3 Tools to Strengthen Your Songwriting

Many of us spend hours in our studios or living rooms, starting songs and trashing them, with the hopes that just putting in the hours will be enough to eventually write something we’re pleased with. Undoubtedly, practice does lead to growth. But I find it amazing that it is generally accepted that we can learn an instrument using a tried and true methodology, but don’t ascribe the same potential to learning to write songs. 

Many of our songwriting skills start from listening and applying what we hear. We learn chord progressions, then write songs around them. We emulate a particular singer and apply their embellishments to our own melodies. We connect with a lyric style in a genre, and find that same personality establishing itself in our own songs. But these things are akin to teaching ourselves how to play guitar. We’re applying ideas out of order, and though it results in growth, the progress can be slow and leave us wondering where our blind spots are.

That’s why I’m a fan of following a methodology that involves exercises to build into our songwriting sessions. One of the habits of career songwriters is consistency. That means writing with frequency, entering the flow several times a week so the action of songwriting is almost second nature. Lyric exercises like daily journaling to a musical mood, stacking to form lyric sections, gathering titles, and musical exercises like generating two contrasting melodic themes, or writing two contrasting chord progressions can be great for accelerating growth. So much of songwriting comes down to structure instead of content. To jump-start your songwriting growth in the weeks ahead, here are three exercises that will lead directly to more awareness of your strengths and where you can grow.

Journal to Music

Music inspires emotion. It’s almost too obvious to state out loud, but our words are influenced by the music we listen to. But when we’re trying to write lyrics for our original songs, we’re often somewhat blind to the particular nuances of emotion the music already carries. When we key into the emotion created by the harmonic rhythm, chord colors and groove, we become aware of a whole world of emotion that is as magical as a human being. Add to that the production and the lead vocal tone, and we’ve got an even more complicated and beautiful being. Instead of trying to match the musical mood to our lyrics, it can be a very productive activity to match our lyric tone to the musical mood. Simply taking out a sheet of paper, laptop or even dictating into our phone, we can turn on some music in the background we enjoy, and begin journaling. The music will guide the emotional angle our words begin to take. Then, when we go to pair music with the words we’re accumulating, we can draw from the mood of the tracks that originally inspired them. This exercise is particularly useful for generating bubbly, more light-hearted lyric content when our natural go-to is sad songs.

Lift a Chord Progression from Another Song, then Change the Tempo or Harmonic Rhythm

Our favorite songs carry many of the same chord progressions, but for some reason, none of them feel quite good enough for us when we’re writing our own songs! To overcome this perfectionism, make it a particular goal to lift a simple chord progression from a song you enjoy. Be careful not to choose a progression that screams complexity from the get-go. We’re going to focus much more on the harmonic rhythm and your groove than the chords themselves. After you’ve chosen a progression, play it over and over. Notice the tempo, and the frequency with which the chords change. Change the tempo to significantly slower or faster than the current tempo, and quickly record it. Close your eyes and listen, just observing how the new tempo changes the personality of the progression. You may feel how the story has changed and the temperament of the singer has shifted from excited to thoughtful, or hopeless to anxious. Then, play around with changing chords in different places in the bar. If the progression originally changed chords with each new measure, try changing chords twice per measure, or changing on beat 4 and again on beat 1 in a 4/4 meter. Remember, you’re never locked in. If ever you begin to feel stale or lost within the weeds of your own song, change something. Doubt can be an indicator of boredom with our own ideas. Instead of ignoring the doubt, spice things up with a change in your harmonic tendencies.

Start At The Chorus

Instead of starting at the top of a song, try starting at the center - the Chorus. Most great choruses carry a repeating melodic hook, paired with a lyric hook, that provides the focal point of the song. If we don’t know what the focal point is, our song lacks clarity, and thus, potency. Settling on a melodic theme that catches our ear and sings well is a major element of choruses. A great writing exercise to practice on a weekly basis is to come up with two contrasting melodic themes, with or without chords underneath. I like to write chords and melody at the same time, but also find it interesting to start with a foundational chord progression and then leave room for change later on. The first line of a chorus carries the melodic theme, and that theme usually returns later on, if not immediately in line two. Once I’ve got a theme that feels good to me, I endeavor to write a contrasting melodic theme to supply the verse section with its motif. To contrast, I might try longer and higher pitches in the chorus and shorter, lower pitches in the verse. I might try a longer phrase in the verse after I’ve noticed I’m using shorter phrases in the chorus. If the chorus just isn’t popping with the energy I want, I’ll shift over to shorter notes or before-the-downbeat phrasing. With regard to pitch, I might try a chorus melody that settles more on chord tones than off them, and a verse melody that relies on the tension of passing tones to give it contrast and interest. 

Exercises like these break down the process of writing a song into manageable bites. Though I love the quick-fire challenge of writing a song a day, I also like to know that whatever my particular difficulty when it comes to finishing songs, I’m leaning into it like an instrumentalist running scales. There’s no wrong way to write a song except the way that leaves it unfinished. Every day, we can do what excites us, knowing that there are many actions we can take towards writing songs we love.

Stay creative,

Andrea Stolpe