3 Principles of Songwriting
Lately I’ve been binge-watching songwriting videos on YouTube. With so many time-tested tools, tips, and expert advice, our best songs should be one chord-tone away. But even after 25 years of writing and teaching the craft, I’m still left twitching a little after the sheer amount of information. “Place the title here and here, but don’t let it get formulaic. Use strong verbs, but don’t make it sound ‘written.’ Write conversationally, but make sure it sounds lyrical. Write interesting chord changes, but don’t stray too far from the familiar. Write cool melodies, but don’t sacrifice lyric quality and content. Be yourself, but still be universal.” Vertigo, anyone?
Maybe it’s my training as a staff-writer, or the fact that I attribute much of my personal success to reliable technique, but these past several years I’ve wondered if I’ve begun to lean too hard towards the intellect and lost a little heart. Like a new parent clutching a stack of child rearing books, I fear I’d swung the way of blind repetition at the expense of instinct. Songs, much like people, are the product of nurture and nature. 5 Steps to Hit Songwriting might write a banger, but it won’t ensure people care about it.
What I was looking for in my writing, as well as my teaching, was intuition. I knew that despite my knowledge about music and words, my songs still sometimes draped like a wet blanket. I knew it because I felt it. I became self-conscious when my songs were too long. I felt restless when the chorus didn’t pop, frustrated when the story was confusing or convoluted, and bored when the chords and groove lied uninspired. But it’s that internal pull that’s critical when we’re trying to write songs. It tells us the song isn’t done.
I believe the same internal sense of alignment born from our conscious and unconscious experience of living and interacting as human beings serves us when we communicate through songs. It’s the only real measure we have in determining the purpose and pleasure in what we write. I recognize the double standard as I now aspire to teaching a tool in this article. But I do so hoping that you and I both hold intellect and intuition close together at heart.
Prosody, Momentum, and Restraint
The longer I teach, the stronger I believe we all know more about writing songs than a Youtube-binge might suggest. And it is with that ‘knowing’ that I’d like to share 3 principles of songwriting to help your intuition speak up.
Every magical, engaging song adheres to the principles of Prosody, Momentum, and Restraint. Prosody is the agreement between music and message. Music is the body language of our words. A lyric takes it meaning from the music that underscores it. Momentum is the consistent, forward movement of the song through time. It is not tempo, and it is not meter. Rather, it is the pace of the song that always delivers on time every time. Restraint is the principle that the song rests in the essential elements, and anything beyond those elements merely embellishes or complicates what already is.
Each song we write is a new situation in which we are combining chords, melody, lyrics and rhythm. Diagnosing weak points in our own songs is like performing our own knee surgery in the mirror. It’s extremely difficult to attend to the song as an outsider, without assumptions, and without bias. By the way, the same principle can be applied to dating, where you can clearly see your friend is dating a dingus while you yourself are in love with a bozo. But back to songwriting.
I often say that if you suspect there is a problem in an area of your song, you are right. But suspecting a problem doesn’t fix the problem. This is where the principles can turn up the volume on our intuition.
If I know that my song loses steam near the end of the chorus, I can consider whether the problem is more clearly defined by one of the three principles. A wandering chord progression, a lyric that never quite gets to the point, or a melody that’s constantly changing can produce a loss of energy, all tracing back to a problem with momentum. Momentum fizzles when we lose our heading. Wet blanket syndrome.
Another common situation we find ourselves in is rewriting for hours, without ever really seeing the song improve. Looking at the principles, we might ask how prosody could be at the heart of the issue. When the lyric doesn’t capture the message inherent in the musical mood, the result isn’t bad - it’s neutral. In my opinion, lukewarm songwriting is the only nightmare to fear. It’s worse than bad songs, which are at least memorable. Simply put, music gives lyrics meaning. If the lyrics can’t make use of the musical mood, in Harry Potter terms, we cast a good old stupify spell on our listeners, leaving them numb.
The third principle comes up often in rewriting. I always say I’ve never met a musician who underplays. We songwriters over-write, over-sing, and over-embellish, when all we really need to do is exercise restraint. When we’re rewriting, we can be looking for ways to remove the chaff, so the wheat can shine. Simply cutting syllables, lines, and even entire sections can be the antidote to a lukewarm song, our own confusion about it.
By far the best tool we all have for writing better songs is our intuition. We use it everyday to navigate relationships and communicate effectively with others. I think it’s only natural we can learn to key into this same sensibility when we create, whether we’re making music, cooking, sculpting, crafting, engineering, parenting, or anything else that requires more than intellect alone. If we really want to write better songs, tools can help, as long as they help us look within.
Stay creative,
PS: I’ve built my retreats to focus on this relationship between tools and intuition, so if you’d like to harness them together in real time, click here to learn more.