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Transcript:
Something I think songwriters don't talk about enough are songwriting sessions, because not every songwriting session looks the same or should look the same. In fact, I think there are a lot of different types of songwriting sessions, and most of the time a successful songwriting session is one with a pretty specific goal, not just something like, "I'm going to work on song X." I don't think that is specific enough. So in this episode of the Songwriting Theory Podcast, we are going to talk about five different songwriting sessions that will change everything. Let's talk about it.
Hello, friend. Welcome to another episode of the Songwriting Theory Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Joseph Adala. I'm honored that you take some time out of your busy day, your busy week, to talk songwriting with me. It's coming out a bit later than usual, but I was sick with the flu for a week, so that's why this got delayed. And my apologies in advance for any coughing. I will be sure to try to do it not into the mic or anything, but still recovering from that. If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide, "20 Different Ways to Start Writing a Song," because a great way to make sure you don't get creatively stuck is simply by starting in different spots, starting with different things, not always starting with a chord progression, not always starting with a bass line, not always starting with lyrics, not always starting with music. Sometimes changing it up is a great way to stay creatively fresh and get some different results with your songs. There's something I don't talk about probably as much as I should, but these aren't just 20 ways to start a song, but they can be 20 different ways to start any given song section. So if you wrote your first verse, and that first verse is built off of a sweet bass line, that's how you started your song, and now you're sort of stuck on the chorus, or you're trying to figure out where the chorus needs to go, you can again go to 20 different ways to start writing a song, but in this case you're actually starting a song section, because just because you started the verse with the bass line doesn't mean that you can't start your chorus with something different, like your melody or with the piano riff or something else.
So let's talk about these five different song... so be sure to check that out. It's at songwritingtheory.com slash free guide. So let's talk about these different songwriting sessions. We'll start with the beginning, and that is simply an idea gathering session. And the beauty of these is, first of all, they're fun, and it's just a great way to get really excited about songwriting. If you're stuck on songs, just going back to basics and sitting down with only the intent of gathering ideas. There's something beautiful about the lack of pressure that you have when you know that you are sitting down just to come up with ideas. You don't need to care whether they're good ideas, you're just trying to get as many ideas as possible. And also the lack of pressure that you know you're not trying to come up with an idea so that you can write a song 10 minutes later off of that idea. It just frees you up to think of more ideas, to possibly think outside the box a little bit more.
So be sure to check that out at songwritingtheory.com slash free guide. So let's dive into the songwriting sessions that we are talking about. The first one is right at the beginning. It's an idea gathering songwriting session. And you can even argue this isn't really even a songwriting session because it's sort of a pre-songwriting session or as sometimes I like to think of it a song developing session.
And really that wording comes from a lot of times in movies they'll say like a movie is in development and what that means, what that usually refers to is the process before you actually start making the movie in the way that most of us think of making a movie. So principal photography is when they actually start to film the movie. It's really getting made. But development is sort of that stage where they're kicking around ideas, they're trying to figure out maybe casting, they're trying to figure out what's the right budget for this movie, is this something that we can do with the budget that we have, all those sorts of things. It's really the pre-movie making stage if you will. So in the same way there's no reason that we as songwriters can't have essentially a pre-songwriting stage. In fact I think it's a great idea. Authors do the same thing. Most of the time an author doesn't just sit and start writing a book. Some do, but a lot plan beforehand. They'll do exercises to really flesh out their characters and make sure they understand their characters before they start writing for them. They don't discover their characters as they write the book. They already know their characters before they write the book.
Or they know the general plot points. They try to outline the book, make sure that the story arc makes sense and it resonates with the characters and it makes sense. All the characters' decisions make sense before you actually put the proverbial pen to paper.
So this is something that I think we should do more often in songwriting. I don't think we need to do as much of it because a book is a pretty big endeavor. There's a lot when it comes to characters and story. And songs have less. So there's no reason to spend months developing a song before you actually write it in the way that maybe it does make sense to do for a book. But there's something glorious just about having no pressure to come up with a song idea and immediately execute on it. There's something just great about that. Because in an idea gathering songwriting session, you're not actually trying to write a song. You're really not even trying to figure out what is a good idea for a song. You are simply, you have one job, gather ideas. You're not worried about whether the ideas are rotten or great. You're not worried about anything like that.
That's for later in the process. For now, you just want to go find ideas and find as many ideas as you can. And really we're trying to maximize the pool of ideas we have that we actually go execute on. Because I think another mistake that is pretty common to songwriters is really, I could call it just impatience. I think impatience is something that negatively affects many songwriters where they're too impatient to actually edit lyrics. They're too impatient to actually craft a song. They just want to get a song done so every song takes an hour. And it's like, well, I can tell. It's not that you can't write a great song in an hour. Of course you can. But just like a book, can you write a book in a month? Yeah. But on average, if you took a million authors and said, okay, write a book in a month, and took those same million authors and said, okay, now write a book in a year, of course on average the yearbooks are going to be way better. That's why authors take a year to write a book. Right? You know, this is the whole process, not just the writing part, editing, all that sort of thing. But usually it's, you know, an author comes out with a book something like once every six months if they're pretty fast, or a year on this lower side.
And I think sometimes songwriters struggle with impatience. Whether impatient to start writing a song, they're impatient to finish a song, they're impatient to just, you know, put out there whether the lyrics make sense or not, whether the lyrics are really something powerful or not. They're just like, oh, it's done. It's done.
We think too improvisationally, I think, sometimes when it comes to songwriting, which we'll talk about a little bit more for songwriting session too. But a part of the beauty of this is it forces us to come up with more ideas, and then we can choose the best ideas for ourselves.
Because the pressure of I'm going to come up with a great idea and immediately execute on it, probably the idea sucks. Right? If you and I, right now, were to try to think through a song idea, and we were to go write a song off of the first idea that we have that's halfway decent, by tomorrow we might think that was a stupid idea. Why do we even make a song off of that? But when you have a giant pool of ideas, it allows you to pull from the best ideas you have, and it also allows you to pull from the ideas that most resonate with you at the moment. Because, you know, if you got laid off two months ago and you were ticked at your boss because you feel like you were not the right person to get laid off, blah blah blah, so you're ticked about it, now two months later when you have a better job and maybe you're not bitter about it anymore, maybe right now is not the time to write that song. Right? Maybe in two months when you have a new boss and they're kind of annoying you too or something, then maybe that brings back the emotions that you had when you were laid off and maybe now that's the time to write the song. So there's an element of that too, right? Where some nights or some days writing a sweet love song might be something that makes sense based on how you're feeling. In other days you couldn't do that if you tried, but you can write a bitter angry song. So when you have a giant pool of ideas to work off of, it allows you the luxury of sort of working on a song that best fits where you are at right now mentally, emotionally, etc. and it also allows you to be more picky, where if you have 30 ideas and you're only writing one song off of one of those ideas, you get to pick the best idea of 30, which is probably a much better idea than just coming up with an idea and immediately executing on it, because now it's one of one idea. That idea might have sucked. You might have just written a whole song in an hour or something that already you wrote a song in an hour, so on average they're probably not going to be that great, it's probably going to need a little more crafting after the fact.
And you might have built it on an idea that wasn't even a good idea to begin with, which you can still have great songs off of not great ideas. I think ideas are somewhat overrated to a degree, but ideally if you're going to spend time writing a song, don't you want it to be on some of your best ideas? And a great way to have best ideas is to have a long list of ideas. In fact, again this goes back to a mistake that I think a lot of songwriters make. Our ideas should far outpace our songs. Far outpace. You might have something like 20 ideas for every one song you write, or 10 ideas for every one song you write, at least. At least, because if you sit down to just come up with ideas for 15 minutes, 15 minutes, you probably have 25 plus ideas.
Easily. You might even have more. Maybe you only have five ideas. Okay, that still is at a rate of 20 ideas in an hour. And what are you going to do? Release any more than 20 songs in a year? So if you take an hour, have one idea gathering session for one hour, you have enough song ideas if you used every single one for the whole year.
So no matter how you look at it, it just seems silly to ever be in a situation where you came up with 20 song ideas this year, and all 20 of those ideas turned into songs. Why? There's no reason for it. Just spend an extra three, four hours just gathering ideas, and you might have 20 better ideas to then build 20 songs off of.
And for the most part here, we're talking about lyrical ideas. And there are many great ways to gather lyrical ideas. One is just sit with a pen and paper and just write down anything that comes to mind. A cool word, a song title that you think would be interesting, a piece of symbolism that resonates with you. You might not even know what it means yet. But you're just like, "Ooh, Shadow of the Tiger. That sounds cool." I don't know what it would mean, but it sounds cool. So write it down. You can figure out later if it has a sensical meaning, if it's worth actually developing further. You don't have to worry about that part here. Turn off that editor portion of your brain. Turn off that portion of your brain that says, "That's a bad idea. You suck." Turn that part of your brain off as much as you can, because it's not helpful to this. And that's the glory of this song-ending session. It's very clear about just produce as many ideas as possible. Turn the editor off.
Your job is not even to find a good idea. It's just to gather ideas as quickly as you can and as many as you can.
Something else you can do is look up, like Google Images, look up art. Go to an art museum. If you're somebody that really, you know, computer screens hinder your creativity, go to a local art museum. Take a pen and paper and decide that you're going to go to the art museum, maybe with your spouse, significant other kids, whatever.
And you're going to bring a pen and paper. And you're going to write every little idea that you get by going to the art museum. That can be a great way to go. And that might be enough ideas. Going to the art museum once might provide enough ideas for songs for the next three years.
Right? So, just taking the time to have an idea-gathering song-writing session, I think, is a great way to go. You almost certainly won't regret it. And they're just a lot of fun.
And then, sort of the other side of the coin is an improvisation song-writing session.
And if idea-gathering tends to be more on the lyrical side of things, improvisation is sort of the equivalent on the musical side of things. So this is where we are just trying to get in our instrumentalist mindset and just kind of try to create magic by just going. Just play. Just play until you find that guitar riff that resonates with you. Just play on the piano until you hit three notes in a row that's like, "Ooh, that's the start of a magical melody that resonates with me." Or just sing or hum randomly in the shower or anywhere else in the car.
And in that moment where you're like, "Ooh, I kind of got goosebumps from that melody I just made up."
That's your hint. That's something that's worth developing further into a song. So this is essentially doing the same thing, gathering ideas, but instead these are musical ideas.
And it's a great no-pressure way or low-pressure way to start writing interesting music because interesting music is less likely to come from picking a stock chord progression and going from there.
And we've talked a lot about stock chord progressions because I think two things can be true at once. It can be true that it's the easiest way to write a song, especially for beginners, especially for people who don't know any music theory.
But it's also true that as you develop as a songwriter, it is no longer the best way to write a song. If I were to help somebody write their first song, and I've done videos and podcasts about this, it is probably best for your first song to write with a stock chord progression. But if you're on song 2030 and you're still just using stock chord progressions, you are massively missing out because we're choosing to build our song on a, by definition, cookie cutter foundation. Why would you do that? It's essentially like saying, "I'm going to build my whole book off of I'm just going to do the hero's journey." Like, the hero's journey is by definition cookie cutter. That doesn't mean you can't make something magical off of it. The original Star Wars trilogy is great, fantastic, and it's off of the hero's journey. Now also it benefits from at the time most movies and stuff weren't built off of that. So now it would feel a little like, "Okay, here we go again." Whereas when Star Wars did it, whenever you're the first, you kind of have the advantage of... It's like if somebody sounded exactly like The Beatles today, you'd be like, "Oh, so derivative." Meanwhile, the same person is like, "The Beatles are the codes." So that's the glory of being first as you get credit that maybe sometimes you don't deserve.
Or you do deserve because you were the first. But anyway, by definition, if you start your song on a stock, well-used, overused chord progression, you are building your song off of something that is by definition uninteresting.
Because uninteresting is almost, when it comes to creative, is something that's just not different. It's the same old, same old. We've all heard it a million times before. If you start with the same stock characters for a movie, why would you do that? You should build your movie off of a cool, different, likable character.
Or you should build it off of... Be like Christopher Nolan. Build your movie off of a really cool concept like entering people's dreams for inception.
Or the Prestige, which is a cool concept with magicians back in the 1800s or something.
But why build your song off of a cookie cutter foundation when you can build it off of not a cookie cutter foundation?
And that's what improvisation gets us. Instead of building your song now off of, "Oh, I guess I'll use the 1-5-6-4, the 1-4-5-4." Instead of that, you're playing on your instrument or using your voice to try to find some magic that then you can build your song off of. That way, if you come up with a sweet bass line, now you're building your song off of a foundation that is already interesting.
Unlike the chord progression, which probably isn't interesting, now you have this really sweet bass line that, because you improvised for an hour, you've got this awesome bass line. And that can be maybe the bass line for your verse or maybe for your chorus. And now you can build a melody on top of that and then figure out the chords from there and write the lyrics and do the rest of the normal songwriting process. But at least now you've built it on an intriguing foundation. You've built your song off of a good idea instead of a, by definition, cookie cutter idea.
And also, improvisation is just fun.
To me, if you don't enjoy the process of gathering ideas, whether musically or lyrically, then you probably are not going to enjoy songwriting because this is like the most fun portion. This is where there's the least struggle. Because an improvisation songwriting session is sit down for half an hour and just play on your instrument. See if you can find something super cool. There's nothing really to get frustrated about.
You probably will get at least a few decent ideas. Maybe you won't find a magical idea per se, but it probably will still feel like, "That was fun. That was a good time."
And just as a last note on this, the beauty of improvisation too is I think it puts music theory and feelings in their proper place when it comes to music, which is largely we should be writing music off of what feels right, but using theory to inform us and to get us there faster.
Because that's essentially those two in their right role. Any time we say that there's some music theory concept or "rule," music theory doesn't really provide rules. It just provides ideas and concepts. But if there's ever a point that we come up with, say, an awesome chord progression or sweet bass line, and then we figure out, "Oh, well, based on some music theory concepts, I probably should..." No, if it sounds great, go with it. Go with the feel when it comes to music.
I think this is maybe an inherent difficulty of songwriting.
And I haven't thought fully through this yet, so I'm not entirely sure if I agree with what I'm about to say. I think when it comes to words, your brain is slightly more useful than your heart, but when it comes to music, it's the opposite.
Because I think trusting your gut, going with the improvised part, or just doing what feels right often is going to result in the best music, which doesn't mean we don't use music theory to inform it. Of course that's going to help.
But ultimately going with your gut, going with the feel.
But I think with lyrics, it tends to be a more... I mean, this is why books... Any form of writing, right? Every form of writer except songwriter acknowledges that the editing process is the most important part when it comes to words. Whether you're writing essays, articles in a newspaper that don't really even exist anymore and suck, but whatever. Back in the day, they were legitimate, I guess.
Whether you're writing a book, a screenplay... Editing is where usually the magic happens. You take something that's kind of a good idea but rough around the edges, not actually good, and you form it into something good in the editing.
And that's true, I think, with lyrics too. So I think a hard part of songwriting is switching our brain back and forth. Because some of the things that will make you strong as a music writer are actually weaknesses as a lyricist, I think, and then vice versa.
So...
Improvisation. Great songwriting session. So we've talked about idea gathering, that's basically lyric ideas and improvisation, which is essentially music ideas. Then we have one hour song drafts, or what I call song sprints. And I've talked about this a decent amount recently, especially if you've been listening to me going through your answers to what your biggest songwriting struggles are. But maybe you may or may not have been keeping up on those, which is totally fine. I don't want to make... I will re-say it here, just in case.
Or if you're new here, you could be new here as well. But I think something that probably every creative person, but certainly songwriters,
need to think about is, where are you on the spectrum of obsessing over quantity versus obsessing over quality? Or seen another way, are you somebody that leans towards, if anything, you are too busy just pumping out song after song to actually take some time to maybe edit the song into something better, or spend more time crafting the song to make it better instead of just moving on to the next song before that song is actually done or ready or actually good? It's like you write it and it's like a five out of ten. And instead of editing it into an eight out of ten or a nine out of ten, you just move on to the next song, which is missed opportunities.
Or are you somebody on the other side of the spectrum where you spend so much time crafting and obsessing over every single piece of a song that you don't actually get songs done?
And probably all of us are going to fall into one of these two camps. And I think regardless of what camp you're in, you need to be cognizant of that and push yourself towards the other camp. Partially because I think probably the best is somewhere in the middle, right? If you tinker too much and you only write two songs a year, that's a problem. If you write 200 songs a year but they're all crap, that's a problem too.
So a song sprint is especially for those of us that lean into the quality element. And if anything, probably need more help getting out of our own heads and just going fast, working on quantity.
If you're somebody that, oh, every song they write takes an hour, then this is not the thing for you. If anything, you need to push in the opposite direction. Because if your average song takes an hour, I'm sorry, you're not spending enough time on a song. You're just not. You're not.
I don't even have a follow up to that.
I think it's self-explanatory, but just as a side story, I have a friend who is a professional songwriter paid by Sony just to write songs. That was literally his old job. And it was a 40 plus hour a week job that it was paid a lot of money in the 80s to do. And the expectation was that he would have one song a week, which if you do basic math means their expectation was something like 40 plus hours on a song.
So if you think one hour is plenty on a song, but Sony thought 40 hours plus on a song, those numbers are wildly different, wildly different. So maybe, maybe one hour is not enough.
Can you write a great song in an hour? Yes, absolutely. You can write a great song in 15 minutes. It's been done before.
That's the exception, not the rule. It's the exception, not the rule. Even if you listen to songwriters, yeah, the most common story they tell is that magical song that came together in 20 minutes because Americans like that crap. We like the success story overnight that conveniently ignores that they worked for it for like 10 years. So it just seemed like an overnight success. We love, we eat up the stories where we can delude ourselves that, oh, just, I don't need to work to earn it. I just magically, there's this moment where I go perform on an open mic and somebody really important is there. So the first open mic I go to, I get discovered, whatever that means. And then it's just easy from there. We love that story, even though it's very much the exception, not the rule. So I think that's why those get told the most. But any songwriter, if you listen to the full story, it's, yeah, most songs, there's a struggle. Sometimes it takes a while of revisiting the song because the lyric just isn't working or I just couldn't figure out the bridge.
And a lot of it is not time necessarily even spent writing as much as it's resting on the idea or tinkering with the idea. There's a bunch of different things that go into it. It's not usually like it took 50 hours of active work finishing a song. It's not necessarily that. Sometimes it's just sitting there and listening to the song and thinking, what is it? What is it about this that isn't resonating with me? What is it about that lyric that makes me cringe? And then figuring out how to rework it. So anyway, so if you're a person that averages one hour song, look, you need to push in the opposite direction. But for those of us that, if anything, are in the other camp, where if anything, we probably spend too much time obsessing over every little detail, a good habit to get into is a song sprint.
Because it forces us to get out of our own hands, trains us to stop overthinking if we are falling into the trap of overthinking.
And also trains us to be biased towards finishing over perfection because perfectionism is a double edged sword like most things. I think you need a little bit of it. Otherwise, your standards are too low. But if you have too much of it, you never get anything done because nothing's ever going to be perfect. So it has value.
I think people who don't have any perfectionism at all and have no artistic standards at all, they just pump out. Like, oh, it took me 20 minutes, pump it out just the way it is. Like, well, you have no standards. You have no artistic standards. And that's fine. But like, I don't know, don't be upset when people are like, yep, that song exists.
That's what's going to happen. Like, on average, a 20 minute song is going to sound like a 20 minute song.
Chocka, I know. It's almost like if you or I wrote a book in two weeks, it probably would look like a book that took two weeks. And books that take a year, on average, are going to look way better. It's almost like there's a reason for that.
It's so weird to me how we know that's true in literally everything, but then deny it when it comes to songwriting. For anything creatively. If somebody built your house in two weeks, you would be like, I'm sorry, I am not entering that house. Explain how you built my whole house in two weeks. If somebody built you a piece of software and it took two weeks, and you're like, I don't know, that's a pretty involved web app. You built that in two weeks? What's the code look like? Is it really buggy and bad?
Something's got to give. We know this for literally everything, except we deny it when it comes to songwriting. But anyway.
Song drafts or song sprints, which to me should result in song drafts, not necessarily finished songs. Now they're finished in the sense that they have all the parts, but most of the time, if you do a song sprint, I think what you will get probably, most of the time, not always, is a finished draft of a song that then you can edit and craft into something better. Maybe the bridge needs to be reworked because the music just wasn't working for the bridge. Or maybe the lyrics need a lot of work is probably most likely to be the case. But at least trains us into being biased towards getting things done. And it also reduces the perceived value of each individual song in a good way, I think. In the same way that we want to do with ideas.
Where if you know I'm going to finish one song a week, guaranteed, because I'm going to do one song sprint a week, and I'm also going to do more in-depth crafting for my other songs throughout the week. But I know that at the very minimum, I'm going to finish one song a week. That helps you to not fall overly in love with any specific song. And then you're less likely to obsess and just overly tinker on one song. Because the reality is value is somewhat seen as how many...
If you finish two songs a year, the amount of pressure and value on each one of those songs is huge. If you write 200 songs in a year, you probably don't remember or even care about half the songs. Now I think that's too far in one direction, and two is too far in the other. I don't know where the sweet spot is. Probably 20 to 50 songs a year is probably the sweet spot. Maybe 15 to 50 somewhere in there.
But song sprints, especially for those of you that are more like me, which is probably a lot of you because you listen to this podcast, but people who spend time, if anything too much time, crafting, obsessing, maybe not finishing.
Song writing session number four, song developing.
So we touched on this, but I think this is another thing that is often missed that can be so helpful. It's just taking time to flesh out a song, the background of the song, maybe the outline of the song, what you're communicating each song section. What does the chorus have to say? What does the first verse have to say versus the second verse? Making sure that they have something different to say. They have something to contribute to the conversation. We're not just repeating ourselves.
Developing the characters a little bit more.
Figuring out the symbolism. So going back to that idea gathering concept, I think I said something like Shadow of the Tiger. Song developing is when you would take the, okay, let's say you think Shadow of the Tiger is a sweet song title. I think it maybe is a little too try hard. It just sounds like it's trying to be cool to me, which it is cool, but it's kind of like Black Sun or something. It just feels like it's trying too hard, right? Like, of course. It's like take some space thing and make it dark. Every metal band just does that over and over. Some of them are kind of cringe, right?
So anyway, to me Shadow of the Tiger is, at least right now in my head, it's borderline cringe is maybe trying too hard to be cool. But let's just say that that's the idea we're going off of. In the song developing step, that's when you would take that idea and be like, okay, let's see if I can make Shadow of the Tiger into an interesting symbol for something. Like, what does that mean? What is the Shadow of the Tiger? Is it that there's this tiger that's going to eat me and its shadow is overcast over me? So then what does the tiger represent? Clearly some form of danger. What is it? Is it addiction?
Is it maybe the beast within, right? Is it a darker side of me that threatens to eat me whole? Is it we're just spitballing here, right? But you know, that's what right now what I'm doing is sort of sound developing, right? We're taking an idea that we have and we're trying to flesh it out a little bit more. We're not jumping into let's write the song Shadow of the Tiger. I'll figure out what it means later. No, that's a problem because now we've written a whole song that means nothing because you didn't even know what it meant before you wrote the song. So that's a problem. We need to get clear on what is that about?
And if the one hour song draft or a song sprint is biased towards just going, right? Getting out of our own heads and just going. Song developing is biased towards making sure you go in an intentional direction, making sure you don't get stuck when you get to the second verse because you didn't figure out before you started writing what the first verse needs to say versus what the second verse needs to say. If you have a third verse versus what the third verse has to say, we can avoid those pitfalls just by planning it beforehand, right? It's like an author. If they get halfway through the book and they're like, now what? Well, you didn't take the time to outline at the beginning. So that's the problem. Maybe you think you're at the middle of the book, but really you're at the end of the book. Maybe your whole plot was just going nowhere because you haven't figured it out yet.
So this song developing is being biased not towards just going, but making sure that the direction we go is actually the quote unquote right direction or a good direction or direction that we can make work.
So excuse me, but you can think about this as like mapping out before you go on a trip, right? So my wife and I went to Denver last year because I had never, as you may or may not know if you've been a listener for a while, I'm a pretty diehard Denver Broncos fan. I mentioned it once in a while, but you know, I've watched every single game for as long as I can remember. I've suffered ever since Super Bowl 50, etc. Maybe you don't care about football. That's fine. Just know that they are in Denver, Colorado.
So I had only been to Denver, Colorado for one day and we visited the stadium as a part of our honeymoon, which based long story short, I just worked out that way where they screwed up our flight and I said, look, I'll forgive you if you drop us off in Denver for a day, give us a day there. And then that flight takes us back home to Ohio.
So it wasn't a part of the plan, but we kind of made it happen. But I had never, you know, I'm a diehard fan and I had never been in Denver for football games. So we planned a three day trip, right?
And when we did that, we planned out one of the main things we have to have. We have three days in Denver, really like two and a half days. So what are the things we have to hit if we never come back, which I'm sure we will, because again, diehard Denver fan and also Denver is beautiful for any of you who might live in Denver. Holy crap. I mean, Colorado is just so beautiful. But before we committed to the trip and how many days it was, we figured out what are we actually doing? Right? What are we doing here?
That's a normal thing that you would do with the trip. Otherwise you just get to the hotel and be like, now what? And that's a problem. You're already there. You've already committed. Maybe there's nothing to do. Maybe you went to a city where there isn't that much to do. Or maybe you needed more time and three days wasn't even going to begin to cover it.
So song developing is doing that, but instead of for a trip, it's first song. It's first song. It's figuring out, you know, how many song sections you need to tell the story you're going to tell, how to flesh out your idea, making sure that, you know, the song structure is going to serve what you're trying to say in the song.
And also song developing frees you up to explore creatively without the pressure and burden of meter and rhyme and just the overall lyric pressure.
There's something about being able to just write and write in prose, write basic English or whatever language you're writing songs in or whatever your first language is and just write.
You're not worried about meter and getting the rhyme scheme. You're just writing. And you may, if you just write a page just worth, have a bunch of different lines that you came up with right on the spot that actually make perfectly great lyrics. And maybe they'll need some adjusting. Maybe there are just some good ideas in there, but it's a great way to just get your thoughts out and start developing out your idea before you are committing to the actual writing of lyrics where you are worried about meter and rhyme and all that.
You can think of it as it's sort of the same idea as a lot of music producers will talk about. They always, if they have a vocalist in, they'll be like, all right, let's just do a practice run. And they tell the vocalist, oh yeah, I'm not recording. We're just doing a practice run. They always hit record. They always hit record. Why? Because a lot of times the singer will do much better in that first take when they think they aren't being recorded. Because psychologically there's something about, oh, this is a practice take. It's not even being recorded. That frees them up to just sing. But then they tighten up a little bit when it comes to when they know they're being recorded. It's the same idea as, you know, it's playoff football right now or, you know, any sport of your choosing. It's a thing to freeze up a little bit in the playoffs. Get a little tighter because now you know if we lose or out, it's done.
So now there's all this pressure that there wasn't before.
So song developing helps with all that. And really what it looks like is planning out your song a little bit, outlining your song, figuring out the background of your song, fleshing out your characters if applicable, figuring out your symbolism, what does it really mean. Doing some prose writing just to flesh out your idea with no expectation for it to be calm lyrics or anything. Just fleshing out your idea before you really try to start writing your lyrics. And then a fifth songwriting session is lyric editing.
I don't think a single song should be released without the lyrics going through some form of editing phase.
I don't think a single song should be released that doesn't have at least one pass for an editing phase.
Are there exceptions to this? Probably.
But very much the exception.
So if you're not editing your lyrics at all, you don't even entertain the idea that maybe you could word something a little bit better or cleaner or clearer or in a way that's more poetic or more powerful that would give people more chills.
Or you haven't considered that maybe some of your words, especially verbs, are particularly weak and don't really incite any emotion in anybody and just by going through your verbs and seeing if you can upgrade them to something that is maybe a little bit more emotionally packed.
If we're not doing that, missed opportunities. Because just changing one word in a line from a met verb to a really powerful verb can make all the difference in the world.
In fact, I think you should go through every word generally or almost every word.
But at the very least, go through all your verbs. At the very least, you should never put out a song without looking at all the verbs you have and saying, "Is there a better verb that I could use here?" And you can literally plug the word into thesaurus.com and sometimes it will literally give you a word and you're like, "Oh yeah, that is a much more emotionally packed, better, more precise word. That is exactly what I'm trying to say." There's no reason to not at least do that.
You'd never release a book or a poem or a movie, unless you're Disney maybe, a movie or anything without editing first.
Without editing the screenplay, without editing the book. Again, usually multiple times. I mean, I just watched a Brandon Sanderson update video and I think he talked about how they're on draft four for a book and they expect to have five total drafts for a book.
That's what writing a book looks like. That's what writing looks like, is you have to edit.
And a common phrase, or at least one that I heard a lot specifically in college from my composition professor that's really stuck with me because the more I've written, the more it seems obviously true to me. Writing is editing.
And all he meant was, it's a very concise way of saying that most of the final quality of your writing is created not in the writing process, not in the first draft. It's created in the editing process where you find better ways to word things, where you clean up the clunky wording, where you find better words. You think about sentences that just don't feel like they're quite working, so maybe they should just be cut out. Maybe they need to be changed. Maybe they just need a verb change and all of a sudden they work much better. Maybe you need to get rid of your adjectives which didn't really add much, they just kind of get in the way.
Editing can take so many different forms, but simply, again, simply finding one verb that you can upgrade in a song section or in a line can make a huge difference. A huge difference.
So don't overestimate how much even a little editing can do for your lyrics.
I'm a big fan of spending a decent amount of time on editing.
Also, I think there's some part of the process that you could argue is like a hybrid between editing and writing. A lot of some people call this rewriting. I technically put this in my editing process.
That's when you technically have written a line, but instead of trying to fix the line, you entertain the idea that maybe the line is inherently broken, so you just rewrite the line. Is that editing or is that writing? I don't know, it's kind of both, right? Because you're taking a written line that the writing has already been done for and you are rewriting because in the editing process you saw that the line wasn't working. It's kind of a hybrid. I personally put it in the editing process. It doesn't really matter, but that's a part of editing too, right? Rewriting. Another common phrase, somebody brought this up in the live stream, I think a commenter brought this up, but they said writing is rewriting. That's very common. It's similar to the writing is editing phrase. It means sort of the same thing, right? That rewriting or editing, that's where the magic is made. That's where you get from a good idea that's meant in execution to something that is actually good.
So five songwriting sessions, idea gathering, improvisation, one hour song draft, or what I call a song sprint, song developing, and lyric editing. If you aren't having these as songwriting sessions, you totally should. Totally give them all a shot. Probably more than one shot.
See which ones work for you. I have a feeling all of them will work for you again, unless you're somebody that leans into quantity over quality, then the one hour song draft. You already do that and you probably, if anything, should do less of it, not more of it. If your average song is something that takes half an hour or an hour, my challenge to you would be pushing the opposite direction, because just like quantity people or just like quality people need to push towards quantity or people who obsess about quality need to obsess more about efficiency, being faster. People who are already just obsessed with efficiency maybe need to work on actually crafting a song instead of just pumping out every single idea they come up with.
So that's my challenge to you if you're one of those people. If not, all five songwriting sessions should be for you. I guess all five are for anyone. Just don't concentrate on it as much if you're somebody that already does that by default.
But hopefully this has helped with you. Again, be sure to grab my free guide. 20 different ways to start writing a song. Again, I can help you with starting a new song, section two for a song you've already written. If you already have a baseline for your first verse and you're trying to write your chorus now and you're stuck, you can start with a melody. Just know that it should be in the same key as your bass line. So if you wrote your bass line in A major and now you're trying to start your chorus with a melody, just make sure it's also in A major. Because most of the time you don't change keys between song sections. And if you do, it might be something like to the relative minor and the bridge. Of course there are exceptions, but most of the time your song is going to be largely in one key, maybe with the key change at the end, especially if you're trying to model after 70s music, which seemingly every single song did that. And now it's almost dead. I feel like key changes almost never happen now. If anything, maybe it's time to bring them back. But songwritertheory.com slash free guide. Hopefully this episode has helped with you. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate every single one of you. And I will talk to you in the next one.
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