Posts Related to: Songwriting

I recently received this question from a reader: I play a little bit of piano and a little bit of guitar, but I’m a beginner on both. I want to write my own songs that others can sing, and I want to get the songs down on paper. Do you suggest I take piano lessons or …

What I have always loved about Mary Chapin Carpenter is that her music comes across as an authentic representation of who she really is at her core; at its best, it never sounds manufactured, pretentious, or striving.
She has never appeared on album covers with that come-hither look that so many female artists use to sell …

When I trained as a musicologist in the mid 1970s, a shift was in the air. Our professors had been scholarly pioneers shaped by WWII (and, in many cases, refugees from that war). The destruction they’d witnessed led them to focus on preserving musical and artistic treasures. 
They tirelessly unearthed, microfilmed (a new technology!), and catalogued everything of …

If you want to take your music to the next level, get experience performing in front of others, and just have fun, there is is nothing better than spending a week at a summer music camp for adults. There are bluegrass camps, jazz camps, guitar camps, songwriting camps, band camps, orchestra camps, chamber music camps - all geared toward adult …

My favorite sentence in all of music? That’s easy. Prima le parole, e dopo la musica. It means: “First the words, and then the music.” In terms of impact, it’s right up there with “A stitch in time saves nine” and “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
Prima le parole, e dopo la musica refers to …

Sometimes called lyrics, or simply “the words,” text is the sixth element used to analyze music. Let’s say you’re a composer. You want to write a “love” song and are searching for a text. How do you decide what words to use? Let’s look at two well-known texts that express a lover’s admiration. The first starts with the famous line: …

People write songs a lot of different ways, but these are some of the principles that work for me. First are tips on writing lyrics; then melody. Tips on approaching lyrics:
Pick a main idea, thesis, message, or central notion that you want to get across. Not just a subject, but a specific point of view about …

Bob Lefsetz is a notoriously tough customer. A well-known voice in the music industry, he’s been writing the Lefsetz Letter (now a blog) since 1986. Self-described as “beholden to no one and speaking the truth” he is the quintessential fan: an outspoken critic of any form of music that doesn’t serve the listener first and …

An unusual holiday or birthday gift, but one that would be treasured for years, is to write someone a song.
Writing a song for someone in particular first presumes that you can write a song! If you can, this is just a specific application of your songwriting skills.
To get someone else to create the song just takes hiring …

I was just reading about Ray LaMontagne, the captivating singer-songwriter who is currently on an East Coast tour. You may not know his name, but you probably have heard his song “Trouble,” which got a lot of radio play a couple of years ago. Watch LaMontagne perform “Shelter” at a BBC stage in London.
 
Today he’s playing …