Opinion

Five Deadly Songwriter Sins

Posted on by IJ

No matter how many times the same points are brought up when it comes to common problems that arise for newer songwriters, they bear repeating as a kind of checklist to go through once you feel you’ve finished a song and you want to send it out there.  Of course, a song can never really feel “finished” if you’re the type who likes to tweak a lot, but what I’m going to list here are more obvious problems that come up again and again when I’m listening to newer songwriters.

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1. INTRO TOO LONG –  I’ve seen this brought up by many songwriting instructors or critiques again and again, but somehow it doesn’t seem to sink in for many writers.  If you are pitching your songs to publishers or artists, you are going to lose them so quickly if your intro is long and self-indulgent.  They want to get to the meat of it, so don’t serve so much salad!  Keep your intro as short as you can, and you can even try no intro at all!  Now of course, you’re going to find lots of examples of pro recordings out there with long intros, but these are often by artists or bands who have long since established some kind of following and they can get away with it.  You can’t.

2. FILLER LYRICS – Even if you have one really good hook in your song, don’t ignore the rest of it!  The sound of boring old phrases  will put even the most enthusiastic of your listeners right to sleep.  Your job is to take every one of those old, boring lines and make them remarkable.  There is not one syllable’s worth of room for boring!  Don’t get lazy or impatient, keep going over every line and make it better.

3.  UNREMARKABLE MELODIES – in some cases the problem can be one of two things:  either the melody is too repetitive, or it’s not repetitive enough!  Work on your melodic phrasing, listen to popular songs or songs you like and notice how often the same melody is repeated within a verse and then within a chorus.  The human brain can remember a sequence of up to 7 digits easily, then it starts to lose track.  This is not to say you should only put 7 notes in your melodic phrasing, but just keep in mind that people who are listening to your songs fresh can only remember and retain so much.  On the flip side if you keep throwing the same melody at them over and over, they’ll drift off to sleep.  Too much or lack of repetition is probably the most common problem I hear in songwriter’s melodies.

4. POOR PERFORMANCE – if you’re not a singer, don’t sing on your own demos.  For the purpose of getting a demo made, of course you’ll probably need to give them a rough version of the melody.  The same goes for your accompaniment.  If you can’t play very well, get somebody else to do it.  A poor performance of even a great song will often be a distraction for those who are listening with a critical ear.  Your mom will love it, your publisher won’t :-).

5. LACK OF A THEME AND CONTINUITY – what is your song about?  If you can’t tell me in one phrase, then you haven’t got the chorus down yet.  And don’t tell me it’s a love song, that’s going to lose me too!  There are a gazillion love songs out there, what makes yours different?  Then look at the continuity of your lyrics, is the first verse tied to the next one?  Can you describe the “story” as it unfolds in each verse and does it make sense as a whole?  A common problem is disjointed lyrics where one part of a song doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the next part and it’s difficult to really know what the song is about.  It’s like walking into an extremely cluttered living room, where your eyes don’t know what to look at first.  In a song with no continuity, your ears can’t figure out what to listen to either.  Get rid of all the furniture and pictures, pare it down and start again!

The above problems are not insurmountable, and yet they will stand out immediately to someone who is used to listening to a lot of songs, like a publisher.  You don’t want to give anyone the excuse to hit stop too soon!  Take your time to fix them and it will pay off, I promise :-).

Happy 2011!

IJ

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Mailbag Nov.8/01

Posted on by IJ

I will occasionally respond to emails I receive by posting them here for you to read.  Here is one I received today:

“I’m an 18 year old college student who makes music as a rapper. I hear alot of music, but I connect to songs that actually have meaning in it. I’ve been writing for about 2 years consistently but I want my songs and verses to have meaning and impact the listener in a positive way.

Kick School of Creative Writing
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Any tips on things to read or songs to listen to or writing tips would be appreciated..thank you in advance.”

Writing songs that are meaningful, not only to the writer but also to the listener is what we are all aiming for, isn’t it?  How do I get deeper, how do I say more and still keep the listener totally engaged in what I’m saying?  And if you’re writing rap songs, lyrics are the focal point so learning to write great lyrics is a must.  Reading a lot is certainly one way of stimulating your creative writing skills.  There are a gazillion wonderful novels out there.  Fortunately, they’re not all “War and Peace” length (meaning hundreds of pages long!), but you would benefit greatly from taking the time to read good novels from cover to cover. A well-written novel can open up the top of your head and give you all kinds of ideas about how to approach your own songwriting.

Song lyrics don’t have the luxury of pages and pages of words to get their meaning across, however, in which case, EVERY word is critical.  What I see more often than not in song lyrics that are sent to me are what I call “throw away” lines or words, as if they were put there just to fill the space.  But instead of revisiting them and rewriting them, the songwriter just leaves them there.  The other thing I see in lyrics is tired old phrases, just the same old, same old way of describing something.  The bore factor.  If this is a problem you suffer from as a lyric writer,   I highly recommend reading anything by Pat Pattison.  He even gives a few free lyric writing tips from one of his books on his web page, just so you can get an idea of how he teaches.

So powerful lyrics are critical, but here is another mistake that songwriter’s often make:  they write songs that are TOO PERSONAL.  Now, of course, the most powerful songs are those that are “true” on some level because listeners can always spot something real, but that’s not the kind of personal that I’m talking about.  When you insert details that only have significance to you, you’re going to lose your listeners…they don’t really care if you had a dog named Spike when you were ten.  I imagine it like watching home movies…who wants to visit someone and just sit there and watch home movies of them when they were kids?  It might be funny for a minute, but then it gets boring!  Don’t write your songs like home movies.

On the other hand, we all have universal experiences, meaning experiences that are common to most people, and when you can find a way to write about your own experiences in a way that everyone can relate to, you’ll find success.

The last thing that I want to emphasize is the “show me, don’t tell me” part. Here’s a quick, off-the-top-of-my-head example:

It’s been a long time since I loved someone
And then you came around
You gave me just one kiss
And now I’m found

Boring!! Here’s something that says the same thing, but in a more interesting way:

My love is an engine
It ain’t run in years
Just took one kiss from you
To loosen up the gears

I grabbed that as an example that was given on Pat Pattison‘s website, the song is written by Kurt Thompson. Now these aren’t the most profound lyrics in the universe, and it certainly isn’t rap, but you can “see” the second set of lyrics, can’t you? The first set of lyrics puts you right to sleep. This is an example of “show me, don’t tell me.”

The last thing I’d like to emphasize is write, write, write.  Write a journal, don’t just write lyrics.  Make yourself write things you don’t normally do, so you can avoid getting into writing ruts.

Hopefully there will be some ideas here to keep you on the right track!

Good luck 🙂
IJ

Hit Songwriting Secrets (not!)

Posted on by IJ

I spend a lot of time perusing the internet for other songwriting news, tips, ideas, etc., in part for my own curiosity, and also because of the articles I write for Muse’s Muse and those I post here.

American country musician Taylor Swift perform...
American country musician Taylor Swift performing live. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One phrase that always makes me laugh is “songwriting secrets”…whether they are pitching a book or some kind of one-on-one session with you as a songwriter, or maybe they’re just trying to get you to sign up to their website so that they have your email address so they can spam with you with stuff later on;  the idea that there are secrets to songwriting that no one else knows is FALSE!

Why?  Because the songs that are successful are not secrets at all!  They are out there on the radio, on iTunes, on videos and CDs for you to listen to, analyze, reverse engineer and learn from.  If your ambition is to write a hit song, you have literally hundreds of thousands of hit songs out there at your disposal to teach you, they are not secret at all.

So how do you learn from them?  This is the the real “secret”.  What is it about a song that makes it successful?  Studying different hit songs, what they are comprised of and how every part works together, you will get a better sense of what makes it successful.

So let’s get to the songwriting first.  Some will tell you that there’s a secret “formula” to hit songwriting…for instance, always have a particular number of verses, always keep the intro short, always write in the first person, come up with a title first…etc., etc.  Don’t “always” do anything;  each song has its own personality and if you’ve already written a few of them, you know what I mean.  Do you use the same chords every time?  The same form or subject matter?  Of course not.  The only formula you need is to make it good, and “good” is a very subjective thing.  If you listen to the top ten pop hits right now on Billboard, (or country, or any other chart for that matter) you’ll discover a few things.

They don’t necessarily conform to any one key or song form (although as far as subject matter, when I checked Billboard for the most recent top 10 pop hits they were pretty much all about love/lust or breakups/relationships!), but they do use certain techniques to keep the listener hanging on.  Sometimes those elements are simply the recording and production itself, sometimes they are the way the verses and chorus (and/or pre-chorus) relate to each other, sometimes the lyrics and/or music are really catchy.  And often it’s simply the artist or band that has such a huge following, almost anything they do will become a hit.  If your ambition is to write a hit song, then your job is to study what’s out there and come up with something better!   Easier said than done, I know.

But lets back off the actually writing for a bit and consider what else makes a song a hit.  First of all, many songs that you hear are not necessarily “great”, but they make it to the charts because of the artist or band, as I mentioned earlier.  If these artists and bands don’t write their own material, who does?  A lot of them get their songs from their record label, who may have their own writers or have a publishing branch.  Quite often, the same circle of songwriters write a lot of the songs you hear…particularly in country and pop.   You can find out yourself by checking out the BMI or ASCAP records (or whichever performing rights organization exists in your country).  These P.R.O.’s have search able records online, so there’s no secret there either.

So, okay, a lot of it is who you know, in which case, part of your job as a potential hit songwriter, after you’ve come up with some great songs, is getting to know people.   Go to music centres like Nashville or Los Angeles or New York, research publishers who might be interested in your style of writing.  Join organizations that can help you like N.S.A.I. or songwriting associations that give workshops in all areas of the craft and business.  Be prepared to keep learning, learning, learning.  Hang on to your day job and save money for these ventures.  When you meet people who can help you, be polite, don’t shove your CD in their pocket, ASK first.

You also need to be patient.  I met a guy once who wrote his first ten songs and immediately went to Nashville to pitch them.  He was so sure that’s all he had to do…but when he got there he learned pretty quickly that he had spent nowhere near enough time on the writing part before he did the pitching part.  It was a huge reality check. That’s a true story. So remember to use your head and do everything in the right order!

The recent stories about Taylor Swift’s success are interesting because on her earlier releases she co-wrote a lot of material,  but on her most recent release “Speak Now” she wrote every single song herself.  She’s young and she’s smart, getting the experience she needed under her belt first by co-writing.  Co-writing is a “given” in the pro songwriting community…a lot of the songs you hear are written by more than one person, so you should consider doing that yourself too.  Chances are that if you get anywhere near working for a record label, you’ll be thrown into situations where you’ll have to write with someone you don’t know.  And if you’re a singer/songwriter and hoping to make it as an artist, you might take a cue from Taylor.  Don’t assume you know everything…you don’t!

There are no secrets to hit songwriting any more than there are secrets to any kind of success.  It comes down to the same things, whether you want to be a great chef, a successful financier or a best-selling author:  hard work, determination, patience, some talent and a little luck.  Shhhh…don’t tell anybody! 🙂

IJ

  • So You Want My Job: Songwriter (artofmanliness.com)

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    Be Careful Out There

    Posted on by IJ

    I was recently contacted by a songwriter who had himself contacted an online Nashville-based company after he saw an ad for them on a music website.  When I checked it out, I saw that this company’s website was pretty straight-forward:  “We find songs for…” and then it proceeded to list a whole bunch of big name country artists.  So they were either a song publisher or song plugging company.  Below the long list of artists, there were three buttons.  The first button was supposed to be a FAQ, but the questions represented weren’t anything like “who we are and what we do”.  No, instead they included questions like “Do my words need to be perfect when I send them to you?” ,  “How long should my song be?” and “Do I need to copyright my songs before I send them to you?”.  All of their answers to these questions raised red flags for me.

    The first question was “Do my words need to be perfect when I send them to you?”…any legitimate song publisher or songplugger WANTS A “PERFECT” SONG to pitch.  They don’t want to listen through a bunch of mediocre songs…which is why it is so hard to get that publishing deal in the first place.  Most song publishers listen to about the first :10 or :15 seconds of a song before they decide to turn it off or not.  But what did this company’s website say?  “No.  All songs start with a good idea and that’s all we need.”  Right away, this should tell you that they are taking anything that gets sent their way.  Why?  I’ll get to that in a minute.

    Second question:  “How long should my song be?”  Now, that’s a rather odd question to put in a FAQ, but nevertheless, they have an answer for that one too!  Their answer is:  “A commercial song…usually has about 24 lines, but may vary.”  This reminds me of an old scam artist/self-proclaimed “hit” writer that I came across a number of years ago on the web.  He actually had it calculated down to the number of syllables in a line!  If you have this many syllables, your song could be a hit!  But all you have to do is check out a bunch of hit songs from anywhere, anytime, to see that numbers of lines and syllables is NOT the most important aspect of being a “hit”, nor is a certain number of them a prerequisite.  Another red flag.

    Third question:  “Do I need to copyright my songs before I send them to you?”  Their answer?  No.  That was the biggest red flag for me.  Now, practically speaking, a lot of pro writers do not copyright their songs until they get picked up by an artist.  But they know who they’re dealing with, and they already have a name for themselves.  They are not you, the first time songwriter trying to get your songs to a publisher.  Technically, a copyright ‘exists’ when you finish writing a song.  You always put the copyright symbol on anything you send out.  And if you are really hot on that song, you register a legal copyright first before sending it anywhere.  No question.

    Okay, let’s get back to that Nashville company website.  Remember I told you that I’d explain why they would take anything that is sent to them?  Well, this will tell you. The next button says “Read what songwriters are saying about [us].”  I read all of the quotes and every one of them was about the recording of the songwriter’s song.  For example:   “Thank you for making a great recording of my song. You are special people who make a difference.”  None of the quotes had anything to do with getting a song placed, pitching it to artists or getting on the radio, or anything else.  All they want is for you to pay them money to record your song.

    When the songwriter who contacted me sent me a copy of the contract, my suspicions were confirmed.  This was all about paying money to get a song recorded.  And not only that, but you get a bonus of $30,000 when you get a number 1 hit!  Wow, so now, let me see…somehow getting a recording of your song done by them, which you pay them for, could be a number 1 hit??  How might that happen?   That’s the other ‘service’ they provide…they’ll send your song to a bunch of radio stations on a compilation CD!  That’s how it will become a hit.  It’s just that you have to pay for being on the compilation CD too.  Oh well, chump change compared to that $30,000 you’re going to make, right?  They’re going to send it out to hundreds of radio stations!  But here’s the twist:  most radio stations pay absolutely no attention to these compilation CDs.  The only CDs they will listen to come from legitimate and big name record labels.  I know…I worked at a radio station.  The CD your song is on gets filed under “G” for garbage.

    The ‘contract’ that was sent to this songwriter was, in fact, a glorified invoice.  Please pay us $500+ dollars.  Oh, and your song could be a hit.

    Don’t feel stupid if this has happened to you or if it does in the future.  It has happened to many, many songwriters over the years.  Heck, I still get an annual post card from a “big time” producer, gushing about my song (and he always gets the title wrong) and how he can make it a big hit for me down in Nashville.  I’ve received a post card every year for about ten years, and that’s not exaggerating.   I probably sent the song out there to a few places years ago and that’s how he got my address.  I laugh, but then I wonder how many others he does this to every year, and how many of them fall for it just because they really believe in their songs and want it to be true.

    These guys are nothing but scam artists pulling at your heartstrings.

    If you have any questions about any publishers or song pluggers, send them to me.  I am not a lawyer so if you get a big, long contract with a bunch of legalize in it, I won’t be able to decipher it much more than you will.  However, if it’s anything like the contract this songwriter sent me to look at, I can tell you right away if it’s a scam or not!

    In the meantime, be careful out there.

    IJ

    PS…I occasionally receive emails from so-called song pluggers or people who want to collaborate and who claim they have written hits for certain artists, etc.   I usually research them first to see if they are legitimate by simply searching for their names in the ASCAP and BMI databases (or check with the PRO from whatever country they reside in).  If I can’t find their names registered anywhere, I’ll simply reply to their email and ask them what name they register their songs under.  If they are legitimate, they’ll tell you, if they don’t answer back, you’ve learned that either they are scammers or that they are not willing to share their info, which makes them highly suspicious.  As I always say, arm yourself with knowledge! ~ IJ

    Like A G6 Lyrics Analyzed by Kimberly Cole

    Posted on by IJ

    Okay, I guess I’m stuck in the 70’s because I recently listened to a bunch of songs on Billboard’s Top 100 and could not for the life of me understand (other than by guessing) what the #1 Billboard song, “Like A G6” was about. But here’s somebody who knows a little more than I do:

    Well, so okay it’s about getting drunk and partying. It’s just that they call it something else now :-).

    IJ