“I make a lot of tracks, and normally I consider myself to be pretty good at writing melody. But I’ve got all these tracks lying around, and for some reason, I don’t feel like any of the melodies I’m singing are that great. I’d like to finish more of my songs, and I really believe in the tracks. “What can I do?”

This was a question posed to me by a highly proficient, recently-signed songwriter participating in my mentorship program. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to call him Joe. Whether or not you see yourself as a producer, vocalist, or even very proficient songwriter, we can all identify a piece of our own songwriting struggle in Joe’s words. Being able to articulate a problem we are facing is the first step in moving past it and finishing songs. But how do we solve a problem when we’re not quite sure what it is?

When I meet with a songwriter, I usually get the sense that writer knows the problem - but just lacks the confidence to say it out loud. When we’ve got a lot of music and no lyrics, the problem is that we are very comfortable creating music and when sitting down to write, begin with the process that lets our strengths lead. This doesn’t really sound like a problem, except that it nearly always lets us off the bus at the same stop… without completed songs.

Joe shied away from writing words because he was afraid to muddle up a good song. He would rather fall back on what he knows, such as writing more chord progressions or producing more tracks, than waste a perfectly good track to a mediocre melody and lyric. Sound familiar?

Sometimes our problems are layered. Where we might be well-versed in melody writing, we may resist laying down a melody on our tracks because what we hear sounds too familiar, like it’s already been written. Sometimes we’re just tired of our own familiar sound. In this case, we may approach the act of writing a melody through the act of writing lyrics, so that our melodies are shaped by the stress patterns of the words instead of what comes out by pitch alone.

Joe has his own problems, and the problems we each face are as individual as our sound. To define yours, you might look at several of your songs and consider what element - melody, chords, harmonic rhythm, or lyrics - you would love to feel more confident about. The weak point can change from song to song, however, try to look for the larger pattern. If you generally find yourself contributing lyrics as a collaborator, or generating lots of music on your own, you can safely say that these are elements you feel more confident writing. You might also consider what element of a song comes first in your process. It could even be a section of the song like the chorus or verse. The parts that always come later are generally felt as more difficult areas to master.

When we see where our strengths lie, we can choose how to write that will set us up to finish more songs we start.
In the case of my mentee, Joe, he was having specific trouble believing in the quality of his melodies and his lyrics. Lyrics very rarely began his process for writing, and so naturally he started with tracks and then moved on to melody. This made melody obligated to work within the parameters of the track. Not an altogether bad thing, as limitation helps to narrow our choices and give our instincts a more clear lane in which to drive. But another problem Joe faced was that he no longer believed in the validity of his melodies. 

As he sang a short bit of melody he’d written that he liked, we began to try to discover what was so likable about it. He was drawn to the falsetto, and the large intervals between some of the notes. The lyric was fairly nonsensical, which is to say that it provoked a feeling without needing to make much literal sense. The melody and lyric got along nicely, but what Joe really wanted was to create melodies with stronger rhythmic characteristics. 

He quickly sang for me an example of a great melody of three lines a friend of his wrote. Comparing the two melodies, we could see that his friend’s melody was clustered, moving only by scale tone and staying relatively static within a small range of pitches. This enabled the lyrics to fill up more space and the melody to become more rhythmic, since the vocalist would not need to make intervallic jumps that would be hard to articulate. 

Compared with his own melody, we could see why he wasn’t able to write rhythmic melodies himself with all the intervallic jumps he included. To encourage more rhythmic ideas, he would need to minimize the jumps in pitch so that he could syncopate more. He would also benefit from starting with a few lyric lines that contain more syllables so that when he used them to encourage new melodies, he could use short notes and syncopation over just one or two bars of music. 

No more long soaring vocals in all sections of the song. Joe was going to contrast one section with another, by using a combination of his natural tendencies and his new awareness of how those tendencies lead him to the same sound over and over again. He was growing his style and his skills because he understood the strengths and weaknesses of his process.

The beauty of songwriting as an art form is that all our songs carry fingerprints of ourselves. No matter how many tools, their mysteries are endless. As a craft, we can delight in our tendencies, and knowing what they are, change the ones that leave us dissatisfied. 

In all my years listening to thousands of songwriters, one thing I know to be true above all. All of us are creative beyond the measure we see - even at times we feel stuck or stalled. Sometimes it just takes a little faith and an outside nudge to embrace a new way of seeing our writing.

Stay creative,