between a rule and an understanding.…