I once heard Taylor Swift refer to inspiration as a “purple, sparkly cloud.” It’s common to assume songs magically descend on our favorite artists and writers without all the hair-pulling and self-doubt.

There are three things Valentines Day gets me thinking about. One of them is LA traffic. Three hours in a car for a two-hour dinner on February 14th sucked the magic right out one year. The second is free chocolate. No explanation needed. The third, though, is canned love.

Inspiration isn’t ours to control. We can, however, learn to tame it, understanding its ways so it drifts by more often.

As a songwriter who has struggled with lyric writing and come out the other side, I’ve recognized a few reasons why my cryptic lyrics happened, and what I did to change them.

We may not realize it, but when we determine to share our music outside the confines of our own living rooms, we shift from being a songwriter to being an entrepreneur.

Now, with a few decades of lyric struggle behind me, I can understand what is so hard about setting lyrics to music. The fact is, choosing a melody, chords, and groove that enhance the meaning of our words and marry them all precisely is no small task.

Sensory writing is writing from the senses of taste, touch, sight, sound, smell, and movement.

We songwriters know the challenge of finishing songs, especially when it comes to writing second verses.

It is no secret that writing from an authentic point of view is a great way to get a listener hooked.  It’s one thing to tell a story and another thing to tell a relatable story.  Easier said than done, huh?  In order for the listener to truly feel what you are talking about, they need to be able to imagine themselves in the character’s shoes.  We do this successfully with a type of object writing called destination writing. 

Rhymes can help give a song its ability to create a believable experience. We are going to talk about five different types of rhymes: perfect rhymes, family rhymes, additive/subtractive rhymes, assonance rhymes and consonance rhymes.

We spend a good portion of our early writer years wafting in and out of love with our songs. One moment, we’re flirting with a beautiful new melody. The next, we’re convinced it belongs to someone else. We can’t seem to find and define what makes our songs lovable. Sometimes it feels like all the good ones are already gone. So why is comparing our songs to those of our idols always a losing game?

For most songwriters, Mom isn’t a trustworthy source of feedback. She’s delightfully ignorant about the craft, never worked at a record label, and has a history of giving her sweet baby James the benefit of the doubt. Even if mom’s perfected the art of sugar-coated criticism, deep down our inner teen knows the old eye-roll and ‘you just don’t understand me’ puts the guilt back where it should be - in the relationship rather than the song.