What’s Your Style
We all have a songwriting style. Whether we recognize it or not, it’s woven into how we phrase a melody, the words and concepts we gravitate toward, and the harmonic choices we return to over and over again. Style extends beyond genre. You might write jazz one day and folk the next, but something about your musical fingerprint shows up in both.
Understanding what makes your style yours is one of the best things you can do to grow as a writer. Not only does it highlight what’s working, but it also gives you a clear place to stretch when your songs start to feel like variations on the same theme.
Recognizing My Own Patterns
When I look back on my own writing, I see a trail of preferences that repeat themselves. I tend to orbit lyric first, due to aiming for the kind of songs that would sell in Nashville, align with my acoustic abilities, and mesh well with my vocal capacity. There was a time when I lost melody, and it was the lyric that determined how the melody would move in both pitch and rhythm. Since melody was a product of harmony in the songs I wrote, my chords dictated where the melody would ultimately move and not the other way around. These preferences built for me an unintentional process for songwriting. It wasn’t that I chose to write this way, it’s that I didn’t choose ‘not’ to write this way. No wonder, for better or for worse, many of my songs sounded cut from the same cloth.
The songwriting was drawn to resulted in songs that felt strong even without production. If a song couldn’t move me as just a voice with a guitar or piano, it rarely gained power with a full band.
Patterns help us see what makes our writing ours, but perhaps even more importantly, they give us a starting point when we want to shake things up. When we want to go in a different direction, we can notice the element that drives our ideas and intentionally start somewhere else.
For me, that means working up a chord progression and a groove. Then I might sing a little melody on top, but reach for the next one and the next one, until I’m writing melodies that are not my go-to in terms of pitch and rhythm. I’ll try starting on various high or low pitches, on chord tones or between them, and try long or short notes to start. These choices will put my focus where it often isn’t. Change the process, change the results.
If you’re curious about your own process, just look to how ideas tend to knock on your door. If you often write melody and lyric together, try separating them and focusing on the strength of only one before you start working up ideas for the other. And yes, suiting the melody you just wrote with lyrics that match is hard. It’s not supposed to be easy. Easy can mean that we’re enjoying the act of singing and playing as much or more than the writing. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was meant to be, is in its finished form, or is a song in our catalog worth playing more than any other. It’s okay to work for it, and let your instincts tell you when you’ve mined the most provocative ideas you’ve got.
When it comes to expanding our style, there are specific tools we can try to coax new ideas out. I cover many of these tools in my course 30-Day Songwriter. Taking a look at our choices with harmony, melody, rhythm, and lyric leaves us free to decide what will make the song we’re currently working on better. And before we even begin we need to learn to define what ‘better’ is. For me, ‘better’ is a song that communicates through music and lyric a clear and potent emotion. It is not diluted or tangential. It moves the listener, even as the listener isn’t sure why. And as a writer who endlessly tinkers with songs, and has heard about just about every tool in the book, I hope I never completely figure it out, either.
None of us need to “fix” our style. There’s nothing wrong with the patterns that show up in your writing. They are what make your voice recognizable. Just keep listening and keep experimenting. And when something surprises you, follow it.
Stay creative,
