A Process for Your Songwriting

Some things in life that should come with a manual, don’t. Living healthy, choosing a college major, being a good friend, choosing a spouse, and raising a child are just a few. It seems that meaningful living simply doesn’t distil well into a one-size-fits-all instruction booklet. Neither does the Smagora wardrobe I recently purchased from IKEA. Songwriting, as it seems, is similarly perplexing.

If you’ve written songs for any length of time, you’ve likely wondered if there is a process for stronger results. And you’ve probably been told that one activity worth building on is journaling, free-writing, or ‘morning pages.’ Certainly, these daily practices, also called ‘object writing,’ ‘sensory writing,’ or ‘destination writing’ help us tap into our creativity, inviting tons of song ideas and developing our keen eye for quality material. But free-writing is just one step in a very personal process. Even if we regularly outpour our wild musings, there’s still a song to write. And a song has music as well as lyric, form and structure like verses, choruses and bridges, and though organized with great effort on our part, manages to convey a sense of effortlessness as if it always existed and we merely plucked it from the universe for all to hear. If free-writing is the extent of a songwriting process, we are, as the Norwegians say, “skrudd.” (Pronounce “screwed.”)

In Search of Process

I reached a point in Nashville about two years into my staff-writing career when I could go no further without process. I was frustrated with unfinished songs, washy concepts, and uninspired musical foundations. I needed steps I could identify and repeat, without reducing the art to an assembly line production. That’s when I began to see the rhyme and reason behind the approaches used by the great songwriters I collaborated with. They weren’t always aware of their process, but there were tendencies none-the-less. Their typical moves let them come up with great material and finish songs in less time. That’s when I recognized the value of the free-writing I had been doing, and when I began sifting it for the songs it contained.

When we free-write or journal, we press onto the page feelings and thoughts and descriptive language according to whatever floats past our minds. The same language happens out loud in the writing room in Nashville, where instead of free-writing as a paragraph, we free-write out loud one line at a time with imagery like ‘The fields have grown over now, years since they’ve seen the plow.’ Or we might blurt out a more abstract concept like ‘there’s nothing time hasn’t touched.’ Our verbal suggestions for lines of lyric come from the scene in which the song takes place and the message we want to express. 

Our own free-writing may wander simply because we haven’t settled on a concept for a song. We’re exploring, and that makes it seem as if there is no song there. But the more we look into specific lines of our free-writing for the song concept they might suggest, the more we can see songs springing from that well of inspiration.

The Song in the Free-Writing

To begin seeing the songs within our own free-writing, I’d like to share an example of some free-writing done without a song idea in mind. The song begins to take shape only when lines are lifted from the free-writing and set in place in a section, such as a verse. The free-writing below is just a few lines written around the keyword ‘rain shower.’

Droplets burst like tiny water balloons on the deck, the wood slabs grayed from too many winters without sanding and staining. That used to be your job. I watched the drizzle paint the window pane, distorting the world like a house of mirrors. I stood staring out the kitchen window. The grass winced under the column of rainwater gushing from the gutter clinging to the roof of the house. That needs fixing too. Blurred headlights pulled into the neighbors drive.

This doesn’t seem like a song, but when I lift lines to establish a rhythm and rhyme scheme, a section of a song begins to emerge:

I watch the rain painting the window

bursting like water balloons on the deck

columns of rainwater gush from the gutters

clinging from the roof

guess they need fixing too

these are the things you used to do

the things you used to do

Or maybe a six-line section of ABCABC like this:

I watch the rain like water balloons

bursting on the deck

grayed from too many winters

The gutters cling onto the roof

gushing on the grass

there’s too much that needs fixing

too much that needs fixing

There was a lot of descriptive language in the original paragraph that was useful for building a song lyric - we just have to grab it. There’s also rhyme already within the writing, and using these ready-made rhyme pairs means we can stay true to the original language that simply felt right when we aren’t trying to write lyrics. To find rhyme within the free-writing we do, we merely need to look for matching vowel sounds, like this:

Pane - grayed - paint - stare

Balloon - you - roof

Fix - wince - drizzle - kitchen

Job - drop

We can also make rhyme pairs through words that follow the same rhythmic pattern and ending sound, like this:

Gutter-water-winter

Kitchen - fixing

Lyrics differ from free-writing in that they have structure, rhyme, and rhythm. The rhythm lays down a pattern throughout the section, which allows for a melody to repeat throughout the section, too. Our lifted lines will sound much more believable as lyrics if we nurture a rhythmic pattern that repeats throughout the section. We can trim the lines down, or add to them, to get the rhythmic pattern we want to hear. 

Using our free-writing to generate sections of lyric is a powerful tool. I use this step frequently in my search for my best lyric content. It also naturally leads to new musical ideas, as the lyric propels the musical phrasing along rather than the musical phrasing dictating how my lyrics will phrase.

This concept of brainstorming and lifting ideas to use as song starts isn’t only for lyrics. When we sing bits of melody, lay down a little chord progression, and settle on grooves we like, we’re doing a sort of ‘musical free-writing’ that naturally leads to song starts. Like music, the trick can often be taking that next step in the process - deciding exactly which melodic themes, small chord progression, or groove to go with amongst all the possibilities. In a sense, our free-writing is the chunk of granite from which we’re carving our own David. He’s in there - we just need to find him, tap by tap.

If step one of the lyric writing process is free-writing, then step two is mining the free-writing for lyric lines. Though we can substitute new ideas at any point in the process, starting with the ideas that came naturally and following them to discover the song concept is a wonderful way to dip into the well of songwriting and come up with a tune.

Stay creative,

Andrea