Writing Your First Song: A Place to Start
I started writing songs like anyone else, by the seat of my early 1990s grunge pants. My older brother was in a band, and I felt like I could write something they could sing. They were a ska band, and the only problem was that I played piano and listened to Madonna. Naturally, my writing didn't fit the project. The band broke up after high school, but I kept writing. I remember so clearly the feeling of liking certain lines and melodies, and feeling trapped in certain chord progressions. I had no idea there were tools that could improve my craft, because I was all inspiration at that stage.
Before we know how to write songs, we feel our way through. There's no quick-start manual, and even if there were, it would feel a bit like assembling a piece of IKEA furniture. We can lay all the pieces out and follow the pictures, but there's an intuition lacking right from the 'Rimforsa' printed on the flimsy black and white cover sheet.
Any song we write is composed of words, melody, chords, and a groove or rhythm that's carried in the instrument we play or the track we're writing over. Every decision we make pertains to one of those four elements. As we become more skilled at writing, we take more risks with these elements, becoming more comfortable with our ability to control them.
Everyone approaches writing differently, because we grew up on different music, learned or didn't learn an instrument, and developed ideas about what's worth expressing. These things make up our skillset and our fantasy, combined with our natural personality that results in the sound and style we make.
It's only natural that each of us starts with the piece of songwriting that comes with greater ease. Word-first writers often have lyric ideas and concepts. Singers have melodic ideas, instrumentalists come with chords. These seeds are gold for starting songs. The trick is setting the doors on the Rimforsa when door hanging isn't your bag.
When you're trying to pull all the elements together, it's immensely helpful to notice which one is giving you trouble and working on that single element for awhile. If it's chords, spend 10-15 minutes finding the chords you want on piano or guitar, and practicing them until they're fluid. If you can keep a constant tempo while playing them slowly, you can bring the melody and words back. If you can't, and you still feel like a toddler driving a stick shift, simplify the part. Be aware of what element is causing the trouble. If you know the chords you want but you just can't play them at a consistent pace, the song will sound really rough, to you as well as any listener.
The same is true for the lyric. Words that are packed too tightly are an instant giveaway that the writer is green. There are plenty of songs in which the lyric content is vague or abstract, and many cases in which we love them all the same. What new writers don't recognize is that structure, which is the rhythm or flow, often matters more than content. Poets know exactly what this means, because the rhythm of the language controls the pacing and speed, which affects how we feel about what is being said. The same is often true for songs.
When lyrics are particularly abstract in a song, it's likely that the melody is doing lots of good work (think Kate Bush's “Running Up That Hill” or Coldplay's “Yellow”). The melody is the vehicle for the lyric, meaning that what we sing in terms of pitch and rhythm should make the lyric sound intentional. You don't have to settle on the first melody you sing for a line. You can adjust the pitches and the rhythms, playing with your full range vocally until you get something that interests you. There is no wrong way to sing your words, and no melodic theme or chords or vibe that is disallowed. There is only symbiosis between the elements. You can ask yourself if the melody makes the lyric feel right and vice versa. You can listen to the chord you play as you sing a particular word, or the note you sing as the track moves to a particular chord, and ask yourself if the moment it creates resonates with you.
We are all limited by our ability to 'see.' But like any other thing we practice, our ability to 'see', or in this case 'listen and intuit,' becomes stronger with each song we write. The feeling that the message of a song is true comes from this heart connection between words and music. It is felt, not necessarily understood. Just as we can feel inspired by an idea, we're taken over by an internal 'knowing' that the idea is good. After we've written tens of songs, we grow accustomed to our natural expression, and begin to want more from the process. It's this wanting that actually signals we're growing. When we become bored with what we're now making, it's because we feel there is something more beyond it. This is why our songs never quite feel done, and our process never like it completely arrives.
What I would like to tell you as a new writer is that by being a person, who has lived experience and whose 'heart' knows things that the mind isn't yet aware of, you have the stuff it takes to write songs. The only distance you'll need to cross is by leap of faith, that each song you begin is an opportunity to finish, however imperfectly.
If you're interested in making songwriting more of a practice in your life, or joining others on retreat with songwriting click here.
Come write with us,
