YOUR BEST SOURCE FOR USEFUL SONGWRITING STUFF
I was watching a home renovation show recently. You know… one of those reality TV shows where a couple of energetic, muscular types swing a hammer and—Voila!— they turn a moldy-smelling shack into a sleek duplex complete with landscaping. And I thought to myself: What if you could do a lyric makeover like that on an older song, give it a fresh coat of paint and plenty of current listener appeal!
Habits… we all have them. A habit is simply a ‘usual way of doing things’. Good habits, like exercising or flossing, can be help you improve your life. Bad habits—well, they can undo all the good habits and then some.
As in life, so in songwriting. There are good songwriting habits that can help you write better and faster. And there are bad habits that can cause you to write the same unsuccessful song over and over.
Generally, your songwriting habits are formed by the songs you heard in your teens and early twenties (from age 12 to 22). Research has shown that we recall our experiences from those years more vividly and more easily than those that occur later in life. It’s called the reminiscence bump.
During our teens, music and songs play an outsized role in our lives. They help us express our emotions, establish our identity, and relate to others. The reminiscence bump ensures that we’ll remember those feelings and experiences and the songs we closely associated with them. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the melody, lyric, and chord styles of our teens pop up when we sit down to write songs about similar emotions or experiences now.
I just want to say right up front… I’m not going to suggest that you use AI to write a song lyric. Period. Why on earth would you want to miss out on expressing yourself through your own creative process? It’s your thoughts and feelings that make a song meaningful and worth writing.
But I am curious to know if AI can be a useful tool. Maybe it can help us pick up our writing speed or reach listeners more effectively. So, I figure it’s worth checking out. Besides, I want to see what everyone is talking about. (Be sure to checkout my update at the end of this post.)
The two top sites for now are Lyric Studio and ChatGPT, so that’s where I went.
I know I give you a lot of advice and sometimes you probably wonder if I know what I’m talking about. (Hey, I wonder the same thing about other people all the time.)
So, in this post, I thought I’d give you songwriting advice that comes straight from the mouths of songwriters and artists with incredibly successful, long-running, world-wide fame and success. I won’t include their bios or track records because you already know who they are. So, here are “7 Habits of Successful Songwriters” straight from the source!
Your songwriting process is the way in which you approach creating lyrics, melody, and chords. Maybe you’re a lyrics-first person. Or maybe you grab your guitar and come up with a groove and chords first. Here’s how a couple of successful songwriters approach their own songwriting.
Paul Simon
“I work with my guitar and a legal pad…. I get going fairly early in the morning, because my mind is sharp, and start by dating the pad and putting down personal comments, such as how I am feeling that day, so that it becomes a diary of sorts. … The first page might have all sorts of lines that will never be used, but as I turn the pages, a little thought might come forward and suggest potential for development.” (Making Music, book by George Martin)
Since I originally wrote this post almost three years ago, there has been a revolution in the way Film & TV music libraries are dealing with cover songs. Up till then, they would not accept or pitch cover songs from indie artists. But now, all that has changed. In addition to accepting cover songs for pitching, a top catalog like Crucial Music even has a list of cover songs they’d like to have!
The reason? I’m not sure but there are just so many movies, TV series, and commercials using cover songs, maybe it was inevitable. And (my real guess), music supervisors were really tired of trawling YouTube at 2 am to find fresh cover songs from indie artists because that was the only place where we could easily upload them.
Why did music libraries shun covers in the first place?
Short answer: Cover songs are not one-stop.
YOU ARE THE OWNER OF THE MASTER RECORDING BUT NOT THE SONG.
Since you paid for the recording (or recorded it yourself) you are the owner of the sound recording, the master. But you do not own the rights in the song: the melody and lyric.
If you are pitching to the Film & TV market, you can only give permission to use the sound recording. A music supervisor will still have to license the song from the copyright owner or administrator. Music libraries previously avoided signing cover songs, but that’s changing as more and more productions use them and understand, up front, they will have to clear the rights to the song.
