My songwriting process

Posted on | October 10, 2010 | 2 Comments

When I was 17 years old I got my first guitar, learned a handful of chords, and immediately wrote my first song (this explains why I’m such a mediocre guitar player – I’ve never stopped writing songs long enough to learn anything new). Since then, I’ve written hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds?) of songs.  I don’t think this qualifies me as an expert, per se, but I have learned some interesting things about the process that best enables me to write and write a lot.

Before I dive into it, I’d like to preface my “process” with the following:

1) All of this is crap.  Leonard Cohen said that however you can enter into the “tower of song,” that’s the route you should take.  These steps are how it usually happens for me, but I’ll happily throw away all of it if I am inspired to do something different.  Whatever can lead me to a song at that particular moment, that’s what I do.

2) I write because I’m a songwriter, not because something has happened that has inspired me to write.  Therefore, it’s almost impossible to line up my songs lyric-by-lyric to things that have happened to me and things that I’ve felt.  Bob Dylan wrote that his songs were all true until he changed all the words.  This is more applicable to me; there is something true about what I write and the emotion behind it, but the truth isn’t found in a line-by-line breakdown of the lyrics. That’s not to say that real life inspiration isn’t a great reason to write – during the times that songs have come to me like that (breakups, etc.), they’ve been spectacularly easy to write.  My life just isn’t THAT inspiring all the time, and I don’t want to sit around and wait until it is.  This process is designed to help me find song ideas and lyrics outside of my own life so that I have access to a never-ending supply of ideas.

3) I work on ideas and music in parallel.  It’s only after I have a fully formed idea, and a fully formed chord progression and melody that I bring them together and write the lyric.  I’ll touch on this more later, but it’s important to know that this post is more about my process for coming up with ideas than it is my process for writing music.  That post would actually be quite boring, because in all honesty, Sharlynn and I can sit down and write the music half of a song in a matter of minutes.

STEP ONE: “TRIGGER”

A trigger is anything that makes me think, “I bet there’s a song in there.”  It could be an email from a friend, a line in a TV show, the plot of a movie, or a word I overhear in a coffee shop.  I’ve always believed that to be a great songwriter, you need to be a songwriter every minute of every day and this is most evident in this first step.  I’m constantly on the look out for something that can trigger an idea, and constantly writing them down (if you care, I use Evernote to remember and tag triggers).  Then, when I sit down to write more deliberately, I have a huge database of things that can serve as a starting point.

STEP TWO: “TITLE”

I know I’m getting a little “Nashville” with this, but yes, I try to start with a title as often as possible (“Nashville” meaning that a lot of country songwriters swear by this method of songwriting).  Why?  Because great song titles lead to great song ideas.  Great ideas lead to great lyrics; great lyrics lead to great songs.  You get it.  What I’m looking for in a title is something that just demands to be written – something that is interesting and poetic without any other context.  I’m working on a new far beyond frail album right now and almost every song on there started as a title, before I even knew what they’d be about – Empty City Nights, Stay Awake, Someday Whole, The Girl You Never Found, I Can’t Hear You Breathing, Change My Mind, You’d Break Her Heart For Me, etc.  It’s worth mentioning that a LOT of songs start with a title and not with a “trigger.”  I’ll honestly just sit down with a notepad and start thinking of words.

STEP THREE: “IDEA”

Once I have a title, I ask myself, “If a song was going to be called X, what would it be about?”  As often as I can, I try to throw away the first idea I come up with, because it’s usually obvious, overdone, and not that interesting.  I’ll come up with three or four ideas for that title and then pick the best one.

STEP FOUR: “SKETCH”

At this point, I have a song title and an idea and could very easily match it to a melody and begin writing the lyric.  The problem is that writing lyrics is hard – you have to tell an entire story in a poetic and engaging way, you have about 28 lines to do it, and they have to rhyme.  Therefore, I want to have as much stuff figured out as I can before sitting down to write a lyric.  I want to know who the lead character is – how do they think, what do they feel, what’s happened to get them to this point?  I want to know what key pieces of information the listener needs to know in the first verse in order to make the chorus make sense.  I want to explore what imagery I can use that fits the emotional tone of the idea (nighttime, sunlight, etc.).  Essentially, I storyboard the entire song – first verse, chorus, second verse, bridge – and then free write within each of those boxes so that I have a some language to mold when it comes time to write the lyric.

STEP FIVE: MATCH IT TO MUSIC AND WRITE THE LYRIC

I mentioned earlier that I work on ideas and write music in parallel until the time comes to match them together and write the lyric – this is the point where that happens.  The sketches just sit there (sometimes for months) until I have a chord progression and a melody that needs a lyric.  Then, I search through the sketches to find something that thematically matches the emotional tone of the music (a “hopeful” sounding melody needs a sketch with a “hopeful” theme, for example).  That way, I can focus on writing a lyric without needing to occupy part of my brain with trying to write a melody and storyboard the song at the same time.  I’m not smart enough to do that all at once.

Well, there you have it – that’s my process for writing songs.  If you’re familiar with my music and think it’s terrible, feel free to use this as a guide of what not to do.  But regardless of quality, I’ve written a lot of songs and I think it’s because I don’t need to sit around and wait until inspiration hits.  I sit down like it’s a job and simply usher thoughts down the conveyer belt and it leads to songs.

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