Songwriting 101: Challenge Yourself
NOTE: This entry first appeared on my Singing Muses blog during August 2006. I am in the process of moving some of the content from there to this one, before I eventually shut down the Singing Muses blog.
Here is an interesting exercise you can try if you feel you are in a songwriting rut. Write a song on a topic or theme you haven't previously addressed before. Why? I hear you ask. For the intellectual challenge, I reply.
I know a perfectly good songwriter who has never written a love song. For the past year or so she has been challenged by other songwriter's to compose just such a song, but she can't seem to do it. My advice to her was to write a love song to her dog! Nobody has to know that the object of her affection is a dog (unless she explicitly mentions the creature in the song), and anyway, the challenge is to write a love song in general, so writing a song about her dog is fine as long as it is a love song. Sadly, we are all still waiting for her Ode to Eros (or should that be, Ode to Canine?), and I suspect we we'll be waiting for some time yet.
This exercise is something I have used to good effect in my own songwriting life. Several years ago, I was going through a big country music phase. One of the sub-genre's in country music is the trucking song, and since I didn't have a trucking song in my repertoire of original songs, I decided I would write one. My song, I Just Can't Wait is the result of this exercise.
On another occasion, while driving home, I happened to tune into a radio program that featured as its theme, songs about prisons. I immediately decided I needed a prison song in my repertoire, and asked my Muse to start working on it. I have to say, my Muse really took his time about this one, because it was probably a year or two after tuning into that radio program that I finally got my death row prison song, Bitter Wine.
By the way, Muse, I am still waiting for that train song I requested several years ago. How is it going?
Here is an interesting exercise you can try if you feel you are in a songwriting rut. Write a song on a topic or theme you haven't previously addressed before. Why? I hear you ask. For the intellectual challenge, I reply.
I know a perfectly good songwriter who has never written a love song. For the past year or so she has been challenged by other songwriter's to compose just such a song, but she can't seem to do it. My advice to her was to write a love song to her dog! Nobody has to know that the object of her affection is a dog (unless she explicitly mentions the creature in the song), and anyway, the challenge is to write a love song in general, so writing a song about her dog is fine as long as it is a love song. Sadly, we are all still waiting for her Ode to Eros (or should that be, Ode to Canine?), and I suspect we we'll be waiting for some time yet.
This exercise is something I have used to good effect in my own songwriting life. Several years ago, I was going through a big country music phase. One of the sub-genre's in country music is the trucking song, and since I didn't have a trucking song in my repertoire of original songs, I decided I would write one. My song, I Just Can't Wait is the result of this exercise.
On another occasion, while driving home, I happened to tune into a radio program that featured as its theme, songs about prisons. I immediately decided I needed a prison song in my repertoire, and asked my Muse to start working on it. I have to say, my Muse really took his time about this one, because it was probably a year or two after tuning into that radio program that I finally got my death row prison song, Bitter Wine.
By the way, Muse, I am still waiting for that train song I requested several years ago. How is it going?
Labels: Songwriting
posted by Jim Lesses at
11:17 AM
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