Songwriter Theory Podcast: Learn Songwriting And Write Meaningful Lyrics and Songs

We're talking about the only songwriting tip that ultimately matters and an important announcement. ►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

►► Download the 6-Step Lyric Writing Checklist here: https://songwritertheory.com/lyricchecklist/

In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we talk about the power of parallelism in your lyrics, why bridges are the perfect song section to start utilizing modes and borrowed chords, the art of subtly different song structure in our songs, non-lazy songwriting, and more! We're going off of the great song 100 Years by Five for Fighting for this episode.

0:00 Intro

2:51 The Power of Parallelism In Lyrics

12:59 Where To Use Modes and Borrowed Chords In Your Songs

35:32 Changing Up Song Song Structure

50:00 The Art of Non-Lazy Songwriting

1:08:36 Should We Have Our Song Title In The First Line?

#SongwriterTheory #JosephVadala

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this episode of the new format of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're learning about Hook Writing, 3rd Verses, Wordplay, and more off of the song Everything You Want by my favorite artist,  @VerticalHorizonMusic  . We'll be covering what we can learn about hook writing, lyric writing, song structure, and more in this episode. Let's talk about it!

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this bonus episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about your biggest songwriting struggles. We're going to talk through and attempt to give the solution or some advice as to how to get past the struggles you're having in your songwriting. Transcript: We're back with another bonus episode of the Songwriter Theory podcast. It's going to be part eight of addressing your biggest songwriting struggles. No, I didn't forget about this series. Just didn't have time for a hot second, but we're back. We're going to finish out responding to these, not necessarily in this episode, unless actually, almost certainly we're not going to finish in this episode. No, it's not important to have watched the other ones. If you're thinking, Oh my goodness, part eight, do I have to go watch the other ones? No, they're all self-contained. Each one is me addressing different of your responses to this survey that I sent out. And whether you are somebody that actually responded to this and you're waiting to hear specifically what I have to say about your songwriting struggle and maybe the advice I give or whatever it might be. But also you might be somebody who shares a struggle with another songwriter out there. In fact, in going through these, I've realized, wow, there are a lot of themes that come up over and over. So there might be something in here to help you as well. Let's talk about it. Hello, friend. Welcome to another episode of the songwriter theory podcast. Another bonus episode talking about your biggest songwriting struggles. If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide. 20 different ways to start writing a song, starting songs and finishing songs or some of the recurring themes that come up here. And this free guide will help you with starting songs. It's a cheat sheet now. It's much shorter. It's very easy, practical to apply. Great way to stay creatively fresh. And just it's good to have a variety instead of being stuck in one way to start a song, especially because sometimes the one way to start a song isn't actually what's best for us. Maybe you've always started a song writing lyrics first and you haven't even contemplated that maybe an easier way to write songs for you is actually starting on the music side. Maybe something specific like a bass line or a guitar riff or chord progression. Regardless, it's a great way to mix things up. Songwritertheory.com slash free guide. Let's dive into question or feedback, I guess. Response. There's the word. Number one, lately I've been having trouble getting into the flow and starting a project and or staying focused. It's a big problem in today's society. Yes, yes, it is. Also, I have trouble finishing projects and following through and letting them out into the world. I'm not very experienced at the mixing process, but I know what sounds good, at least to me. I know I can figure out how to use the mixing tools in Ableton Live 11 Suite, which I recently acquired. Not an EDM artist, however, Ableton is perfect for the kind of music I want to play and I'm playing with all of its tweakable sounds and effects and features. But I feel like my music is so far removed from the mainstream that there's no point in putting it out there because A, no one is going to like it or listen to it. And B, I want people to hear it. But that's not the most important thing.(...) I like I make music because it's what I've always done. I'm originally a singer songwriter and trying new things with Ableton on keyboard guitars, bass drums. Do I need an attitude adjustment? Should I go back to busking on 9th Street with my classical guitar in harmonica? What do you think? 0:00 Intro 3:26 I Have Trouble Getting Into a Songwriting Flow! 8:41 I Have Trouble Staying Focused On Songwriting! 16:44 Who Will Even Care About My Music? 24:19 I Struggle Writing Melodies! 33:06 I Struggle with Metaphors In My Lyrics!

►► Download the 4 Pillars of Music Theory For Songwriters Guide here: http://songwritertheory.com/musictheoryguide/

In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about how I'd learn songwriting if I had to start over.

After writing songs and continuing to learn for around 20 years, I'd certainly do things differently if I had the chance to do it all again. So, in this podcast I'm going to walk you through exactly what I would do in what order if I had to learn songwriting from scratch. What I'd do if I wanted to learn songwriting but had never written a single song before. The ultimate "songwriting for beginners" guide if you will.

So, let's talk about how I would learn songwriting if I had to start from the beginning.

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this bonus episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're continuing to respond to your biggest songwriting struggles. I asked you all what your #1 biggest songwriting struggle is, and you answered! And now I'm going through each of your responses to try and help you out! So, let's talk about your biggest songwriting struggles and how you might overcome them!

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about another factor leading to or signpost indicating how good a song is. This time we're talking about honesty. A song doesn't have to be literally true, but it definitely should be communicating truth. Often, our songs are touching on themes and exploring different stories to try to glean some meaning from life. Our songs, like any other art, should represent reality. Again, not literal reality, but the reality of the nature of the world and creatures with free will. Just as Tolkien used fantasy characters to explore core human truths, so should we be writing with core human truths in mind. Are you characters consistent? Do your stories represent what is likely to happen in the real world? Do your characters seem like they would or could be real people? A part of what makes art great is the illusion of the lack of the hand of the artist- but yet art is completely created by an artist. But if the art feels honest and real, we don't see the hand of the artist. We do see the hand of the artist when the artist makes characters do things out of character so the rest of the plot can happen, or when they present a world that bears no resemblance to what we know of the reality around us. So let's talk about honesty as a factor leading to great songs!

Transcript:

In this episode, we are continuing our conversation about what makes a song great. It's a difficult conversation to have. It's not something that is super easy. It's not something that can just be made into a simple math equation. But we all have this sense that there is such a thing as one piece of art or one song being better than another. We all think, "How do I make my song better?" Which implies the existence of better. So, it's important to talk about what are the factors that lead to that. When I say that I want to make my second verse lyric better, what are some of the underlying principles or factors that go into making it better versus maybe making it worse? And we can apply that to all different parts of any given song. So, we're going to talk about things philosophically today, but we're talking about what makes a song great. But to... Hello, friend. Welcome to another episode of the Songwriting Theory Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Joseph Adala. I'm honored that you would take some time out of your busy day to talk songwriting with me. I could be listening to Rogan, but instead, you are here. And I'm sure that Joe Rogan is more entertaining than I am, given that, well, we are talking about things that are largely informational. So, as entertaining as I may or may not be as a human being, this podcast is no Joe Rogan show. Joe Rogan experience, I'm sorry. What's wrong with me? Goodness. That being said, I know that, you know, probably we have time for one, two, maybe three podcasts to actually keep up on in the fact that any podcast talking about songwriting, the craft of songwriting, and learning more about songwriting makes the cut for you, means that songwriting as a craft is really important to you. And that pumps me up, because it's important to me. That's why I do this. That's why we're 251 episodes in, something like that. I care about the craft of songwriting, and the fact that there's anybody out there listening at all, of course, means that other people care about the craft, too, which is the best. So, thank you for being here. I appreciate that. If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide. I always do always to start writing a song. We're talking philosophical today. So, makes sense to offer you something for free. That is purely practical, basically. It is, if you want to start a song, do this, or this, or this. And it's not a comprehensive list. But I think too many of us just kind of default to one way to start writing a song and never even entertain the idea that there's a bunch of different ways to start a song that can inspire us in different directions creatively, or can get us out of our creative rut. Too many times, I think we think that, "Oh, the muse hasn't visited me," or, "My creativity's just run out. I just can't write a song right now." But it's not because our creativity ran out. It's because our creativity with that specific thing has run out. Maybe right now, if I were to try to come up with a piano riff, I've just kind of run out for now, because I've done too many in the last several months. And I just need to go try to start a song with a bass line, or start a song with an interesting drum part, or perhaps start with a song title instead, something on the lyrical side. Start with what I think is a compelling story, and then figure out, "Okay, how do I tell that story via song?" So if any of that seems interesting to you, be sure to check out that guide, songartethery.com, slash, free guide. We guide 20 different ways to starting a song, whether from a lyrical standpoint or from a musical one. So in last week's episode, if you missed it, I would encourage you to go back and probably go back to the episode before that as well. In general, if you're new here, this probably isn't the episode I would recommend you start with. Probably start with something that's a little more hard teaching. This is, again, getting kind of philosophical, which I think is important sometimes. And here I think it's super important because this is foundational. If we can't even begin to have a conversation about what some of the factors seem to be of making art in general, things in general, but particularly songs better, then we can't really talk about how we can make our songs better, right? How can we possibly even have the audacity to say anything or ask any question about, "Well, how do I make this verse better?" Or, "How do I write better songs if we don't agree to some premise that better exists and then therefore there are factors that lead to whether something is better or not?" When I write the first draft of my lyric and I think this is deeply flawed, but, you know, hours of work later, rewrites, edits, and then finally I'm like, "Oh, this version compared to my first version is better." And most of us could look at the A and B and be like, "Wow, yeah, the edited version way better." How do we know that? And that's sort of the question that we're trying to answer with this series, where we're getting into what I think are some of the central factors. And last week we talked about sort of the cohesiveness or cohesion or synergy, if you will, of all the different parts in a song that they're all moving in the right direction, that theoretically there is no such thing as a perfect song, but if the perfect song existed, the melody alone would tell you the whole story. And then the lyrics would tell you the whole story perfectly. And also the music, the background music, just if you heard the chord progression alone, it alone would tell you the story. Now, of course, that's impossible, right? We can't have a chord progression tell a whole story. But the closer we can get, where just by listening to the chord progression, just by listening to the melody, just by reading the lyrics, they all are in agreement and push us towards feeling the same emotion and telling the same story, such that if you just heard the melody and you were to write down what you think the song is about, you would be correct. Again, that's impossible. Perfection is always impossible. But I think the closer we get to that, the closer we are to at least in one factor making our song better. So we're talking about a second factor today. And don't think this is in any particular order. For example, I'm not sure that I probably don't think that this is maybe even a top three factor. We'll see as I work through the list. But I do think it is an important factor. And I think it's one that's not talked about enough. And that is honesty. Now, when I say honesty, I don't mean honesty about literal truth. Literal truth, I think, doesn't matter much at all. For instance, if you write a song about something that happened to you, and you take artistic liberties and make adjustments to what acts you're doing, and you think that actually happened in your real life, or you're singing a song that's loosely based on your life, it's not factually accurate, who cares? That doesn't matter. Unless, of course, you identify who the person is and then you throw them under the bus publicly and say, "This song is about this person who broke my heart." That's crappy, right? But that's more of a moral issue than anything else. But it's important that it gets at real truth. And so, we can utilize real truth to tell a lie, and we also can tell the truth through fiction, which you could see as a lie, but it's not really a lie, right? Because it's not pretending to be literally true when it's fiction. Think of a parable would be an example of something that is factually not true. Whatever the parable is about, it's not even claiming that that thing literally happened. The purpose of the parable is a story to teach you a lesson, right? So, let's say the tortoise and the hare, right? It's a fable, right? But a fable and a parable are essentially the same thing, but a fable is designated for kids is maybe the difference. But essentially the same idea, right? The tortoise and the hare communicates a core human truth, even though the actual story, of course, never happened. Never in the history of the world has a tortoise and a hare talked to each other and raced. That's never happened. But the core truth of that, which is the idea that steadily making progress and not being arrogant, even if you're less talented or you're slower in that case, right? If you stick with it and you're the one who's more dedicated and take it more seriously, you can win. And then on the other side, you know, the hare, there's a bunch of different ways to interpret it, right? Which is a part of what makes it great, whether it's, you know, the talented versus the untalented, literally the fast versus the slow, sticking with something. And it being more important to be consistent than it is to be good or talented, or I feel like I'm going back to the talented thing. But there's many different ways to take that in a way that is communicating a core human truth. Or the boy who cried wolf, right? Why do we still talk about that? Because even though that is not a real story that happened, I'm sure it has happened in some form somewhere in the world, but it's just a story, right? That is meant to communicate a core human truth, which is absolutely true in your life or in our lives. If we ever do something where we claim something over and over again, and we've shown that when we say it, it's not true, then eventually people don't trust us. That's how it works, right? If you, this is maybe a weird direction to go, but if you falsely sued five, six people on the seventh time you sue, nobody's going to believe that they actually wronged you, right? Because you just keep making up reason to sue people, so nobody's going to trust you. And they shouldn't. They're right to do so. Because the evidence is what the evidence is. Or if you're on RoomMate 10, because none of them worked out, probably the problem is you, right? You had ten different people that you could live with? It might be you probably, right? Same thing with relationships, right, Taylor Swift? But I don't know why I did that. I actually planned on giving a compliment to her in one of these episodes, so I don't know why that, but also seriously. If I had a friend that had literally a third of the significant others of her, I would have an intervention. But it's a celebrity, so I guess slightly different rules, but silly. Anyway, not the point. So we're talking about real, core human truth, not factual truth. Now, factual truth, of course, becomes important if you're telling a story that is presenting as if it's actually true, especially if you were naming names or something, which you should never do in a song. It always comes across like classless at best. Whenever there's like diss tracks, it's always like, "This is gross." It's so petty and pathetic. I don't know. Anyway, so you can tell a fictional tale about anything and get at a human truth much better than some literally true stories. One example of this would be Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings is literally in a fantasy world that does not exist. It has creatures of all different kinds that do not exist. There's no such thing as elves. There's no such thing as hobbits or dwarves or orcs, right? None of those things are real as presented in Lord of the Rings. And that has nothing to do with whether Lord of the Rings is communicating this core human truth. And part of the reason, I think, that Lord of the Rings is like one layer beneath legend status of... And when I say legend status, I mean stories that at this point are going to probably last for the rest of time because it lasted for so long. So if you take Arthurian legends, right? Or Homer and the Iliad and Odyssey, those stories are so just... Or anything Shakespeare, basically. Those things are so entrenched in culture and have been for so long, or even like Aesop's Fables type stuff. A lot of that is so entrenched in culture and has been for so long, there's no reason to believe it would ever fade away. It's just so entrenched. Lord of the Rings, I think, is that level right below where, you know, there's other fantasy series that I really enjoy. I'm a big Brandon Sanderson fan. I think he's a great author. But I don't know. Are people going to be reading Mistborn 200 years from now? I hope so. But I don't know. People will absolutely output tons of money that people will still be reading Lord of the Rings 200 years from now. Absolutely. So it's in that, like, status right beneath clear legend that is at this point just a part of the lore of humanity, basically. Which things like Arthurian legends and things like that are already in that category. So the question is why. And there's a bunch of reasons why, of course. But one reason, and a very important one, I think, is that it communicates core human truths that will never go out of date. So talking about, you know, redemptive suffering, the idea that Frodo to do the right thing to save all of Middle-earth had to suffer, right? There was no, oh, he just prances into Mordor and is like, "See ya!" to the ring. No. Like, he had to go through a lot. He bears a great burden on his soul because of the draw of the ring, which does affect him. And there's just, I mean, we could talk for hours just about the core, like, human truths that Lord of the Rings gets at. But, you know, the real pull of humans to, like, this lust for power is a core thing. That, like, Frodo has to be the one to go do it and be the hero, even though he's the most unassuming, right? We have powerful elves, we have powerful cool dwarf guy. I forget his name. Gimli? Is that his name? I'm sorry. To all the Lord of the Rings fans, I probably take it. Is Gimli his name? I feel like that's right, but I don't want to double down because everybody's gonna be like, "Ah, Jesus, that's from a different thing!" But... That's gonna bother me. But I'm also now worried, like, are all these names of these different species correct? But it's a Hobbit, right? Not the magical elves or humans, which seem to be portrayed as sort of the, like, the best middle ground sort of, like, they're pretty average for power, they're pretty average for intelligence. Elves are always super OP in all fantasy, for whatever reason. I'm always like, "Why are elves..." Like, shouldn't the elves be the bad guys who are in charge of everything? Because they're, like, smarter, live longer, more powerful, both magically and, like, just somehow it seems like there's... I don't know. Anyway. But it gets a human truth, right? This, this, this, this, the allure of power. That even Frodo, who is good, has a draw to. And Frodo has to be the ultimate hero, rather than say Aragorn, who seems like he would be the traditional hero we would all think of, because he's a man who's drawn to that power. So it requires Frodo, somebody who's much more unassuming that nobody would think of when they think of a hero. Right? And no hero poster, do you imagine somebody that looks like Frodo, you imagine Aragorn. And yet he's the one that has to actually be the hero, which communicates a core human truth, too, right? Like, sometimes heroes, or the hero we need, is not what it appears. And even Frodo, in the end, wasn't totally strong enough, because he needed Sam to save him in the end, his friend. But Sam's not the real hero. Some people say Sam's the real hero of the... No, he's not. Because he didn't bear the burden of the ring the way Frodo did. Frodo needed help because he spent this whole journey bearing the burden of the ring. So anyway, there are so many, like, core human truths that are communicated in Lord of the Rings. And it's not preaching anything, right? It just is telling a story that feels like, yes, this has a lot of truth in it. Not that Tolkien sat down and was like, "Oh, I'm gonna make the hero be not the human because of..." Like, it's not preachy, it just is getting at core human truths via fantasy. Maybe a better example. I just decided to start with one that, like, is obviously not true, because it doesn't even take place in the real world. And it has species that literally don't exist, elves don't exist, much to all of our chagrins, sort of. But it's a wonderful life. It's a wonderful life is probably the epitome of what I'm talking about here. And don't worry, we'll get back to songs. But movies is an art form that I think everybody can relate to. Even if you're new to songs, you've never heard a song before. Like, it's just in the West. And any form, if you're anywhere in Western culture, movies, for better or for worse, are sort of the art form of the time where everybody tends to know some of these core movies. Whereas that's probably not true for paintings or sculptures or even books. But it's a wonderful life. So George, the main character, in the end, does not get what he wants. You might have watched that movie every year of your life and you could be 70 years old and never picked up on that because it doesn't make a point of it. But he doesn't get the thing that he spent basically the whole movie wanting. He wants to get out of that darned town of whatever it's called, Bedford Falls. And he wants to go be an architect and do amazing things, building huge, impressive buildings. That's who wants to do. I'm pretty sure that's right. He wants to be an architect, right? So he wants to go out and do great things in that sense. He wants to get out of Bedford Falls. But his whole life, they show us how he puts other people before himself. And we could go through all the different things, right? He risks his life to save his brother, loses his hearing. Which, by the way, even right there is getting at a core truth. It's not a Hallmark movie where he saves his brother and pays no consequence for his sacrifice. He actually sacrifices something. Hearing out of one ear. That's pretty significant. I don't know about you. I've actually, for a variety of reasons, I've had this ear blocked for the last couple of days. It's the worst. I hate it. It's the worst. That guy lived his whole life like that because of a sacrifice for his brother. Now, of course, any decent person would still do that all over again to save their brother's life. But still, he actually suffered a realistic consequence of doing the right thing. And the same thing happens with his boss when he's a kid at the drugstore or whatever he works at, where he saves his boss from essentially unintentionally committing manslaughter because he's sad about, I think, his son had died in the war. And this trend continues, right? He takes over the family business, not because he wants to, but because it's the right thing to do and it would help his family. And his father passes unexpectedly. And he puts his brother through college, and the deal was supposed to be that after that, his brother would support him so that he could go to college and go off and be the architect and get out of bed for falls and fulfills his dream. But because of the father passing and all these things, he ends up basically just sacrificing for his brother again. And his brother gets to go do the great things that he wants to do. If memory serves, I might have that part wrong. But regardless, again, he's sacrificing. The whole movie is him making sacrifice after sacrifice, putting other people before himself. And the Hallmark movie version, which would be intellectually dishonest, would be in the end, not only is all his problems solved, but somebody comes in from New York or Chicago or wherever he wanted to be an architect and says, "You've got a free, free ride scholarship to go learn what you wanted, go to college, learn that architecture stuff, and I want you to design the new tallest building in the world because I heard you're a good man." That's the Hallmark stupid, probably half of Hollywood movies today would do that sort of ridiculous thing. But that's not reality. Reality is sometimes even when you do the right thing, life doesn't turn out the way that you thought it would. Or you don't get this, you know, sometimes the dreams you receive are not the dreams you had in a way. He's shown that he has lived a wonderful life or a meaningful life, might be more precise. He is shown that the whole town he's from would be in shambles if it were not for all of his different sacrifices. That's what matters, the fact that he touched all those human beings' lives via unselfishness or selflessness. Not like, "Oh wow, you built a tall building, congratulations." And I'm not diminishing that, of course that's great and cool. But he doesn't get the thing he wants in the end, he doesn't. He evades going to jail for a crime he didn't commit because people give him money that frankly they owed anyway or that he had given them before. But he just avoids going to jail, his life still looks the same otherwise. Nothing about the life that he was miserable about changes in the end, he just learns to see it differently. And to know that he's blessed with the life he has, even though he didn't see it that way before. So that movie is fiction, right? But it communicates a lot of human core truths. It's an intellectually honest movie, it doesn't give us the hallmark, "ridiculous ending." That would actually really undermine the whole movie. It doesn't get or Potter, right? Portrayed as the bad guy. You know, it's one of those where like, when you really think about it, is he that? He's just kind of a business guy doing what he's doing. He's a little overly greedy and all that, sure, but he's a little caricatured admittedly. But generally the bad guy, right? And he doesn't get any comeuppance. Didn't think I was using that word today, but... He doesn't get punished for the fact that he's a selfish bad guy. He gets nothing, right? And he actually stole the money, if you remember, basically. And he was going to put George in jail basically falsely. And did it intentionally, and he could have bailed him out. And should have, because he knew that he took the money. That was like, he's the bad guy, and he doesn't get any punishment for it. And that's also reality sometimes. So that movie, through and through, seems like it's concerned with truth. What would really happen? Not with a "wouldn't it be nice if", which to me is that core, one of these core factors, that separates great art or good, better art versus worse. To go to songs, I think a great example of that would be "Casts in the Cradle". Where, again, it's something where the story itself is not true. It's loosely based on the songwriter's stepfather. It's loosely based on the songwriter's wife's stepfather. It's some, like, connection. But it's not overall a true story, nor is it pretending to be. But it gets that core truth, and it doesn't back away from the most likely consequences. Basic summary of that song is, man keeps putting off prioritizing his son until it's too late. And then son shows him largely the same amount of care and respect as he got. Or, you know, basically the son does back to him what he did to his son. Which is, most of the time, probably what would happen. The Hallmark version is the son just unconditionally is like, "Oh, but I'm still gonna put all this effort into spending time with my dad anyway." And sometimes that happens, and I think there's even a way to write the song in an intellectually honest way where that happens. You probably would have to tell the story from the son's perspective, and maybe the son has a specific reason, perhaps a religious belief or some other moral belief where he believes that despite what my father did, the right thing for me to do is to be a better son to him than he was a father to me. That could make sense and would be intellectually honest. He could be intellectually honest to explore it from a standpoint of the son feels that maybe even for his children's sake, he wants his children to have a relationship with his grand- with their grandfather, his father. So despite the fact that his father doesn't deserve it, and despite the fact that a little part of him resents that he's giving this to his father, but he knows it's the right thing to do so he doesn't anyway. So I think there's different ways to end the story differently that are also intellectually truthful and honest. You know, this isn't- this isn't- don't hear me say that like, oh, everything has to have a semi dark ending for it to be intellectually honest or true. I don't think that's the case. Although I do think that almost all true, like happy endings of like happily ever after, almost all of those are artistically not good just because it's just not- that's never true. I just as a side point, I have the side theory that you can have great art that is on the spectrum anywhere from like super depressing sad all the way to- if it's a spectrum sad happy and then in the middle, you can have art that's all the way- all the way to the far sad depressed and you can have real art that gets pretty decently into the happy, but still acknowledges, you know, that things aren't perfect. But I don't think you can have a 100% just straight up happy song that has any merit at all. Just because it's like- it's not real. There's no real thing in this world that doesn't have some level of sacrifice had to be made or- I don't know. This is just a side theory. That's not what we're talking about today. But I do think there's something to be said for like, I don't know, has anybody ever seen like truly just happy happy movie that everything's happy and great and there's any substance to it at all? Because even the happiest things in life are this conflict, right? The best thing ever happened to me is my daughter. But the idea that it's all positive is ridiculous. No, I now have new worries that I don't- that I didn't have before, right? I have a young life that I love more than anything in my hands. That's a burden to bear. It's a burden I'm super happy to bear. But it is like it's not all rainbows, right? I love her so much. Anytime away from her sometimes is excruciating and I hate it. But like I have to, right? I have to work out. So even the most blessed things, there's a bit of ying and yang to the thing. But anyway, so Castle in the Cradle to me is just intellectually totally honest. Fast Car would be another example. It's a bit tragic, right? The person that was supposed to be her ticket out of a life of, you know, poverty, essentially, and hopelessness does sort of end up being the ticket out, but then he doesn't complete the ride with her, right? He ends up becoming a deadbeat just like her dad. And, and, you know, that's tragic, but also makes sense. It's alluded to from the very beginning. That that's probably where that story is going. And it doesn't just have this, oh, and it miraculously turned everything around and everything worked out and happily ever after. Which maybe can be done in a way that's artistic and intellectually honest to a degree, maybe. But it's just harder to do. When you when you see, when you read Fast Car, you feel like this could be a real story. This feels intellectually true. It feels like if these characters were real people, this is more often than not probably more or less how the story would go. And a part of this, a big part of this, I think is, well, let's talk about the opposite. The opposite of this is if we ever are prioritizing message over truth, that basically by definition is propaganda. And propaganda, I think, is basically just anti art. It's like the antithesis to art. It's the opposite because art usually should be some form of exploration, right? You're exploring a theme, you're exploring a topic, you're exploring a character, you're exploring a what would the consequences be of X. It shouldn't be you sit and you're like, how do I convince people of my worldview? Or how do I convince people of certain political thing, I believe? Or how do I convince, you know, and obviously, when you think of propaganda, you mostly think of the most overt form, right? People think of things like from, you know, Soviet Union, that would portray like, oh, life is great here, even though like 100 million people died of starvation because, you know, we took out all the farmers and the productive members of society in the name of, you know, whatever. So we took away all the producers, so then there was no production, so then everybody died. Like, that's the reality. But, you know, in the propaganda, it possesses like, no, we're the good guys and the whole rest of the world is evil and horrible. And that is propaganda, right? But I think there's two things that people forget about propaganda. One is propaganda is still propaganda, even if you agree with it, or even if it's, I don't know if propaganda is ever true, per se. I think you can even have true propaganda, and it's still be propaganda. And you certainly can have propaganda you agree with, that is propaganda. In fact, probably most of the things I could throw onto the bus that I think are propaganda, not most of the things, a lot of things, are things that I might actually agree with some, a lot of the premise of the thing. But at the end of the day, I feel like it's approached in an intellectually dishonest way. And therefore, it's propaganda, it's not art. And so the opposite of pursuing something honestly and trying to get at the truth and being exploratory in nature is for you to be exploitative sort of, and to purposefully wield your art as a weapon to manipulate people essentially, and to presumably your way of thinking about any given thing. And I think something that's misunderstood is something can be true and be propaganda. Just like you can tell something that's true, like whenever people say numbers don't lie, like, well, that's partially true. But true numbers can be used to lie. Right? So just by omitting certain elements of the truth, you can effectively lie, even though you did tell the truth. Let me give an example. Let's say JFK. Right? JFK. You can make a movie about JFK that, you know, tells something about the story of his life, or how he got to the presidency, or, you know, maybe a Lincoln-esque movie where it ends with the assassination. I don't know. Maybe that even exists. And you could address him as a person and as a character in a way that appreciates the good parts, or shines a light on the good parts, which of course there are plenty, and also shines a light on the not-so-good parts. So for instance, if a movie portrayed JFK as a great husband to Jackie Kennedy, that's just a lie. Right? Like, he was an awful womanizer. I mean, he makes Bill Clinton seem like a decent dude when it comes to women. Maybe. Heavy maybe there, maybe. But JFK is like, and this isn't like, well-known. Right? Well-known. I think I saw a number that he might have cheated on his wife some like 20 times just while he was in the White House. Something ridiculous. That dude was not a faithful husband. And it has nothing to do with, you know, how much you like him as president or any of that other stuff. But it would be intellectually dishonest to have a movie that portrayed all the good parts of him, again, of which there are plenty. But not also, but you also, I guess, could just omit that part and be intellectually honest. But if you do show him as a husband and kind of pretend like, oh, he's just a great loving husband. No, no, that's just not true. And you can say the same thing and we'll keep it the same era with Martin Luther King, right? One of the greatest historical figures in American history. Super important. Great guy. A great man. Great guy. I feel like has different connotations. We're going to get to that part. But like, he also is like any other historical figure. We're all, we all have pluses and minuses, right? The greatest people often have some of the greatest flaws as well. And he's no different, right? I mean, again, for some, we're keeping with the cheating, but like also cheated on his wife. I think a lot. Certainly he did. And seemingly a lot. So yes, it's true that he was a very important historical figure. Did a lot of great things for the United States. One of the most important non political figures in the United States history, right? Non like politician figures. I Have a Dream is one of the greatest speeches certainly in American history and presumably is one of the great speeches, maybe of all time. All of that is true. Also true, terrible husband when it comes to faithfulness. So if we had a movie where we're like, Oh, but Martin Luther King was a great guy. So we have to like, a great man. So we have to portray him like he's flawless. No, no, that's intellectually dishonest. Just like with the JFK thing. And this can be applied to basically any historical figure, right? You got to take. Be honest about the whole person. That also makes it more compelling, right? It makes him a good thing, right? But in the context of a movie, it actually makes a more compelling movie when you're a little split about like, Hey, this Martin Luther King guy did a lot of great stuff for the world. But he did a lot of bad stuff for his family, namely his poor wife. You know, that's actually a really interesting conflict. That's more interesting than just hero for the world. Like, okay, that's good. But like, it's not as compelling as this interesting juxtaposition that you can play with of like, you know, his own family. Not good, especially faithfulness with his wife. But for the world, great. That's just it's interesting. That's way more interesting, way more artistic. And again, honest. It's honest. So what's an example of a dishonest song? A lot of you are gonna love this. Imagine. Imagine is overt propaganda. Overt. Like, it doesn't even remotely pretend how it is that this isn't just accepted reality that everybody agrees on is so beyond me. I think it's because people don't pay attention to lyrics. A lot of people just don't pay attention to lyrics. But, but before you are like start typing some hate comment about how it's not, let me read you a quote quote from John Lennon to help you avoid embarrassment. It's a quote from his biography. Again, by John Lennon himself. So he talked about imagine as is anti religious, anti nationalistic, anti conventional, anti capitalistic, but because it is sugar coated, it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do. Put your political message across with a little honey that this is what we do to try to change the apathy of young people. He literally is saying that he is sugar coating and in the other quote, using a little honey with his political message specifically targeted at young people. This could not be more. The short version of that is it is propaganda. It is. It's also not. It's one of those weird like it's like the worst form of propaganda ever, but also like so many people buy into it. That's like, I guess it's effective. But boy, if you read the lyrics, it's like laughably bad and ridiculous. I mean, the whole thing is just absurd on its face. He's basically the whole lyric is wouldn't it be great if there were no countries and nothing to live for except today and there was no God and there was no religion and there was like, oh, so like before all those things became a thing, partially because back when it was just a bunch of tribes or different human beings without even a tribe, tribalism. Yeah, that resulted in me right now would have to be nervous that my next door neighbor was staging a coup right now and there would be no punishment for it because it's just anarchy like dude, this is why we made society because it's horrible. It doesn't work and we know that and that's what like that doesn't mean there aren't flaws in what exists now, but the idea that it would be better without those things is nutty. It's nutty. It's like even the core says you may call me a dreamer like no, John, I'd call you a moron like you're basically saying wouldn't it be great if for a bunch of things where it's like if you know anything about humans or human history at all or about like how things have gone in different countries, you know for a fact that everything you just outlined is no, it's horrible. It ends horribly 100% of the time. So no, it's not like I'm not going to imagine and be like, Oh yeah, wouldn't it be great? Not to mention always hilarious guy who who passed being worth 200 million, which would be 620 million in today's money. So over half of a billionaire talking about specifically mentions wouldn't be great if there were no possessions. Well, John, you were more than welcome to give up all of your money in possessions. Little thing, though, notice you didn't do that with that in today's money over half a billion net worth classic do as I say, not as I do, which of course doesn't reveal an overt hypocrite or anything. Also, he could have moved the USSR, but he didn't. Can't imagine why. Can't imagine why. So regardless of how you feel about the message he's trying to put across, it's propaganda, right? Like it's not even slamming it to call it overt communist propaganda. It literally is that he actually says it. He actually says it. So it's like, I'm sorry, it's just the idea that we're supposed to all buy. It was a brilliant. No, it's not. I could write a song that's like, wouldn't it be nice if fairies floated through the sky and just gifted us with pixie dust that always kept us high? Like, that's the level of delusion in that song is just like, what's no, not to mention, sad thing, because this drives me crazy. So if you're one of those people, I just want you to reconsider this. So many people will say in a discussion as if it means anything at all. Like, wouldn't it just be nice or we just need to get along? Would it be nice if everybody just left each other and got along? Yes. What is your point? Like, do you think if you just say that loud enough, everybody will be like, oh, you have a good point. And it will just like all turn out. Like, have you been alive on the planet? Like, just just as a frame of reference, if you're watching this, you probably can scroll down if you're on YouTube and see a bunch of hate comments, because I dared to like call out the obvious truth that like imagine is is straight up a communist propaganda song. You can like it, but that is what it is. And people are going to be so mad about and these are probably the people that are like, Oh, peace, love, man, wouldn't it be great if we had no and these are the people that are probably calling me cussing at me in the comments because I dared to point out that a song that they like is exactly what it is that the guy who wrote it himself admits it is right. So anyway, don't be that person that's like, wouldn't it be nice if we all just love each other? Like, yes, of course, we all agree that as nothing to the discussion. Of course, everybody thinks that would be nice. But that's not reality, which goes back to the main point here. Honest, right? Gonna be honest about how humans actually are. Most people, I think, generally have a pretty good flag of when when something is being presented to them, that's not real. Admittedly, in today's world, I'm starting to question that because there's a lot of stuff. It's like, wow, that's overt. Just the world is not like that. It's just not. But people are like, exactly how my life is. Just speaks to me. It's like, what? What kind of delusional fairyland do you live in? The world is not like that at all. So there is a lot of that, unfortunately. But I think I think most people I think most people have a firm, a decently firm grasp of when something is presented to them. That just is not true. And, and whether people have that sense or not, I think it's just irresponsible as an artist to we should be explorers of thought, not people who try to shove our message, no matter how good the message might be, no matter how important we think the message is. It's irresponsible to weaponize art, because it's just propaganda, then. Right? That's exactly what you're doing. And even if you think it's propaganda for the good, everybody who makes propaganda thinks it's for the good. Right? Like the USSR thought it was for the good. So, you know, it's the whole like everybody thinks that the good guy, right? They're the hero. So that doesn't make an aim better. So last point on this. I know this one's going long, but highly connected to this idea is the idea that I think as you approach great art, the hand of the artist should disappear. Which means a lot of art, I think, could come down to the premise of you start with a premise, you start with a character, you start with a situation, and then you ask what would actually happen from here. Right? Start with a premise and then tell the truth. Cast in the Cradle seems like a good example. Starts with a premise and then tells the truth about what probably would happen. What makes sense. This is why the Star Wars sequels in general suck, and especially Episode 8. It's obvious, if you know anything about the character of Luke Skywalker, that the director, the writer, just decided that Luke Skywalker would just be a totally different human being that operates completely out of character with the Luke that we knew from three movies. And he's just like, well, this is a story I want to tell, so I'm going to shoehorn Luke into a character that just isn't Luke. He didn't start with what would Luke do, which is what you should do. We already have the character of Luke. It should be intellectually honest about what would Luke do. Because a part of art, and I think the tension that is inherent within art, is of course art requires the hand of the artist. We're literally creating something from nothing. But I think a way to look at art and somewhat measure it, to a degree, is how much you don't see the hand of the artist. Propaganda would be an example of you can see the hand of the artist all over it. But a part of what makes something great is if a character in a movie or something feels like that would be a real person. And it feels like the decisions they make are an actual human making decisions. Not that the writer is like, I need this to happen in the plot so the character makes that decision. We've all seen the movies where somebody makes a totally out of character decision, and we can tell and are immediately bothered. We're taken out of the fantasy of the thing because we saw the hand of the artist being like, well, I need the plot to happen. So even though we established that this girl is brilliant, it doesn't make this sort of mistake. She's going to make the single dumbest decision in the whole movie just so I can make the rest of the plot happen. And we're all like, no, that doesn't make sense. You showed that she's super smart for like two hours, and then you decided all of a sudden she's going to do the dumbest thing imaginable. That doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. So the hand of the artist is attention that I think is just always there. It's an interesting one. But art is of course the hand is there. We're creating something from nothing. But a factor, I think it's connected to this honesty thing, is theoretically you need to let the story go. You need to let the song go to a degree where we can maintain the illusion that the story you're telling in your song is a true story. And that character would actually do or that character would actually say, Luke Skywalker would do this thing, you know, based on what we know of the character of Aragorn who would make this decision in the third movie. These are the important things because it allows us to continue the idea that the hand of the artist isn't actually there. That's an indication that it's well done and it's being honest and truthful. If we can see the hand of the artist, that's an indication that it's not being honest and truthful. And we certainly don't like it in movies. We shouldn't like it in music either. Anyway, hopefully this was helpful to you. I know that these are philosophical and all that. But again, I think it's important to talk about because philosophical matters. This is the underpinning to everything we talk about, really. So if you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide, 20 Different Ways to Start Writing a Song. I appreciate every single one of you. And I will talk to you in the next one.

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about 1 factor that seems to be one of the factors contributing to a song actually being good. We're talking about how every part of the song working together to communicate what the song is about - aka the COHESION of the song. If your lyrics are about something tragic, but the melody sounds playful and the harmony sounds like a grand romantic piece, is that any good? No. The song may be made of different parts and song sections, but it also is a singular song. So let's discuss the COHESION or..... I'll say it, synergy of songs.

Transcript:

As songwriters who are seeking to constantly improve at the craft of songwriting and write better and better songs, I think we are constantly on this quest where we're asking ourselves, "How do I write a better song? How do I write a better chorus? How do I write better melodies? How do I write a bridge that's more emotionally resonant?" And yet sometimes we don't actually take the time to think about, "Well, wait a second. When I say better chorus, when I say a better song, what does that even mean? What are the things that we're looking at? What are some of the factors that lead into this idea of something being better in any piece of art?" This is a difficult thing for us to tackle, but as I mentioned in last week's episode, we're going to try. And I realized very quickly that this probably would take more than one episode to even begin to do this justice and not have it be multiple hours long. So this is going to be part one in our Who Knows How Long series about trying to tackle what actually makes a song great or what are some of the common factors to what sort of leads to a good song. Let's talk about it. Hello, friend. Welcome to another episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast. I'm your host as always, Joseph Vidal. I know that you would take some time out of your busy day, your busy week to talk songwriting with me. If you're listening to anything and instead you're listening to something that you're hoping is going to help you and hopefully me talking about it will also help me become better songwriters so that we can all become better songwriters together, at least be striving in that direction so that hopefully both you and I are better songwriters next year than we were this year and much better five years from now than now and etc. So on, so forth. Don't want to bore you. It's just going through random numbers. I think you understand. So that's the goal. But in today's episode, we're tackling something heavy. Not heavy, maybe emotionally, but something that I feel like most people aren't even willing to start to discuss. But I think it's important to discuss because if we can't define or talk about here are some factors that seem to lead to a song being better or more good or great, then, you know, how can we possibly talk about here's how to make your lyrics better? Like we'll define better if we can't have some idea of some of the factors that go into an element of the song or the song as a whole being better, then we can't actually answer the question what would make this better. So I think it's an important thing to discuss. I think it's something that artists in general don't talk about enough. And it's just one of those things that I think it's a net negative for all of us. Yes, it's a hard discussion, but that doesn't mean it's not one worth having. Most important discussions are difficult and don't have clear answers, but that doesn't make them not important to have. So we're going to do that. It's going to be part one because I realized there's no shot that I could even begin to do justice to this in one part. So we're breaking it up. Let me know in the comments down below if you're on YouTube what some of your ideas are and please back them up. Don't just be like, "I think a great song is X and you have no reasoning as to Y." I mean, you can, but it's kind of hard to... it's not really making a point if you just list a thing and don't justify why it's a thing. But that being said, I am very curious what other people think is meant to be a discussion. I again do not pretend to have the answers. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this pretty much throughout my life, but that doesn't mean that I'm right. It doesn't mean that I'm right. But hopefully it's at least well thought out and has some merit to talking about, hopefully. But I guess that's up to you to decide. So if you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide. 20 different ways to start writing a song, especially if you're like, "All right, we're talking philosophy and getting real deep into what makes something good today." But where's my hard just go do this songwriting advice? There it is, songwritertheory.com slash free guide. It gives you 20 different ways to start writing a song because I'm personally of the opinion, at least for me, it has been very helpful to have a bunch of different ways that I know I can start a song because sometimes if you start a song the same way every time, sometimes the results in the song start to sound the same. And whether or not that's a problem, certainly a problem that comes up, I think, is writer's block. I've done too many piano riffs for weeks or months. I'll sit at the keyboard or piano and be like, "I just don't have anything." But it's not that I'm out of creative ideas, it's that I'm out of piano-based creative ideas. So just going over to my guitar, or writing a bass line with the keyboard, or starting with lyrics, or starting with what I think is a compelling symbol, or going to find artwork on Google Images or an art museum that I find inspiring that I'm like, "Ooh, that can make a good song." All those sorts of things can be really helpful to jump-start your creativity even when you think it's gone or currently the muse isn't visiting you or however you want to look at it. But again, songwritingtheory.com slash free guide. The first factor that I think we're going to talk about is cohesion or unity or, if we want to use the word, if you're in the corporate world I'm sorry, you're probably about to get triggered, but synergy of parts. Every element of our song should be in agreement on what is being communicated. Your melody, or for a great song or a good song, the melody shouldn't be communicating or sounding like it's communicating love. It's like a love song in the melody. Well the chord progression sounds like you're angry. The song is angry. And then the lyrics are actually telling a tragic and sad story of losing a close relative. Right? Because those three, those don't go together. They're not all on the same page communicating something. Even if the chord progression is great and the music is great and then the melody is great and the lyrics are great on their own, but when we put them together they're a mess because they don't actually work together. It's one of the classic, you know, the whole is not a sum of its parts. The idea that a team is not just how good each of the individual players are. It's how well they work together is a part of it. This is why more talented teams often lose because they just don't have the cohesion or synergy that a team that technically is less talented has. And I think the same thing is true for, well, anything. We could talk about how this is true for movies, right? You can have the greatest actor of all time. Missed cast in a movie might tank a movie. But you think like, oh, we got the greatest actor of all time, whoever you think that is, in a movie and most of the things about the movie are fantastic, but yet that actor is so wrong for the role that it just ruins the movie. It's a real thing that can happen, right? Because it's not just a sum of its parts. No piece of art is simply a sum of its parts. There's more to it than that. The parts all need to be on the same page. Think about something ridiculous. This would work in comedy to comedic effect. But generally in a movie if the soundtrack is communicating something wildly different than what's going on on screen and it's not giving the quote unquote right emotional cues, that would ruin the whole movie. There's a way to know this. You can look it up. There's tons on YouTube and they're hilarious, right? But if you think of it as being in the real movie, it would ruin it. So there's one that I think is like Seinfeld music to The Shining. And it makes it hilarious. But of course it would have ruined the actual movie. And this applies. They do things like adding a laugh track or taking away a laugh track from something. It totally changes how the scene feels by having a soundtrack where it did or having a laugh track where it didn't before or not having a laugh track where it used to. Soundtrack, same idea. Obviously different because laugh versus not laugh. It's a little binary and soundtrack really hits at all the different emotions. But you know you couldn't just take the Star Wars soundtrack and then put it on, I don't know, Dune and it'd just be like oh it's perfect because the Star Wars soundtrack is great and the Dune movie's fantastic. So like no, no. Because they might not fit together. They might not work together. In fact I think they wouldn't. I think the Dune soundtrack's fantastic. It's perfect for that movie. And Star Wars soundtrack is perfect for Star Wars. And the Dune soundtrack of course is Hans Zimmer and the Star Wars one of course is John Williams. And those two are both all time great film composers according to most people and I would tend to agree that they certainly have the longevity and the peaks that you want to look for in greatness. But I would never want to trade those two. I would never want to trade those two. I would never want anybody but John Williams for Star Wars and I would never want anybody but Hans Zimmer and his styles for the Dune soundtrack. Because things including art are not just a sum of their parts. It's how they all work together. Are they working together well? So an easy way and practical way in my opinion to sort of test this with our own songs. Because even though we're talking sort of we're getting very philosophical today. But I think it's important that we be able to connect it with okay but what do I do with this? And one of the things I think we can do is we can test this by isolating each of our parts and then testing to see do they all evoke the same emotion? They all seem to be on the same page for what's being communicated. Now obviously lyrics are always going to be more precise than music and what they communicate. We're probably going to at best we're going to get into specific emotions when it comes to music. You're not going to be able to listen to a piece of music with no context and be like this sounds like my parents just passed away due to cancer and I live in X country and my income is X amount of dollars. Lyrics of course can communicate more factual information than music can. But we're looking for something like the lyrics elicit this idea of wistfulness. And the melody sounds wistful so that even if I just listened to the melody, if I were just hum the melody to someone or to myself, I think it sounds wistful. It sounds deeply connected to what the lyric is communicating. Such that if I just read the lyric alone as poetry with no melody to help it out, no background music, no chord progression, nothing, does it still elicit the same emotion that the song is going for? Does it still communicate the same thing that the song is going for? The lyrics alone. And then the same thing with the melody. Sometimes I'll call this the theme test, which is a nod to themes in movie soundtracks. And there are a bunch of different great examples of this. But take something like the Jaws theme. The Jaws theme is a great example of this. Like two notes, John Williams, very well conveys the idea of something's coming for you and it's a scary thing. You wouldn't have to watch Jaws to hear that Jaws theme and it elicits some sort of look over your shoulder like what's coming for me emotion. Which fits perfectly with what it's trying to communicate in the movie. And that's just, you know, we could talk about the orchestration, but just the "melody" of that part alone communicates that. It doesn't need all the orchestration and all that in order to very well communicate what it's trying to communicate. And so anyway, so I call it the theme test for that reason. It's the idea that is your melody approaching, communicating so clearly the central emotion of the thing. That if it were just a theme or a motif in a movie where there were no lyrics and it just was this melody, does that still carry that same emotion that your lyrics and then your chord progression or just general harmony are going for? There's a lot of examples of this, right? Imperial March, which is Darth Vader's theme, is another example of this. You know, the depth to that one I think is even more because it also is a theme that depending on the arrangement can be sort of adjusted to lean into different elements of the theme. Meaning like in its full orchestration it very well evokes this idea of this relentless unstoppable army coming for you and this unstoppable force in the form of Vader and very sort of just powerful, nobody can touch this. But then in different orchestrations with the same melody it evokes this tragedy of the character as well, which you see in episode six when Vader is, spoiler alert, dying, but dying as Anakin Skywalker. And it has a tragic element to it and not just because of that scene but just the music alone does. It has this element of a broken former fallen hero. And a part of that is masterful orchestration and a part of that is writing a melody that well fits with both of those things. And just one last example because some of you are probably like, "Yes, we get it, you like Star Wars." But the ring theme in Lord of the Rings is maybe even the best example of this in a way given that that ring theme, if you just think about the melody, if you've ever heard it, and if you haven't after this podcast go listen to it. But that melody and the whole sound of that ring theme evokes this wonder and sort of the seduction of this mysterious item. Like it has a sort of like, "Ooh, what is that? I want to swim closer. I want to touch it. I'm just drawn to it. I feel like it's ee ee." Like if you told me it was a siren song, it feels like it matches the same sort of, it appears beautiful. It's something that you want. But deep down you know it's bad for you because the ring of course, I'm not going to explain Lord of the Rings. I don't know how you can be alive on the planet and not know the basic premise of Lord of the Rings and what the ring is and represents. So I will spare you telling you what you almost certainly already know. But it's perfect for what the ring is. Absolutely perfect. And to a degree because what those melodies have in their favor versus ours is they don't have to be "singable" because they're played by instruments. So you less have to worry about singability which limits their melodies less. So probably most of our melodies aren't going to be able to reach the heights that a theme that's played with an organ or with a flute or you know with a violin can reach. But I think the closer we get to that the better it is. And the same thing is going to be true for the harmony or chord progression or arrangement, however you want to look at it. All sort of sides of the, not exactly the same coin, but basically all of the music that isn't the melody. Is that something where if you played your song for someone and it had no vocals in it, so none of the melody and none of the lyrics, would somebody still gather from that song? Roughly what the core emotion of it is. And I think I implied this when I used the word "wistful" earlier, but we're looking for more than like "oh it sounds sad." I mean that's the baseline that we should go for, right? But we want to be more precise than sad. Because sad is basically 50% of all emotions roughly fit into sad. That's not very precise. We mentioned this in last week's episode, maybe you weren't here, but "wistful" is something like sadness for because of no longer having something that was a happy thing. So sort of this combination of you're glad that you had this happy thing, but you're sad you don't have it anymore. It's way more specific than just sad. Because bitter is sad, it's sort of a hybrid of sad and angry. Especially if you had a Venn diagram of angry and sad, the part in the middle where they meet is bitter. There's maybe a little bit more to it, right? But at a high level it's something like that. So that shows those words are more precise. Because bitter is a form of sadness. And so is wistful. But wistful and bitter could hardly be more different. They're very very different. They have similarities, right? They both kind of share the idea that you're probably looking back at something. Bitter is more like I'm just ticked about how it ended or something. Whereas wistful is more like, but I'm glad it happened. And maybe I'm not mad about any element of it. There's no anger in wistful usually. There's a lot of anger in bitter. But anyway, the emotion that we're talking about here should be something more like the words bitter or wistful. And less like the words like, oh it's like kind of happy or sad. I mean, you might be able to do something as simple as major versus minor key. We'll accomplish happy versus sad. That's the baseline requirement. Which although let me point out that it's not true that you put something in major key and it's automatically happy in minor and it's automatically sad. There's plenty of poppy, happy, catchy songs that are in minor and plenty of super depressing songs that are in major. But we should be going for something with our chords, our background music that elicits a more specific emotion than just sad versus happy. So this is one of those things where like perfect is unattainable, right? But I think philosophically speaking, a perfect song would be one where if a thousand people all listened to the melody alone, no lyrics, just the melody. Maybe it's hummed, maybe it's played by a violin. I don't know. And a thousand different people just read the lyrics as if it were poetry. And then another thousand people just listened to all the background music. And then they were pulled after and they were asked what was that song about. They all would have the exact same answer and it would be correct. To me that would be like one, this first factor we're talking about, that would be perfection. Again, obviously that's unattainable, right? So we're trying to just get as close to that as we can, which is still going to be pretty far from that, right? But to me that's the goal. Perfection is something you can never actually achieve. It's a direction to be pointed in. I think that's the direction that this factor is pointing in. And by the way, this is also something that should apply across each song section, right? So it's more than just the three parts of melody, harmony, and lyrics. It's also the synergy or the cohesion of your verses with your choruses and all of that. We could even dive way deeper into sort of the specifics of like what does musical cohesion across song sections talk about. And of course there's going to be a lot of variety there, right? But like one obvious example would be if between each of your song sections there was a crazy key change that made no sense, was super disjointed, not intentionally, it didn't like fit with the lyric or like it makes sense that the lyric would have the disjointed. But like just in a song that is pretty straightforward, it has this disjointed key change between every song. That would be an obvious, like that's not as bad as weird for no reason. It doesn't fit with the lyric of the song, right? So moving in the opposite direction of that to me would be the key there. But again, we could probably spend this entire year's worth of podcasts just diving into different ways. We could apply this one factor to songs, but I don't want to put you through that. So we're not going to do it. But I'm just throwing out there that there's way more to this factor than just the cohesion of those three parts. We could talk about song sections. We could talk about viewing the song as a whole versus viewing the song as a sum of parts, which is not, I think both can be helpful. Ultimately, the whole is the most important. But but obviously it is made up of parts, right? So if your song has a terrible chorus, but the rest is great, probably the song is going to be sunk. So there's a lot to this factor. But I think we I think we have established the central idea that across all things, I think, certainly all artistic things, and certainly for songs, I think this cohesion of all the parts is all moving in the same direction, just like you would expect the soundtrack and the script and the cinematography and the acting of the actors to all point to the same thing. Now before somebody comments this, I'm going to just throw out there that let me take an example that I think is pretty commonly done. And I personally think is fine and great. And on the surface, it may seem like it's in conflict with this, but I don't think it is. And that's when you have a song that sounds happy. But when you listen to it, it's actually kind of bitter and sarcastic. So it sounds like it's a nice, oh, happy song. But if you really listen or pay attention or read the lyrics, you realize, oh, no, this is like, you're just slamming this person with sarcasm. You might say, wait a second. So shouldn't it sound angry? Shouldn't the melody sounded because that's the core emotion? No. Well, I think it can. I think it can in that work, because that is true. But it also is true and makes sense that it would sound happy because what is sarcasm? Sarcasm literally is verbal irony. So then what is irony? Irony is saying something that is the opposite of what you mean. So if you say to somebody like, you know, no, I care about your opinion so much. If you're using sarcasm, what you mean is I don't care about your opinion at all. Right? I couldn't possibly care less about your opinion. Something like that. So it makes sense that if it's the opposite, that sarcasm is essentially your words, if you read it like a script, what they actually say versus what you actually mean, insert it with the tone, are actually opposites. So it makes sense the music would follow that, right? Where the music sounds like it's happy. Yeah, go you. But really, it's no, screw you, you suck. That makes sense that it would have that. So your lyrics are where you're communicating the you suck part. And then the music is what's adding to the irony by sounding happy. So that's actually an example of on the surface, maybe it seems like it breaks this rule, but actually it's a perfect example of this rule applied in some ways where the song is actually essentially utilizing music to double down on the sarcasm. And there are other examples like that, right? And of course, there's multiple ways to do this factor. Again, this is a thing where we could talk about this for the rest of the year. And some of you are probably thinking, it seems like we're gonna, because you're still talking about it. But no, we're down. We're down with this point. So that being said, I now realize that I thought that this episode would have time for two factors. But we had time for one. So we're gonna have another episode where we're gonna tackle what I think is another factor that is something to consider, something to look at, that I think is common to certainly all art at least, and certainly songs where this is just a factor to something being more good or better versus another thing that has less of this factor. But hopefully this was helpful to you. Hopefully it gave you something to think about whether it be in the form of, huh, maybe I should run my songs through some of those tests of does this melody communicate without the lyrics and without the background music? The same thing that the lyrics are trying to communicate or the music or to the last sarcastic song point. You know, is there a way that I can have my melody and my, let's say, lyrics intentionally conflict but in that conflict it actually sort of elevates the main idea in the way that like angry lyrics plus happy music sort of adds to the, like that sarcasm in the combination of things. You know, it's not just sarcasm that can be used that way. There are many emotions where we could toy with, let's take wistful. I said earlier that wistful is something like a combination of happy and sad, right? You're sad that you don't have the thing anymore but you're happy that you had it. It's a fond memory. So in that case, you could communicate that maybe by the music and the lyrics both being wistful or perhaps you could communicate that in a different way where the music just sounds sort of happy but the lyrics have this sad sort of I miss you element to it or maybe the opposite would be the way to go but there's many different ways to break this down and apply this I think. And you know, getting creative with it I think can be a good idea for whatever that's worth. But let me know what you think. Does this seem like something that like yeah, okay, that seems like a good starting place at least for that factor generally seems to be a factor to whether a song or really any piece of art is good or not or more good, right? Basically if you have two songs that are exactly the same but one is more obviously cohesive in all of the different parts communicating in one direction the same thing versus another one where it's like yeah, but the melody kind of has a different emotion to it that doesn't really fit with the lyrics. To me, I think yes, yes, obviously, it would always be better for all of the parts to be working together rather than one kind of going rogue communicating something that really the song isn't trying to communicate so it just kind of feels out of place. But next week, factor number two. Hopefully this was helpful. Hopefully that will be helpful. If you haven't already, be sure to grab the free guide songartatheory.com slash free guide. 20 different ways to start writing a song. These episodes are admittedly philosophical. Don't worry, we'll get back to hard teaching. But in the meantime, this hard teaching or maybe not hard teaching but hard go do this uber practical in that guide, which hopefully compensates for the fact that these podcasts are admittedly at least during this series where we're getting away from that a little bit. I think ultimately this is in some ways the most practical thing we could talk about because what else is there even to talk about if we can't begin to discuss what makes a song great or what makes this song great, right Rick Beato? But yeah, Rick Beato is great. I love Rick Beato. I'm just throwing that out there. If you don't know who Rick Beato is, first of all, how? Second of all, check him out. I certainly don't agree on some things. But to his credit, he admits that he doesn't consider lyrics when he's talking about what makes a song great. My pushback to him is how could you possibly claim a song to be great if you don't even think about the lyrics? Like, that's such an important part of whether a song is great. To talk about the music production as a reason that the song is great to me also doesn't really make sense. It's like, well, it makes the production great. So the track, that specific arrangement of the song might be great. But that doesn't make the song itself great, which is basically just the combination of lyrics, chords, and melody. But alas, I still love Rick Beato. He's the grandfather slash godfather of music YouTube as far as I'm concerned. And he's just super awesome. Also he's done great things for the world because I feel like I was the only person on the planet that was like, guys, of course music theory is helpful as musicians and songwriters. You know, I wasn't on YouTube at the time, but just as a human, I felt like half the time was like, how do these people... does everybody like pretend like it's worthless? That knowledge? Rick Beato came on the scene and everybody was like, oh yeah, how about that? It's actually deeply practical. And for that, he will always be a legend. He'll always be a legend. Rick Beato's the best. Anyway, have a great week. I'll talk to you in the next one.

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this Bonus episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're continuing to address your biggest songwriting struggles directly by responding to more of your responses to my survey. We'll be discussing struggles such as:

- I Can't Get My Rhythm + Rhyme Right!

- I Struggle To Write Lyrics That All Work Together

- Opinion: Songs Shouldn't Have A "Message" - I Struggle To Connect Verses + Choruses

- I Struggle To Pick The Right Chords For The Right Feels

- How Do I Start A Song?

- How Do Intentionally Write Songs With Certain Emotions?

- What Kind of Songs Should I Write First?

Transcript:

This is part seven of responding to your answer to my question of what your number one biggest songwriting struggle or challenge is. Let's talk about it. Hello friend, welcome to another episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast. I'm your host as always, Joseph Galla. Honored that you would take some time out of your busy day, your busy week to talk songwriting with me. And welcome again to another bonus episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast where we are talking about your answers to the question of what your biggest songwriting struggle is. If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide, 20 Different Ways to Start Writing a Song. This is a struggle that comes up. We might get to this question today actually, but somebody asks about, "Hey, I struggled figuring out where to start with songs." Not sure if we'll get to it in today's episode or not, but whether you're just somebody that sometimes wants to get out of your creative box a little bit more or you're somebody who struggles to actually start writing songs and not even just being original with starting songs but just starting in general, this is the guide for you to kick writer's block to the curb because writer's block sometimes comes from staring at a blank page, staring at your instrument and just being like, "I don't know. I don't know what to do next." But starting our songs in different ways can be a great way to overcome that, and this free cheat sheet gives you 20 different ways to start writing a song. SongwriterTheory.com slash free guide. First response for this bonus episode. Dear Joseph, songwriting is a very excellent form of literature and philosophy. I agree. As a result, I enjoy English literature such as short stories and memoirs. Songwriting is very special to me and my friends. The tricky part is the rhythm and rhyme. So let's address that first. So when it comes to...so with rhythm and rhyme, because you paired them together, I'm mostly going to assume that you're talking about the rhythm specifically of words and or the melody, aka meter. So the tricky part is meter and rhyme. First thing on that, because I've seen enough lyrics and had enough questions where I know that I think I need to say this, probably more often than I do, but your lyrics should not exist or not be made to serve an arbitrary rhyme scheme. Your lyrics do not serve a rhyme. Your rhyming or lack of rhyming should service and serve your lyrics. So you should never be, for instance, let's say you decide on a rhyme scheme that is A-B-A-B. You should never be significantly altering your lyrics or using corny words you don't really want to use. I'll pick on Night and Light. I've used it in one of my songs. There's nothing wrong with Night and Light. I've used it at some point, but you don't want that to be a constant go-to. If every single one of your songs has Night and Light, it's like, all right, come on. So if you've picked that as a rhyme scheme, A-B-A-B, and you're significantly changing what you actually want to say just in order to fit that arbitrary rhyme scheme, I think we've lost the plot when that happens. Because ultimately, nobody gives a rip whether your song rhymes or not. Just in general. I would argue in the scheme of all things lyrics, rhyme is towards the bottom of what's important. So to your tricky part is the rhythm and rhyme. Worry way more about rhythm, aka meter, than rhyme. Because to take it to the extreme, which is a good way to test any form of logic, but to take it to the extreme, if you had a song where every single, you did not rhyme at all, or a poem where you did not rhyme at all, not a single thing rhymes, not even family rhymes, or consonants rhymes, no rhymes at all, but you paid attention to meter, you could have a great lyric. You could have great lyrics. But if you reverse that and pay no attention at all to meter, your meter is just all over the place. But your rhyme scheme is perfect. Nobody will notice or care that your rhyme scheme is perfect because nobody will be able to see past or hear past the fact that your meter is all over the place. Now when I say meter is all over the place, I don't mean that you have some slight alterations in places. I don't mean that your syllable counts aren't exact, even though your emphases counts are exact so just for instance, take common meter, has four emphases three, four, three, which often comes with a syllable count of eight, six, eight, six, but doesn't have to. We talked about this in a previous podcast. I think the example I used was I have to go to school has the same meter as I have to go to the school. Now I tucked another word in there that's unemphasized to the school instead of to school, but that's the same meter because the emphases are still the same. They're on the same syllables, the same number of emphases. There's just one unemphasized syllable tucked in, which in the scheme of a song, totally fine, totally fine. It happens all the time. It's not imperfect. It's great. It can work marvelously, especially if it needs to be there. If your meter is all over the place, you might as well be speaking the way I am in basic prose where there's no real sense of meter at all, then your lyrics, they're not even lyrics. They're not even lyrics. I guess my first recommendation is don't pay attention to those two things equally. Get your meter right and if you can, use rhyme as a supplemental part to your lyrics where you make your lyrics even better because of rhyme, great. Because rhyme, I think should be viewed that way. Number one is say what you mean to say in your lyrics and get the meter right. And again, meter right does not mean exact with syllables and everything, but try to be as exact as possible with emphases or at least really close and you're good. And then for rhymes, to actually find rhymes, especially if you're looking for perfect rhymes, which would be like night and light where both the consonants and the assonance or the vowel sound and the consonant sound both match, rhymezone.com is a great way to go. If you're looking for lasso-vert rhyming, like family rhymes or things like that, I don't have a website recommendation that's going to just be on you. Although my recommendation is lean, for the most part, I would argue that ABAB rhyme scheme, especially if it's throughout a song, is too much. If maybe in the chorus of your song, one of the main points of your song, you have an ABAB rhyme scheme, great. The rest of your song, do like XA, XA at most because if there's too much perfect rhyming going on in a song, that's usually where it starts to get cringe and feel like everything is just serving the rhyme. So get the meter right. Worry less about rhyme. Moreover another problem is chaos, such as theorizing and being absent-minded. The challenge is that there are a lot of romantic lyrics and there's pain and sadness. However, rock and roll and blues are archaic. That's interesting. Rock and roll and blues are archaic. I don't think any musical genre is archaic and even if it is, you can bring it back. There's that new movement of like, Bardcore, which is like Bard style music. I don't even know what era that's from. 1500s, 1400s, 1200s, I don't know. Really old style music. Old European style music. But they do it for like, Down With The Sickness. It sounds like that. So any genre that gets archaic just comes back. So don't let that, I don't know if this is what you're saying, but don't ever let, "Oh, that genre's played out." Or, "That genre's heyday was 30 years ago." So bring it back. I mean, right now, seemingly half of pop music is just 80s round two. I mean, a lot of Dua Lipa stuff is like that. A lot of the weekend stuff is like that. We're getting towards the end of my pop knowledge here. But I've heard so many songs when I do have the, unfortunately I'm subjected to what is now pop radio. So much of it is, even, I like the 1975. They're a guilty pleasure of mine. And a lot of their songs are very 80s inspired. So anything that you think is archaic, it all comes back. You can breathe new life into something that maybe is actually archaic. But anyway, as a result, the time of day and such saliences as, wow saliences, big word, as country and folk music make poetry pretty. The melodies are always the fun part, but the saying is valid that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, for sure. Nevertheless, these forms from the 1980s forwards are very popular. Making money has been new investments. Moreover, I think new songwriters are cool. Yeah, okay. So I think that was the end of the question, implied question part. So Rhythm and Wrath. Yes, get the meter right, get the rhythm right. Mostly paying attention to emphasize syllables. Easy example again is forever. If you just listen to the word forever, you can hear which syllables are emphasized and which ones aren't. It's forever, not forever. It's hard to even say that. Or forever, it's forever. So the emphasized syllables, that middle one is the ee, ee, right? It's for, not emphasized, ee, emphasized, and ver, not emphasized. So just listen for the natural meter in your words and try to match that up. Just another tip on this. If you write melody first, that can help you worry a little bit less about coming up with an arbitrary meter or rhythm because it's already contained in your melody. Any melody has a meter built in because it has number of syllables in the form of number of notes. And yeah, sure, you can maybe stretch out a syllable or shrink a syllable. Yeah, you can do that. But generally speaking, the syllable count of your line and the melody note count of your line is going to match. And then there's natural emphases within your melody, right? There's a natural meter within your melody. So if you write melody first and then just write lyrics that match with the natural cadences, the natural emphases of the melody, then you're good and you don't have to worry about coming up with an arbitrary meter. As I mentioned in a previous episode, if you're really, if you're starting with lyrics and you're just looking for a place to start, common meter is a great place to start at least where you have four emphases, three emphases, four emphases, three emphases. If you want an example of that, Amazing Grace is a perfect example of exact common meter. Writing good verses. I never struggle with coming up with a chord progression, melody line, or rhythm for choruses. But writing good verses that stick in your head and make you experience something is a mystery to me. I always imagined verses to be more of the story writing section of the song containing some kind of message, but that mindset tends to leave me writing super generic verses that lack the feel I loved about the chorus. I struggle to connect choruses and verses. It's like I'm writing two songs that happen to be in the same key, but have very little momentum and flow connecting the two. I hope that makes some sense. So it sounds like this is mostly coming from a lyrical standpoint, given the emphasis on not knowing what to say and story writing section of the song. And first I'll say, not every song has a story. Sometimes I'll refer to this as like point in time songs. I think that's what I call it. But it's basically this idea that some songs don't really have a sense of time progressing. For every song that like Cats in the Cradle, which has a clear progression over really a man's entire adult life almost, right? From a kid all the way to his son, you know, him being very old and his son having kids of his own. Or 100 Years, which goes from 15 years old to 99 years old. For each one of those that has a very clear story time progression, there are other songs where the whole thing could be taking place in a moment. And it's just all the different feelings you're feeling in that specific moment. There's no clear progression of time. So it's not necessarily the case that it's a story in the sense that you or I may think about it, but very often it is. In which case, an easy way to... There's several easier ways to look at it. One is, one of the tried and true ways of doing things is to have present tense in the chorus and then have your first verse be the future and your second verse be the past. So you talk about the future you hope for or the future you dread or whatever it might be. Then you talk about here's where I am now in the chorus and then in the second verse you go back in time and say how did we get here? Or you can reverse past and future so it's actually an order past present future with first verse, chorus, second verse. Other things you can do is just see the chorus as something that's either a so or therefore or a but. So let's say your chorus will keep it really simple. Let's say your chorus is "I love you." The very main idea. Hopefully it's not just that you say "I love you." I mean I guess that could be okay. The basic premise is "I love you" is the thing being communicated in the chorus. So in your first verse and then second verse you might opt to make it so the chorus is a so or therefore. So in your first verse you could be like you know "You're so pretty and beautiful and you make me smile." So or therefore "I love you." That's the chorus. And then the second verse is "Wow you're such a great mom and you take such good care of our family and you're so kind." Whatever. "Therefore I love you." So have it be that each verse is something that supports the main idea of the melody. Where you could take the main premise of the melody and say "Therefore I love you." "Therefore I love you." First verse "Therefore I love you." Second verse or second idea "Therefore I love you." Or so. Same idea. Just less pretentious way of saying it I guess. And then you could also have "but." So you know we'll keep with "I love you." "You're awful to me and you left me for someone else but I love you anyway." You know and then the second verse is some other piece of evidence about how this person is awful and you probably shouldn't love them. "But I love you." That's another fairly easy way to go. And then for the, this might be nitpicking on something that you don't mean, but I always imagine verses to be more of the storywriting section of the song containing some kind of message. So I don't think, it depends what you mean by message, but generally speaking I feel like songs should, any form of message in art should be accidental via discovery. Meaning there's a difference between a theme and a message. A theme are ideas you're exploring. So a theme would be something like good and evil or love. A message is something that is more opinionated. So it's more like you know love is a lie would be a message or love is antiquated now or something silly like that. That would be a message, right? That's an opinion. The theme of love is not an opinion, it's just what we're talking about. So it's probably not what you mean by this, but just in case. I want to argue don't really think about what's the message of my song because that's where we quickly go from art to propaganda. And even if you think it's positive propaganda, it doesn't change those propaganda, right? We write a song specifically to get a certain message across, it's propaganda. And generally, if not always, I think that should be avoided. Again, your worldview is going to influence your songs. That's totally fine. But there's a difference between your worldview naturally influencing your art and you sitting down and being like I'm going to tell people X or I'm going to convince people of Y. Which at least now is sort of what message usually means. That's probably not what you mean. But yes, the verses probably should generally be the story portion of the song or the... You can think of it like if your chorus is the thesis, your verses are the pieces of supporting evidence. If you remember back in the day with essays or whatever, you may have had to write a paper where you have a thesis and then you needed three supporting pieces of evidence to support that thesis. You can think of that as your two verses and your bridge or something like that. So I struggle to connect choruses and verses. It's like I'm writing two songs that happen to be in the same key but have very little momentum and flow connecting the two. If you're talking about music, I think we already talked about that in a previous episode. I mean I guess we're recovering many things in some of these because we do have some of the same sort of stuff popping up which makes sense that people would have similar struggles. So I don't want to go too deep into that because I think we feel like I remember covering that for if anything too long in a previous episode. So that's something to think about and this is going to be in a YouTube video coming out pretty soon where I talk about how to finish songs chord progression wise. But something to think about is where, what's the last chord of say your verse or conversely what is the first chord of your chorus and then figure out the last chord of your verse based on the first chord of your chorus thinking about how well does one transition into the other. Because a lot of times I think people don't think about that they just think in wholesale chord progression so they're like one five six four and then they think oh so for my chorus I need another chord progression one six five four not really paying any mind to okay but does the four at the end of the first progression actually connect well into the one at the beginning of the next progression. The answer to that question is actually yes four to one is a great relatively powerful transition so that would be a good way to transition to a chorus generally but sometimes people don't think about that all I think that's worth thinking about. I'm struggling with understanding how to use the right chords to raise emotions slash feeling in the song or conversely to lower the feel not sure if that makes sense but I hope so. So I think I know what you mean by this and in which case I would say the right chords is just a part of what you're looking for. If you're talking about you have a verse and then you want the the pre-chorus to sound like it's sort of upping the ante and then from there you want the chorus to feel like it's upping the ante even more like there's a main point of the song. There's a lot that goes into that. I have specific videos on each of those things I believe. So right chords is always a difficult thing but just as a general answer to your question is it's not just in the chords. The chords are going to be a part of it but a lot of times how a song really feels like it's raising the emotion or feeling in a song is not just the chords it's in the arrangement. So for instance the pre-chorus may sound like it's upping the ante or raising the emotion as you word it not mostly because of the chords that are there but because the arrangement is changing. Maybe the arrangement is getting a little thicker that's when the bass comes in or some other instruments come in and it's elements of the arrangement that really help it pop up a little bit more. And so that's a very general answer but this is a difficult question because there is no one way anytime somebody says right chords it's always a struggle. There is no because sometimes people will be like oh just give me the right chords for the chorus. That doesn't exist. There is no is a creative thing right there are general guidelines for instance a great way to go is to avoid a one chord in a pre-chorus that way when you probably have the one chord in your chorus it makes it so that the pre-chorus is obviously not the chorus because you didn't have the one chord you didn't have that home center of gravity chord. So that's a really good way to make sure that your pre-chorus doesn't overshadow your chorus. So we have things like that but for the most part when it comes to right chords to raise emotions or feelings in the song that's not really a thing so much as it's very context dependent. Alright so if you have a three chord in the context of C major and E minor chord from a three chord going up to a four chord an F major chord it's probably going to sound like it's raising the emotion feeling partially because it's going up which by the way if there's an easy answer to this it's chords that go up or sound like they're going up which is going to be easier if you're a pianist because if you're going to be really specific when we say chords going up chords don't really go up or down because chords are just it depends on how you arrange it right so I can I can have an E major to an F major that actually goes down in pretty much every way even though E major to F major you would think is going up but anyway but going up is a great way to feel like you're sort of rising up and raising the ante and then you know going from minor to major will feel like rising whereas major to minor will feel like it's a little more deflating but those are super general right we're not even we're not even touching how inversions can affect this and how how every chord sounds is very much dependent on what came before it for instance when people talk about like oh major chords are happy and minor chords are sad by themselves that's probably true right if I just play this out of the blue that is sadder than than that which is E minor versus E major but depending on the context and and what chord came before it you can actually have major chords that sound really dark or really sad and you can have minor chords that sound happy depending on where it comes from especially when you get to borrowed chords and all that advanced stuff all to say that if there are some some things that we can glean from this for raising emotion going up and then you know thinking minor to major would be rising generally and then falling would be major to minor and and and going down super general that is not always going to be true you have to do it by ear and a part of it too is just doing it more and more so that you get a little bit more of a sense but I don't know that there's necessarily a science to it there's probably more of a science to the arranging side of how you raise emotion and feeling in a song or conversely lower the feel my biggest struggle is to come up with an idea of a song and how to begin to write it I keep hearing advice that I should write a couple of songs that would introduce me as a person as an artist my point of view my lifestyle etc also I'd like to write some happy joyful positive and energetic songs but all that comes to my mind is sad and depressing my main goal is to be a live performing artist and the songs that I wrote and write right at the moment are not the type that I would see myself performing live in a way that I cover that I perform cover songs so for my biggest struggle to come up with an idea for a song how to begin to write it first of all free guide again cheat sheet really now because it's shorter but has way more actually ideas of how to start a song songwritertheory.com slash free guide but to me I like to break it down into categories which is really you can start a song from a lyrical standpoint which is really anything that's based on words right whether it's a song title specifically and you reverse engineer a song from a song title or you just come up with a specific lyric or line that really resonates with you which sometimes is the same right there's a song that I I guess I'm writing technically I haven't finished the second verse yet or the second verse lyrics but it's called here until you leave and it came from the the idea for a line I'm here until you leave which struck me because it to me it well reflected that very specific feeling where you are in a relationship and you know that it ends one of two ways because you've decided that you want to be with this person forever but you know deep down that they're going to leave you so you know that the only way this relationship ends is with you being brokenhearted and them choosing to not love you anymore so the idea of I'm here until you leave it's sort of it's that right it's this idea that I'm not the one who's gonna leave it's you that's gonna leave because I'm here until you leave so that whole song which is probably my at this moment it might be my favorite song I've ever written even though it's not 100 written literally just came from the idea of that phrase and there's nothing revolutionary about that phrase either it just it just happened to strike me and from there I reverse engineered a song if you will or I ask more questions about like okay what's the story here what are the different symbols I'm going to use so so you can reverse engineer from a song title from a line idea that you like those two can end up being the same sometimes they're not you can have a compelling symbol that you want to use if you think of you know a specific symbolism that resonates with you preferably something that is a little more original than you know dark represents bad things but if you come up with a more specific symbol I don't know purple tiger like to you you think the representation of a purple tiger is something particular or white whale that's a great example right the white whale is actually something that already has symbolic meaning because ofI'm now like 20 000 leagues under the sea is that that one no that's that's the whatever the white whale mopi dick thank you I don't know who I'm saying thank you to I'm saying thank you to my own brain apparently for bailing me out from embarrassingly for getting mopi dick for a hot secondbut the white whale would be a reference to mopi dick right so the white whale is a symbol that white whale in general means nothing right but because of mopi dick the white whale has come to represent a lot so you can do the same thing with your own song right where whether it's a creature or anything else where you come up with a symbol idea and then imbue it with meaning because not symbols don't naturally have meaning you give them meaning and then ideas can start on the other side right musical this could be in the form of a baseline a killer bass line a really cool drum rhythm that you like a piano riff that resonates with you a guitar chord progression or a guitar finger picking pattern or pick picking pattern so there's so many different ways to start a song from a musical standpoint or from a lyrical standpoint and really you can end up doing both right you can come up with a bunch of lyric ideas by coming up with ideas from a lyrical standpoint and then come up with a bunch of music ideas and then mix and match them sort of mix not mix and match them but match them where you know you hear a piano riff you came up with and you're like oh that actually matches really well with this new lyric idea i have before i didn't know what that song was going to be about but now i have an idea of what it could be about because it actually matches really well with my song title here until you leave or whatever so that's that's there's so there's no one way to begin a song i would highly encourage you try a whole bunch of different ways grab the free guide try all of them and at least a couple of times and then from there you know maybe try to try to figure out what you think your bread and butter ways are which ways result in the best songs for you personally and then keep the other ones in your back pocket as ones to use once in a while to mix it up but i think having bread and butter is is a good a good thing i've said this a million times so i'll make it quick but you know for me bread and butter tends to be i start with the piano riff very often if not i tend to start with a bass line of sorts sometimes it's just a piano bass line so it's kind of starting with the piano riff still just in a different waythe best way for me to write catchy songs is actually starting with rhythm because i'm not somebody who can just sit at a piano and write something catchy almost always i'll do something that's a little more you know romantic sounding or emotional sounding sad uh so this also connects to the point that was it you that made no yes it is you that made this point right i'd like to write some happy joyful positive or energetic songs but all that comes to mind is sad and depressing uh finding ways in certain ways to write songs that can sometimes nudge you in different directions than you normally would go can be a great a great way to handle that so again for me i don't know if i would ever write a catchy song on the piano ever if it weren't for starting with drum patterns and drum loops it can be even really simple ones in fact the most simple drum patterns a basic funk beat or something or basic pop beat can be the best for inspiring you to write something that's catchy and more happy sounding perhaps but also uh to address i keep hearing advice that i should write a couple of songs that would introduce me as a person as an artist my point of view my lifestyle etc i don't know who's giving you that advice i don't know if that's bad advice but it kind of sounds like a business person giving an artist advice right it sounds like what a record label would tell an artist and i'm not saying there's no truth to it from a practical standpoint but i would say you need you don't know who you are as an artist yet because you're just starting so so the idea of your first songs introducing you as an artist is doesn't even really make sense because you don't know who you are as an artist yet you maybe have a decent idea you know generally but you know that and we constantly evolve as artists so i wouldn't worry about that is really what my answer to that is i would just write what's coming to mind which connects to with the i'd like to write some happy joyful but all that comes to mind is sad and depressing write what is coming to your mind right if you're inspired in a certain direction follow it when you're not inspired work anyway but if if all your inspiration is towards sad songs then lean into that write sad songs don't just arbitrarily be like oh i should write happy songs why why should you write happy songs especially if you if that's not the way you're naturally leaning and that's not to say that there wouldn't be value if you've written 10 songs and all of them are sad to say okay now i'm gonna try to force myself to write a happy song just so i can expand myself as an artist that's fair enough but if you've written basically no songs or very few songs which reading between the lines sounds like maybe is the case very few um which maybe i'm wrong but it sounds like very few in that case don't don't worry about any of that just write what is most inspiring to you right now lean into that and probably ignore the that and i don't even know what some of this means introduce you as a person as an artist my point of view my lifestyle nobody cares about any of those things except artists right like your songs introducing you as a person uh like does that is that something people are looking for like when i listen and i care deeply about lyrics i've never listened to lyrics in my life and thought i want to know this you know i i want to get to know this artist as a person no i want to know who they are as an artist i don't really care who they are as a person within reason you know there are some artists that are pretty terrible people one of whom is in jail for uh yeah r kelly type people rightso i i guess i care a little bit but for the most part you know i care who somebody is as an artist i don't know who cares who an artist is as a person or their point of view or lifestyle lifestyle is the maybe the most intriguing of those four because nobody nobody cares like you know nobody cares what your lifestyle is uh nobody cares what my lifestyle is in fact you might be somebody who's been listening to this podcast for a long time and you've never once thought what is joseph's lifestyle i don't even know what that means really but like what is joseph's lifestyle nobody cares right now nobody listening to this podcast right now watching this video gives half of a rip what joseph's lifestyle is you don't right and you might say it's not the same because you follow me for information is but i don't know just to me right right what is coming to you and don't worry about forcing it in all these different directions um and and be careful whose advice you listen to myself included uh just because i don't know i i'm trying to round my mind around who on earth or what kind of artist would tell another artist to write songs that introduce you as a person your point of view which is maybe one of the more legitimate ones next to artists and lifestyle lifestyle like that i don't need it nobody cares nobody cares and again this is not an insult to you right nobody cares about my lifestyle i don't care about any of my artists favorite artists lifestyle don't care at all i care about their artistic identity that is it right what kind of songs do they write what subject material do they cover things like that that's what i care about don't give a crap about the restin fact if anything if they shove any of the other things in my face like for example i feel like any pop artist that i get to know at all i like them even less than i did before right like i i don't know but i kind of get a kick out of dua lipa total total uh you know i don't pretend like it's great music at all uh but for whatever reason some dua lipa songs just do it for me uh but i bet and i've seen little clips but i bet if i watch interviews of her i would like her less and less and less and soon i would be like i don't want to listen to dua lipa soyeah it's kind of like actors right the more that not all actors but a lot of actors the more they're interviewed and they talk the more people are like you know what i mean like like brie larson is maybe the perfect example of this i don't know if there's any human being who has seen her in any interview in the last like five years who has thought this this person is incredibly unlikable i mean she's so unlikable that her co-stars can't even pretend to like her when they're promoting a movie with her like they're obviously annoyed and you can tell why too because she's like condescending to her more popular than her co-stars in an interview like wildly unlikable so anyway that long rant just to sayi'm sure you're way more likable than brie larson i'm sure literally every person who's ever listened to anything i've ever done is probably more likable than brie larson butdon't you know nobody cares about your your lifestyle or any of that just concentrate on making art concentrate on that worry less about the other stuff all right that's been so long than that one we're gonna cut this episode off here we'll be back for part eight to cover more of these songwriting struggles thank you so much for listening remember again if you haven't already grab my free guide 20 different ways to start writing a song song writer theory.com slash free guide thank you so much for listening or listening and watching if you're on youtube and i will talk to you in the next one

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Guide here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're asking if this perspective on art is holding your songwriting back.   I constantly hear people, including songwriters and musicians, say "Music is just all subjective", "Art is subjective", "There is no good or bad, art is purely subjective".

Not only is that unequivocally wrong, I think it's an actively destructive view that doesn't leave any room for us to "get better" at lyric writing, music composition, or anything else songwriting because, by definition of music being entirely subjective, there literally is no such thing as "better" lyrics or music or songs.

So why spend time trying to make our songs better? How could we even begin to have a discussion on how to write better lyrics or improve our chorus? If it's all completely subjective any of that would be a total waste of time.   So, in this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast that absolutely no one asked for, we're going to talk about why this view is wrong and why it also is destructive to us and our future as songwriters.  

Transcript:

So there's a certain perspective or opinion or just something that people say, especially artists of any kind, seemingly, and certainly songwriters. It seems like songwriters are constantly saying this and I think it's both destructive and just completely wrong. So because of that, we're gonna talk about it in this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast.  Hello, friend, welcome to another episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Joe Svedala. Honored that you would take some time out of your busy day to talk songwriting with me. Extra honored that you would take some time to listen to this podcast where we are, this is a podcast for being honest. Nobody asked for me to talk about this. The vast majority of subjects we talk about is something that either is inspired by what I think some of you would want me to talk about if you did tell me, and then a lot of it is off of what you do tell me. So a lot of the content recently, the last several months, has been inspired very directly by your feedback when I asked what your number one songwriting struggle was. Most of the content has been pretty directly off of that, some more directly maybe than others.   And I still need to finish that series as well, which we'll get back to. I have not forgotten.   But this is one of those episodes where we are talking about something that nobody asked for, but I still think is important to talk about.   And I've wanted to talk about it for a while,   and then just realized it's a good podcast episode. I think it's an important thing to discuss, because you may not end up agreeing with me,   but hopefully I can at least get you to consider that instead of what seems to happen, which a lot of people just kinda,   I wanna say mindlessly kind of repeat this thing, I think it's a cop-out answer, and I think it's not true, or at least there's an argument, I would argue a very compelling argument, that it's clearly not true.   But regardless, hopefully you at least reconsider the repercussions of this view of this perspective, and also maybe consider that maybe it's just not true.   If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide, 20 Different Ways to Start Writing a Song. It's a cheat sheet, it's shorter, it's better than it used to be, and has double the ways to start writing a song. It's a great way to go, especially for somebody who is struggling with your song sounding the same, or you feel like you're uninspired. One of my favorite things to do, because my bread and butter way of starting a song is starting with a piano riff or something at the keyboard. But whenever I feel like, I just don't have any piano riffs in my fingers right now, I feel like I've written them all, which obviously I haven't, right? But just, you know, if you write a piano riff   two a day for five days, by the sixth day, you're kind of like, I just, I don't even know, like I've done every key of it, I just don't know where to start. But just doing something as simple as, I'm gonna go grab a stock funk beat and improvise to that, or I'm gonna do a bass line, or I'm gonna start with an interesting symbol or song title instead, or I'm gonna think of an interesting character or an interesting story to tell. Those can be all great ways to start a song that will refresh us creatively, so that we don't get into writer's block.   So anyway, be sure to check that out, songrithury.com slash free guide. So what is this perspective that I'm wanting to talk about that I think is super prevalent and ultimately pretty destructive and just not true, just wrong?   It is that art is completely subjective, or art is totally subjective, or art is just subjective, all the different versions of that quote that seemingly everybody says. And not everybody says it, not everybody has that opinion. I think a lot of people don't have that opinion, but the people who do are very loud about it.   And I think, first of all, it's just not true, which we're gonna cover first, why I think it's just not true.   And then also, regardless of the level of truth, I think it's an unhelpful perspective if you want to get better as a songwriter. If you wanna write better songs, I think it's an unhelpful, if not overtly destructive perspective.   So first, let's talk about some of the reasons why I think it's just not true.   And we're gonna start with quite a claim probably, but and that claim is, I think the vast majority of people who say this don't actually believe it. They think they believe it, but if we tease it out a little bit, if we discuss it a little bit, dive a little bit deeper, about the repercussions, if it really is true that music, art in general, movies, books, it's all subjective, just totally subjective.   There's a lot of consequences of that view that almost no people that do start with the premise of like, all art's all subjective, music's all subjective. Most of those people, when we go down some of the paths we're gonna go down, it's like, okay, if that's true, then this other thing has to be true. But those people, even if they wouldn't admit that they are like, yeah, I guess I don't agree with that.   Inwardly, I think they just, they would know. Oh, I don't think this view is correct.   So first let's start with how logic works, I guess, which I know you didn't expect this in a songwriting podcast, but this is, if you want to get to the truth, you have to think logically. And I know a lot of people listening to this might be like, really, I didn't expect a logic thing today, but here we are.   So whenever a logical claim is made, one way to test it is to take it to the extreme and see if it still holds true. So for instance, if I were to make the moral claim that all stealing is bad, you take it to the extreme, find the most understandable or seemingly justifiable version of stealing and try to figure out is that morally right? If it is, then that undermines my point that all stealing is wrong, right?   Or all lying is wrong, for instance. So if we were to say all lying is morally wrong,   but then we take it to the extreme, right? If we were to say all lying is wrong, then we would be able to lie to a certain evil German party from the 1940s to save certain people from a horrible fate. If we lied to them, is that a moral good? I would argue yes, because they're saving their lives and life doesn't always give you perfect choices. So you're not lying for evil   and you've edited that deeply because I don't know, YouTube algorithm is weird and YouTube doesn't like talk about certain things and they will brand it. You can't even say certain words without them. You're like, oh my goodness, they're bad guys. Like, no, no, I'm presenting them as the bad guys. But anyway, hopefully you got my drift about 1940s certain German.   But anyway, if you can find one example of something, then the whole claim is just not true. So if we take the claim that art is completely subjective or songwriting specifically is completely subjective to the extreme, we would take the most extremely bad version of art and extremely good version of art, put them together and say, is it true that it's just subjective that this really bad thing is better than, or is worse than the really good thing?   So let's do that. If we believe, if we believe that all art is purely subjective, again, this is, don't, this is getting ahead maybe, but there's no false, no, don't false dichotomy here.   The claim that all art is subjective, is totally subjective is a extreme claim. What I'm not claiming is that it's purely objective. I'm not claiming that. I think that's actually more arguable than this, but I'm not arguing that. I think there's objective ways to look at art and there's of course, there's subjective ways to look at art as well. Of course, there's subjective ways to look at everything.   But the idea that it's purely subjective is what I'm saying is not true. It's not 100% subjective. But if it's true, that's 100% subjective, then it is 100% valid, 100% valid for me to say that the first scribble my daughter did is equally as good art as Starry Night, Mona Lisa, Sistine Chapel, Statue of David.   And not only do you have no grounds to refute or argue with me, because you said it's all subjective. So if I subjectively believe that my daughter's first scribble is better than Sistine Chapel,   what, is your subjective opinion more important than mine? That would be blatant narcissism, right? That your subjective opinion matters than somebody else's subjective opinion. That's like the epitome of narcissism, is we all have equal opinions except mine is more equal. Like mine is more important. That's a horrible place to start. So if it's true that it's all subjective, you have to concede, you must. There's no other way than it is equally valid for me to say that my daughter's first scribble is better than Sistine Chapel than for you to say the Sistine Chapel is better than my daughter's first scribble or first time she tries a stick figure.   Like just to put an illustration on it, I can do right now a deep piece of art that is very meaningful to me, that I've thought about for a long time. Sorry to those of you who are just on podcasts who isn't gonna see this exquisite, brilliant piece of art. Here we go.   Better than the Mona Lisa, baby.   And the best part is, if it's true that art is purely subjective, not only can you not actually refute or argue with what I just said, you can't even inwardly roll your eyes   because you say it's all subjective, purely opinion.   So if that's my opinion, you can't refute it. And it would be pretty arrogant for you to even roll your eyes at it. Because what, is your subjective opinion somehow better than mine? There's no objectivity here according to this view. So really you can't even get off on judging me for having that opinion.   But here's the thing, we all know this absurd.   We all know, deep down, like even right now, you're probably thinking about, no, that can't be true. But yes, it is. If it's purely subjective, there's no objectivity. Then there's no discussion to be had about something being better or worse. Because that doesn't exist in your view. It's just what people like, what each person subjectively likes. That's the only thing we can talk about. So we can't even begin to have a discussion about what movie is better than another movie.   Let's apply it to other art forms before we take it back to songwriting.   So let's take movies.   We all know, hopefully, that The Dark Knight is better than Morbius or Thor II.   We all know that Infinity War is better than Thor II.   Most MCU movies in the Infinity Saga are better than Thor II. But we know that that's true. We know that Empire Strikes Back is a better movie than Rise of Skywalker.   Everybody knows that. I mean, the only thing that every Star Wars fan in human history agrees on is Rise of Skywalker is a pile of garbage. It's awful, awful. Even people who were defending episode eight still agree Rise of Skywalker is terrible.   And we all know that The Godfather is better than Troll 2 or The Room, famously awful movies.   To the point that if somebody actually tried to say Thor II is better than The Dark Knight, all of us would be like, "Are you kidding me?" Now, maybe if they said they like it better, there's no accounting for taste because now that's not an objective claim anymore. That's a subjective claim. But anytime we say this quarterback is better than another quarterback, that's an objective claim. And there's no way to, there's no science to just outright prove it. You have to gather what you think goes into what is a great quarterback? Is it accuracy? How much does playoff performance matter? Is it playoff stats or is it playoff wins? A quarterback wins even a stat and maybe not a football or sports person, so I've already lost you. But there's many things where we can have objective discussions that just aren't completely clear, which we'll get into in a little bit, a little deeper. But this goes to something else where let's go to music.   You may or may not like Cardi B more than classical music. In fact, probably a lot of Americans, if they're being honest, they don't actually like classical music. Some actually are willing to say, I think it's boring, right? Some people will actually say that out loud, which I almost admire.   So probably, if I were to guess, it might even be true that if you were, if every US citizen had to be honest,   they would say they prefer Cardi B over classical music. I don't know, as I said that, that's probably not true. But regardless, there's a lot of people that if they're being honest, they prefer Cardi B, and absolute garbage like WAP, over Moonlight Sonata or anything by Bach Beethoven, whoever is in your goat discussion of composers.   And honestly, if somebody said, I just like Cardi B more than, I would be like, okay, that's a little bit of a sign of a degenerate culture that we live in a world where a lot of people probably genuinely prefer outright garbage like that over brilliant classical pieces.   But there's no accounting for taste. That's a, they're not making an objective claim that Cardi B is better than Beethoven or Cardi B is better than Bach.   So that's fine, right? They just like it more.   But I think we all, a little part of us, would immediately, if we were in a room and somebody had the audacity to say, oh, Cardi B is far more brilliant, far better of an artist than Bach or Beethoven. We all know that we jump in and be like, are you kidding?   Because that's an objective claim. That's an objective claim. And we all know it's objectively false. We all know, in our heart of hearts, we know that. Now we might not have figured out how to articulate why that's true,   which we'll get into in a little bit,   but that doesn't change that it's true. For instance, we'll save that point, because my second point is gonna be how objectivity is often misunderstood.   But again, somebody can say, I like WAP more than moonlight Sonata.   Purely subjective claim, whatever, it's fine. If they say it's better, now we have a problem. And most of us recognize that. Why? Because most of us understand that there are objective and subjective claims, and they both can be valid.   For instance, I can say that I like the Star Wars prequel trilogy more than I like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.   That's just taste, right? I would never say that it's better than the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is one of the greatest movie trilogies ever.   And the Star Wars prequels have significant issues, especially the first two.   And it's just, if you were to break down how you measure movies, I'm pretty sure basically every category, Lord of the Rings would win. But I love Star Wars, George Lucas, Star Wars. And orcs and ogres, not ogres, but orcs and dwarves and elves and all that sort of high fantasy stuff just does not do it for me, just from a personal standpoint. I still like Lord of the Rings because it's so good that it actually gets me past my bias. It's kind of like a country song that I like. It's really impressive. It means the song must be really, really good because I'm so biased against country by nature.   So we all know there's a separation there. You can come up to me and say, "I like Thor II better than The Dark Knight." And I don't think you're a little crazy, but for the most part, you're just saying what you like. I don't know why you like it better, that's fine.   But we all know that we'd all be a little ticked if somebody said, "Oh, the Barbie movie's better than Gladiator." Of course it's not. We all know it's not. Even the people who made Barbie, if they're being honest, know that it's not better than, I don't know, on "Music Gladiator." I'll use a more clear example. It's a wonderful life, which is in absolutely the goat discussion of movies. Somehow I didn't see it until this year. That movie had hype for 31 years that have been alive and still actually matched or exceeded the hype. That movie deserves, most movies in that category are overrated, that one is not. Anyway.   So, if any of what I just said is true, where you know deep down, like, yeah, I mean,   obviously it's absurd to say that Troll 2, or The Room, is better than It's a Wonderful Life,   or that Cardi B is a better writer than Bach or Beethoven, or My Daughter's Scribbles, or The Scribble I Just Did, is better than Starry Night or Mona Lisa or something.   If that's true, then you don't believe it's all subjective.   You don't, because if it's all subjective, everything, all those absurd things I said, shouldn't bother you at all. Because it's just pure subjective. So what is it? There's no discussion to be had. I have my opinion, you have yours. There's nothing to discuss.   Which leads me into the second thing, which I think is what bothers a lot of people. People throw the baby out with the bathwater, they make this fallacy all the time with things.   And they confuse objectivity as like, it's a thing that's so obviously true, nobody could disagree with it. Which is funny to me that in today's world, people could say that, because there's lots of things that are firmly established as objective that large swathes of the population are just like, "No, not true." Like, "Okay, all right."   And so it's shocking to me when people think that. It's obviously not the case. Just to take one silly example, like the earth isn't flat and it revolves around the sun.   Right? You know what I mean? Like people deny it still.   And also objectivity doesn't mean that it's easy to measure or determine. Just as an exercise here, let's take science. One of the more objective things we have, right? Math is the most objective probably in sciences.   It depends on the type of science, right? The gravity science is far more objective than many other types of sciences or pseudosciences. But just as a example, for most of human history, we had no idea that we were made up of cells, much less that cells are made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which were made up of the combination of protons, neutrons, and electrons. That doesn't change the objective reality that always was the case. 2,000 years ago when we didn't know that, it wasn't not true. But right now, scientists say that 90% of the universe is dark matter, they don't know what it is. Whatever it is or whatever group of things it is,   the objective truth that we currently don't know is still the objective truth.   It doesn't change just because we don't know how to measure it or we haven't figured out what it is.   It's just like if you lived under a rock your whole life, it's objectively true that the sun is in the sky and the rock isn't the whole world, even though in your perspective, this life under the rock is all there is. That doesn't change the objective reality though.   So what you won't hear me saying is that it's easy to have a discussion, try to in good faith, have a discussion about objectivity and art. It's not an easy discussion.   But in almost anything except math, that's always true.   A lot of times we oversimplify things to try to make it seem simple, but it's not.   Right? And I think a lot of people run into this whenever, you know, the deep down, they know something like, yeah, it's yes, it's a wonderful life, is objectively a better movie than the room. We all know that down deep.   But when somebody actually is crazy enough to try to argue with us, that's when sometimes we might be like, oh wow, I don't actually know how I know that,   but I know it's true. But that's true even for scientific things. You and I, for probably every single person who's listening to this podcast watching this video, you have never yourself seen any proof or even evidence really that the earth is round, but we all believe it.   Theoretically, we all believe it. A lot of people don't, but we'll say we here believe that the earth is round.   And that's okay if you don't. I have people I love who don't, and that's okay.   Crazy to me, but it's what it is. So in that case, why do you believe that? You believe that because science textbooks all told you that.   You know far more people that believe that than don't. And you saw some pictures from space, allegedly,   that seemed to show the earth as being round. Right?   We all, for many things that we take for granted as being objective, we actually have outsourced to other people. The fact that we're made up of, I mentioned, protons, neutrons, and electrons, none of us, none of us have definitively seen for ourselves, oh yeah, there's protons, neutrons, and electrons. Maybe we've seen a picture in a textbook that's labeled that way, but we don't know that. They could have been making it up. And I'm not suggesting those things at all. In case it's not obvious, I'm not suggesting either of those things are true.   But there's a lot of things in life that we don't think about how we really don't know how to defend the objective thing. And we can't say that we've actually seen it with our own eyes, or have proven it with our own science, or math equation, or whatever it is.   Much less all the things in the world that are way more nebulous, like who's the goat for basketball, or football, or whatever else. All of those arguments are way more nebulous than sports media would make you believe. The same thing is true with like, how would you even begin to decide the goat of actors, or the goat of composers? It's a difficult thing. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, though.   So I think this is a part of the people   get frustrated and I kind of throw it out. It is a difficult discussion to try to get to how can I separate out this concept of, here's what I like in a song, versus here are some of the objective through lines and themes that seem to generally create a better song. Now it's easier if you break it down into pieces. For instance, I did this when I believe I did a podcast breaking down why, it wasn't the main point of the podcast, I think the main point of the podcast was why you should learn piano as a songwriter, and then I did one on why you should learn guitar, I believe.   But I believe I've done this, maybe I haven't. But a quick breakdown is, I believe that you can make an objective claim that the piano is the greatest instrument.   Now, that means that we have to break it down into different things that are objective, or are more objective.   So for example, we have to talk about, okay, how do you measure the greatness of an instrument? I think one factor is its range, right? Because it's an ability to play different pitch ranges that adds to the mix, adds to the song, and piano has the largest range, right? So it has violin beat, it has guitar beat, it has instruments like flutes beat by a ton.   It's way more than most instruments, and it's more than any other instrument, at least of, you know, main semi-normal instruments. Organ is probably close, but yeah.   Then another factor would be something like, how much you can do with one person at an instrument. With a flute, we'll take the flute as comparison, with a flute, it can play one note at a time.   That's it. With a piano, you can play chords, full chords at the same time while also doing the melody.   You can sing with just a piano, and it feel pretty full. You can't sing just with a flute, and it feel full. People don't do that, right? Your accompanist is never a flautist. Your accompanist is a pianist, or maybe a guitarist, which by the way is another part of the argument, I would say. Then I think there's an element of instrumentation that's how useful is it across different genres. Something like a banjo is really only super useful as a main instrument, as a driving force, in very specific genres. It's a very specialized instrument. Piano, you can throw it in an old ancient classical piece, or way before classical. Heck, you could do Gregorian chants with piano, and it works totally fine. It seems to fit because of such an old instrument. But it also can fit in the most modern rock or pop. It's not like a steel guitar, which automatically makes something sound kinda country.   So I think you can break down these different categories and say the piano is either number one, or number two for darn near every category. And the only thing that seems to be in competition is these days, maybe guitar has kind of entered the goat discussion.   But probably 150 years ago, that wouldn't be true.   But these are the sort of things we have to do, right? Is break it down into pieces of like, okay, melody,   how melody and the chords and the lyrics all fit together, which we're not gonna dive into this next, because actually in the next episode, we're gonna finally take the audacious step.   Very often, whenever I mention, like, look, I think it's crazy to say that it's purely, it's just all subjective art.   The immediate pushback I get is the like, gotcha question, which is lazy and silly, I think. But it's like, okay, define what makes a good song. Like that doesn't, first of all, I'm not saying that there's no subjectivity. And I'm also not saying like, oh, it's trivial to just be like, oh, let's make a math equation. And then we can just grade every song and it comes out with a perfect number. And we can definitively say this song is better than another. No, it's always gonna have some level of variability. There is some subjectivity to it. But if we take it to the extreme, that's where we see, okay, there's also some objectivity to it, which is why we all know that if somebody says,   wap is better than Moonlight Sonata, if you have any soul at all, there's a little part of you that's angry at the idea that somebody could suggest such an absurd thing.   But we can, again, if there's no objectivity, you can't think that's absurd. You can't, there's no, it's all subjective. So there's nothing to talk about.   So anyway, we are gonna take that audacious step in the next episode, which I believe might be the 250th episode for this podcast.   And I'm not gonna do it because I think I have all the answers, I don't. But I think everybody's too, it seems to me that everybody's too lazy to even try.   And I think that's a problem. I think that's a problem because of the third point we're gonna get into.   Which is, to me, if you wanna grow as a songwriter, if we wanna be able to have legitimate discussions about how can I make a song better, how can I improve a song,   we can't say that it's all subjective. Because if it's all subjective, there's no discussions we had.   If I write a song in the next hour, I take an hour and write a song,   and I feel like the second verse lyrics just isn't quite working. And the bridge melody feels like it doesn't really fit with the theme and with the main ideas.   It just doesn't fit with the lyrics of the bridge.   And there are numerous other problems. Maybe just the lyrics of the chorus just don't quite work, they don't feel tight. They are using a lot of meh words like sad, which is a pretty bland word compared to something like wistful, which is more specific, or bitter. For instance, you could say, it's maybe over simplified, but wistful is something like sadness   and longing for a past happiness that you had.   It's very specific, so it has sadness, but it has happiness too, because you're wistful for something that was happy, but you're sad about it now because you don't have it anymore.   So it's way more specific than sad, which is a broad category. Because if I say I'm bitter, bitter is kind of like a hybrid between angry and sad, which are two more generic concepts. But bitter is a very specific type of sadness or a very specific type of anger. It's really sort of a hybrid. So if I say I'm bitter, that's telling you that I'm both sad and angry.   If I tell you I'm just sad, that's just sad, right? So there are words that are clearly better and more precise than others that communicate more, even though it's still one word. So the word sad versus the word wistful, communicates way more with one word than sad does. And that's not even like a,   that would be a thing that's like objective. Like if I tell you I'm sad, or I tell you I'm wistful or bitter, I have absolutely been more precise in communicating what specifically I'm feeling with those other two words.   And there are many other examples that would be way more extreme. I probably should have picked a more extreme example,   but regardless.   So if I sit down and I write a song, and it has all these issues,   if I truly believe that it's all subjective, I believe there is no reason, no good reason for me to take any time to listen to that inner voice that's telling me that my second lyric, my second verse lyrics aren't working, and my bridge melody doesn't work with the lyrics, because it's all subjective. What does that even mean?   Because I can't even begin to say   that my lyrics aren't good, because that's an objective claim. I can say I don't like the lyrics in that section, but who cares? That's my subjective opinion. I shouldn't even care about my subjective opinion for my own songs, because I might be, my subjective opinion might be totally wrong, and the whole world thinks it's great.   And since there's no objectivity at all in this view, why would I spend more time to just subjectively change the lyrics?   Meanwhile, if I sit down and I write a song draft in an hour, same exact scenario, but I believe that there is some objectivity to it, and that I can, by taking the lyrics in the second verse that I think have issues, they're not using very precise words, it doesn't really evoke much of an emotion, because it's kind of generic language, maybe there's even some cliches in there, which is the worst of all,   but if I go into that with, no, there is some objectivity here, then there's reason for me to think I can make that better. It's worth trying to make it better, because making that verse better exists. If we say it's all subjective, that doesn't even exist. There's no such thing as making your second verse lyrics better, that's an objective claim, just like it's objective to say the Dark Knight is better than Thor 2. Saying I like it better is not, that's a subjective claim, that's just an opinion, I don't even have to back it up with any facts. If I claim the Dark Knight is better, is better, that's an objective claim, I need to be able to explain to you why it's a better movie than Thor 2, which I would do, except that you don't care, because it's a songwriting podcast, but that is something I could do, and have done before.   But not that anybody, I've never heard anybody make such a ridiculous claim, I've heard similar ridiculous claims, but not that one.   So with the mindset that there's some objectivity to this, I'm incentivized as a songwriter to think my song isn't just perfect as it is, I can't just write it off as oh, it's all subjective, so I think the lyric might suck, but no, there's no such thing as a sucky lyric, I'm just gonna throw it out there.   Then there's reason for me to actually try to make it better, and there's a way that I could figure out how to make it better, because we can't even begin to have a discussion about how to write a better pre-course, or how to write a better chord progression, or how to improve your second verse lyrics for your song called Infinity, or I made up a song title on the spot and immediately regret it, but we can't even begin to have that discussion. You can't email me and say, Joseph, give me some feedback on this song, because all I could tell you, if there's no objectivity, is I like this and I don't like this, but why should you care what I think? If it's just all subjective, you shouldn't. I don't even think you should really care what you think if it's all subjective. What does anything matter? We might as well just do that, say that's my song. Subjectively, it's just as good as anything else. I like that more than Moonlight Sonata.   So it is what it is.   And I think down deep, a lot of times,   another underlying reason that people   believe all art is subjective, there's many things we could get into that's even deeper that we're not gonna get into because of the song on any podcast.   I think it's downstream of certain world views and things like that.   But I think a part of it too,   is we have to take responsibility   and acknowledge that we might write songs that aren't very good, or we might have to acknowledge that our songwriting used to suck or the first five songs we write are gonna suck and the next five songs are gonna be okay. And then even when we start writing more and more good songs, we're still gonna have some duds that just aren't very good, didn't quite work.   If we say it's all subjective, we can give ourselves a pass. We can just say, oh, who's to say? Everybody universally hates this song and everybody says it sucks and they can even give objective reasons why it sucks.   How the melody is something that is completely unmemorable and also it's not an interesting melody but boring,   and which it merely has some subjectivity to it. But there is also a level of,   we all have heard melodies that like, oh, there's something about that that's good and there's something about that. Another one is melody I think is one of the hardest things to have any sort of objective discussion on. But we can look at a lyric and be like, look, that had a cookie cutter line here, it's not emotionally resonant at all. It's using a lot of generic words that isn't gonna move anybody.   So we can even talk about specific things in each other's songs that just aren't working and could be improved. But if it's all subjective, there's nothing to talk about.   And that's the part that really gets me, is it doesn't make any sense at all. If it's true that it's all subjective, for anybody to be listening to my podcast or anybody else's podcast about songwriting, it doesn't make sense to try to get better at songwriting because that doesn't exist if it's all subjective. The idea of writing a better song or taking your song and making it quote unquote better does not exist because better is an objective claim.   All you can do is hope to make a song that you personally like better or that for some reason you care that I personally like better, which you shouldn't care about. You shouldn't even care what you subjectively like better necessarily. I mean, obviously that should be a part of it. We should write music we like generally.   And then the part that really gets me is the idea that there's people out there creating content, teaching songwriting, who would say it's all subjective.   If it's all subjective, does that mean that your content is just you saying, in my subjective opinion, this, in my subjective opinion, that,   and you should listen to my subjective opinion because my subjective opinion is better than your subjective opinion? Like is that? I don't know how we get away from that. And it's one of those things where like, for some reason this is one of those things where like anytime I try to have this discussion, for some reason I feel like people try to brand the opinion that no, there's two spectrums. There's I don't like it to I do like it, which is subjective claims. And then there's a separate, totally separate discussion that's being able to discuss it's bad to its good spectrum. And those are not necessarily linked at all, which is why I can like one movie way more than another, but also concede that the movie I like less is actually a better movie. If we are incapable of that, that's a massive flag,   massive flag, because we should be able to have that discussion. And that's an acknowledgement that there's a separation between our personal taste and just what makes something good. For example, famously, if you listen to this podcast, my favorite band is vertical horizon, but you will never hear me say is vertical horizon is the greatest band of all time. I would never say that. I don't think they're the best band of all time. I wouldn't even begin to be audacious enough to make that claim about any band.   They're my favorite though. They speak personally to me. I would say maybe that Mascale is a good songwriter. I think it can back up that claim with, because that's an objective language, right? But I would never say they're the best band, or my favorite band is better than your favorite band necessarily. I mean, maybe I would, depends what your favorite band is. But that's a totally separate discussion. I should be able to concede that your favorite band might be better than my favorite band, but I still like my favorite band better. Just like I might like Revenge of the Sith even more than I like Lord of the Rings movie, but I can concede the Lord of the Rings movie is better. The acting is probably better. The plot is better.   Maybe the VFX are better, right? The effects are better. The script is better. The plot is better. Did I say that already? The dialogue is better. Of course, the dialogue's better. Dialogue has never been Star Wars' strong suit, right? So we can break it down into categories, and then break it down further and further, and try to have an objective discussion in good faith where we try to parse out, you know,   why does the Lord of the Rings have better dialogue than Star Wars? We all know that's true,   but, you know, it is a difficult conversation to figure out why that's true.   So this is the ultimate thing for me, is it just feels like, regardless of any of the other points which were about that, I just think it just doesn't stand up to basic reason that all art is totally subjective.   Frankly, I think it's a ridiculous thing to say. I don't think it stands up to even thinking about it for like five minutes.   But, even with that opinion, I also think it's just destructive.   You're just not incentivized to ever try to get better because there is no better to attain.   That doesn't help us. If you wanna become a better songwriter, if you wanna listen to content to get better at songwriting, you have to accept the premise that better exists is such a thing as making your lyric better. You can edit your second verse lyrics that suck, and you know they suck, and you cringe at them. You can edit them, you can redraft them, rewrite them, and then you look at the B, right? Your sixth draft that also had edits, and look and say, "This is objectively better than what I started with. "This is obviously better."   And if that doesn't exist, why would you waste any time to do that? You wouldn't. You wouldn't.   And to me, it's like, well, everything becomes pointless really fast. Trying to learn to write better doesn't exist. You shouldn't listen to any content creator about it.   There's no point.   There's no point.   And this is a thing too that for some reason, it's only art that we apply this to. If we said that, "Oh, well, how to build a good car is totally subjective." No, it's not. If the car doesn't move properly, or if the car is such that even in a 30 mile per hour car crash, anybody who's remotely near the crash is going to die 100% of the time, obviously it's not a good car, right?   Again, it's like good car, bad car, good house, bad house. There are elements to it that are subjective.   And there are elements to it that are objective, which we know if we take it to the extreme.   If you compare whatever you think the best car is, just the engine is the best, the speed is the best, the acceleration that breaks, the safety, the gas mileage, all the different factors that we could say are, here's what makes a car better or worse. It's better across the board than car B. Then we know it's objectively better than car B because it's both safer, faster, more fun, more cool looking, better gas mileage. It's better at all the things.   So we know there's some level of objectivity to this. There's objective discussions we had. We know this to be true for everything else. I would even argue for music, which is why I gave the example, we all know we're gonna cringe if somebody actually comes up to us and has the audacity to say, "WAP is just as good as Moonlight Sonata," or whatever. Maybe you didn't think Moonlight Sonata is overrated. You know, I'm not even sure where I land on that. I haven't really thought about it. But, you know, pick some masterful classical piece, or hack just a not horrible gross song like WAP, which is just awful in every possible sense. I really think it has no redeeming qualities. But, regardless,   it just ends up being destructive to us if we can't have that discussion. So next episode, we're gonna do the audacious thing. We're gonna try to figure out what are some of the things we can look at that seem to make objectively better songs?   What are some of the commonalities? What are the factors we look for? For example, I'll give you one example. I think it starts with synergy, if you will, of all three of the main parts. If the melody feels like it is communicating the same thing as the lyrics, which feels like it's communicating the same thing as the harmony and the chords, to me, that's a start.   If your lyrics seem to be talking about one thing, but the melody doesn't fit at all with the lyrics tonally, the lyrics are really sad and just, or maybe wistful or something, but then the music is like grandiose and epic in a way that just doesn't fit.   This doesn't make sense. These are supposed to be working together.   So I think that's where it's gonna start. I haven't fully written it out yet, the episode, but we're gonna do the audacious thing because I know this episode alone, a lot of people are gonna be like, "Whoa, this is really good." I know.   It is what it is.   I'm not gonna back down from this. You're welcome to make your counter argument. I've heard a lot of counter arguments. I have yet to hear a compelling one. It usually comes down to, "Oh, you can't give me a math equation to figure out how good a song is." So you're wrong. No, that would prove,   that wouldn't even prove wrong that if I were to claim that art is totally objective,   me not being able to provide basically a math equation to figure out how good a song is still doesn't disprove that claim. And that's not the claim we're making. I'm making the claim that we should be able to have a discussion from a subjective standpoint and from an objective standpoint. Sometimes the line is blurred between the two, but the idea that we can have no objective discussion about art,   whether movies or music is absurd, asinine, ridiculous, doesn't stand up to even the beginning of thinking about it. Which is why we're gonna discuss it next time. Because I think it's worth having that discussion. Because if you and I wanna write a better song, next time we write a song, we have to have some standard to look at at what does that mean? When we say I wanna write a better song or I wanna take the song ahead and make it better, what are some of the factors I can look at to make it better? Otherwise, I don't even know what we're talking about.   We're wasting our time, really.   So hopefully this was helpful to you. Hopefully it got you to maybe reconsider some things if you're somebody that has said before or really hasn't thought about it much, but just you hear from so many people this, you kind of accept it as true, but you never really thought about it yourself. There's probably a lot of people, which is fine.   We don't have time to think deeply about literally everything that everybody says in passing.   So hopefully for you there was something in this that at least made you think, huh, okay.   Yeah, there's something to this idea that if it's all subjective, this is a waste of time. So maybe in my heart of hearts, I know deep down that there's some level of objectivity here, just because it's difficult to measure doesn't take that away.   And next time we'll do the hard thing that nobody else is willing to do. I've never seen it anywhere. Maybe it's been done, maybe it hasn't, but we're gonna do the audacious thing. We're gonna try to figure out how to objectively measure a song or some factors to look at for objectivity in a song.   I don't pretend I have all the answers for sure, but we'll try. We'll do a good faith tribe and you can let me know in the comments what things maybe poke holes in it. Let me know maybe factors that I'm gonna miss. I'm sure I'm gonna miss factors.   It's a hard thing to tackle, right? But we can do it together. Also, if you have ideas, feel free to email them to me as well. Really, my goal is I wanna start this discussion.   I think it's a worthwhile discussion. I don't pretend to have the answer, but I do think it's worth all of us together trying to seek it, trying to figure out what makes it. Again, if you haven't already, be sure to check out my free guide, 20 different ways to start writing a song, songwritertheory.com, slash free guide. Thanks for sticking with me. Thanks for listening to an episode that again, nobody asked for, but I do think is an important thing to talk about. Don't worry, soon we'll be back to the normal grind of the main stuff people wanna know.   But I thought this episode was important to talk about. Hopefully you found it helpful. And I will talk to you hopefully in the next one.  

►► Download the Musical Keys Cheat Sheet here: https://songwritertheory.com/keys/

In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about how learning chord types just got easier... because I'm going to tell you exactly what chords to learn in what order to be most effective at writing chord progressions for your songs. The way songwriters should look at chords should be significantly different than how musicians often look at chords. So let's talk about how to learn chord types for songwriters!

Transcript: If you have wanted a roadmap to know what chords to learn when along your songwriting journey, then this is the episode for you, because we are talking about what chords you should learn in what order as a songwriter. Let's talk about it. (upbeat music) Hello, friend. Welcome to another episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Joseph Adala. I honor that you'll take some time out of your busy day and be here with me talking about songwriting. You could be listening to any podcast right now, which I probably shouldn't remind you of, like Rogan or whatever your favorite podcast is. But instead, you are here wanting to learn about songwriting. And hey, I get it, but I also appreciate it, because there's a lot of entertaining podcasts out there. And the fact that you are choosing one where you would learn something about songwriting, about the craft of songwriting, I'm glad you care enough about the craft of songwriting to, well, be listening to any songwriting podcast much more even so that you chose this one. I was about to say much less this one, but that wouldn't make sense, now would it? If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free Keys Cheat Sheet, a lot of what we're talking about today with chords. There's gonna be my first point before we dive into the chords, but you have to understand the chords within the context of keys. Because as long as your understanding is just, oh, G major to C major sounds good with quotation marks around it, for those of you who aren't watching the video, you're just, you're not really gonna understand chords. The only context where chords have any meaning at all, in chord progressions have any meaning, is within the context of keys. So a C major chord in the key of C major has a totally different sound and a totally different job than a C major chord in the key of G major. Because in C major, a C major chord is a one chord. In G major, it's a four chord, which sounds different. So context matters. So it's really important to understand that, again, that you don't wanna learn super complex theory. So I made it super easy. This Keys Cheat Sheet just breaks down every single one of the main triads, AKA main, major, and minor, as well as diminished chords in every single key. So no matter what your favorite keys are, it will give you exactly all the notes in the keys, which will help you with melody writing and making your own chords, but also all of the main triads, all the main, major, and minor chords. So that's at songwritertheory.com slash keys. Super easy to remember. Link will be in the description down below or in the show notes, depending on whether you are listening via podcast or watching on YouTube. So we're gonna dive into the chords that you should learn in what order. But again, just to reiterate, it's really important to understand chords in context of keys. Yes, you need to know the notes within C major. Let's say you're playing on a keyboard or a piano. Of course, it's important to know, oh, C major is C, E, and G. Yes, great. But the most important way to understand chords as a songwriter is not just C major and G major, and, you know, oh, it's a common chord progression to have a C major, G major, A minor, F major. Yes, that's true, but it's not just that chord progression. Really that chord progression is a 1, 5, 6, 4, and you just happen to say what a 1, 5, 6, 4 chord progression is in the context of C major. So the chord progression G major, D major, E minor, C major is actually the exact same chord progression as C major, G major, A minor, and F major, just for frame of reference, here's your, let me find my pedal here. Here's your C major, G major, A minor, F major, and then if we have instead the G major version of it, so that was a 1, 5, 6, 4 in C major, and then if we have it in G major, then we would have this. (drumming) So that would be the same exact chord progression, and you probably can hear that. It's just in a different key, right, but the chord progression sounds the same. So it's most important to understand chords in that context. In this episode, we're going to be talking about things like major and minor chords, inversions and things like that, but that is only gonna be helpful, or is mostly gonna be helpful if first you understand that just getting an understanding of that Roman numeral notation for chords, and knowing that a C major chord in the context of G major is the same as a D major chord in the context of A major, because they're both four chords in that context, that that's the most important way to understand chords. Because as a songwriter, you need to know that if you're writing a song in G major, a C major to G major chord transition is gonna sound very different than even what it would sound like in the context of a song in C major. Same exact chords, but it's gonna sound different because of the context. So that being said, let's talk about the specific chords to learn in what order. And the first chords to learn are major and minor triads. And that's because no matter what the genre, key, style, whatever it is, major and minor chords are foundational. They're foundational to everything. I don't care what music you listen to, major and minor triads are at the foundation of it. And you may have noticed that I just, I believe, interchanged between using major and minor triad and major and minor chord. And that's because it's the exact same thing. So a chord is really just any combination of two or more notes. So a chord could be this, even though it's just two notes, or a chord could be this, which is four notes, or this, which is five notes. All of those are chords. A triad is a specific type of chord. And by the way, is the most foundational type of chord there is. In fact, all major and minor chords, as well as diminished chords and augmented chords, are triads. There's no such thing as a C major chord or G major. There's no such thing as a major or minor chord that is not a triad. And all a triad is, is a chord that's made up of specifically three notes, and they are stacked in thirds. It's not super important that you understand what thirds are for most of this episode, but we'll go over it really quick. So a first or unison is just the same note. So C to C would be a first or unison. C to D would be a second. C going past D to E would be a third. So basically, if you just include the note that you're starting on as the one, you just move up more notes. So a third is not moving up once to a second, but moving up again to a third. So a triad is a chord that is made up of three notes stacked in thirds. So let's take a C major triad as an easy example of this. So a C major triad starts with a C. That's why it's called C major, because that's the root of the chord. So then we have a third on top of that. So we skip over the D and go to an E. So the first two notes of a C major chord are C, skipping over D, and then E. And then we skip over F and go to G for another third, a third on top of that E, because a second on top of E would be the F. A third is going up to the G. So C, E, G. That's your C major chord. And that is basically how you build all major and minor triads, because, well, they're triads, also augmented and diminished would also be made in that same way. Now, the only difference is that a major triad has a major third, and a minor triad has a minor third. The only difference there is a major third is four semitones up. So we have C, C sharp, D, D sharp, and then E. All right, so one, two, three, four, four semitones up. And then if we just go three semitones up instead, that's where you get minor. That's the only difference. Major chord has a major third between the root and the third. Minor has a minor third in between the root and the third. And going with my initial point about understanding chords in context of keys is going to be most important. What's important to know, I think, is that in any key, any major key, any major key, you're going to have chords built off of all the scale degrees. So we'll stick with C major to keep it really simple. So C major is made up of seven notes, just like every other major and minor key. So we have C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. No sharps or flats. This is why it's a super common key because it's super easy. So each of those seven were called scale degrees, C being the first, D being the second, E being third, F4, G5, A6, and B7. Each of those scale degrees, we can build a triad off of those scale degrees. And those are foundational chords. And in every major key, the triad built off of the first, fourth, and fifth scale degrees are all major triads or major chords. So in C major, the one is C, so we have a major chord built off of that. The four is an F because C, one, D, two, E, three, F is four, so we have an F major chord in C major. And then if F is the four, we know G is the five, fifth scale degree. And the five chord is also in every major key going to be a major chord. And then the two, three, and six in any major key are going to be minor triads. So in the context of C major, we know that our two is D because C, one, D, two is going to be minor. And then if D is two, we know E is three, so we have an E minor. And then six is going to be A, so we have an A minor. And then the chord built off of the seventh scale degree is a diminished chord, which is not as useful as major and minor chords, or at least not as important. In fact, in this video where I'm breaking down what chords to learn in what order, we're not even going to talk about diminished chords because I think they are, they can be useful, but they're not as useful as the other chords that we're going to talk about, in my opinion. So the important thing to understand is in any major key, if you lay out the notes in order, starting with the name of your key, so let's take G major, your one would be G and G major, your one would be A and A major, F and F major, etc. And then you just lay out all the notes in that scale or in that key and assign them numbers. The triads that you have built off of the first, fourth and fifth scale degree in every major key is going to be major. And two, three and six is going to be minor. So if we do the same thing in G major, we have a G major chord, one, an A minor chord, two because we said two is always minor. And then, oops, that's diminished. And then we have a B minor chord off of the three because every time a three is going to be minor. And then we have C major and D major because four and five are always going to be major. And then E minor, and then we're going to have an F sharp diminished as a seven. This is going to be true in literally every major or minor key. So once you know your key, you know that, okay, what's built off the one, four and five is going to be major. And those are going to be my foundational chords. And then the two, three and six are going to be minor. And those are also very, very, very important chords. For the record, six is maybe most important because it's certainly the most used of the minor chords by a pretty wide margin. If you look at how popular chords are, the one, four and five are the most used. They're just used constantly. Probably rarely would you even write a song where you're not using the one, four and the five. The six is by far the most common minor chord. The two is the second most common. And then the three is the forgotten minor chord that is not used nearly enough because I love three chords. I think they're beautiful. Like if you have a one and then a five and then you go, this is something about that three to four that just, I love that. But anyway, my personal opinions aside, major and minor triads. First thing to learn. First thing to make sure you know. They're foundational chords. They're foundational to every key, especially major and minor keys, which, you know, that's every key basically. They're even foundational to modes, by the way. So even when we're in major and minor modes, rather than just a regular major and natural minor key, they're still foundational. No matter what the music is, they are foundational. So having a firm grasp of major and minor triads, the difference between them, where they occur in the context of your key is all going to be very important. Which also, by the way, just really quickly. In natural minor, the one, four and five, if the one, four and five were major in major keys, what do you think the one, four and five are in minor keys? Natural minor specifically. If you said minor, you'd be correct. And then the seven, the three and the six are going to be major in the context of natural minor. So let's take A minor, for instance. We're going to have a C major and we're going to have an F major and a G major, which is going to be our three, six and seven in the context of A minor. And then your two chords are going to be diminished. So in major keys, one, four and five are major. In minor keys, natural minor specifically, one, four and five are going to be minor. And the only difference is with major, the diminished is at seven and with minor, it's at two. But otherwise, if you take the other ones, two, three and six, those are going to be minor when it comes to major keys. And in minor keys, the three, six and seven are going to be major. And then the two is diminished instead. So it's a little swap there. Now for the most part, the most important thing to remember is one, four and five and any natural minor key is going to be minor and in any major key is going to be major. Enough about that. Let's talk about step two. So now you have a pretty firm grasp of your major and minor chords. Great. Foundational tom music. Next thing is inversions. And you may say, "Joseph, that's cheating. That's technically the same chords because inversions are just basically a different way to play a chord." And that's true. Or maybe you're not saying that because you don't know what inversions are. But if you would say that, that is true. But I think it's a mistake to just right away skip to other chord types because inversions can have a massive sound difference while technically being the same as a basic major or minor triad. So if you don't know what an inversion is, it basically is just having any chord, any chord at all. But we'll start with major or minor here because at this point theoretically all you know is you've listened to me, you've gone out, you've made sure you really understand major and minor chords. So you're like, "All right, what did he tell me to learn next?" So now we're on inversions. So we're going to concentrate on inversions in the context of major and minor triads. So all it is is having a different note other than the root note. That is the lowest note. Now when we say lowest note, what the heck does that mean? You can see it multiple different ways. If we're just playing piano, it would just be the lowest note I'm playing on the piano. So a C major chord with Cs in the bass is just a root position C major chord. It's the default way to play C major, is to have C in the bass. And the root, by the way, is just always going to be the note that the chord is named after. So the root of D major is D. The root of D minor is D. The root of E major is E. E minor is E. You get it. So you probably got it the first time, but we'll make sure. So C major chord, by default you would have a C in the bass, which also means by default, let's say you're a guitarist, you probably would be playing a C major chord and your bass guitarist would be playing a C, by default. An inversion would be, instead of having a C major chord with a C in the bass, we have a C major with an E in the bass, would be first inversion, because that's another note from the chord. It's an E, which is in our C major chord. It's just the third instead of the first. Or a C major chord with a G in the bass, because that's also a note from our chord, other than the root. That's the fifth of our chord. So back to if you're a guitarist, in this case this might be something like you're playing a C major chord and your bass guitarist is playing a C, versus you're playing a C major chord but your bass guitarist is playing an E, or you're playing a C major chord and your bass guitarist is playing a G. As you can tell probably, those all sound pretty different considering it's technically the same chord. In fact, I talked about this in a livestream fairly recently, but as I've thought about it more, I think I agree with what I said more, which is I think the bass note is disproportionately important to the sound of a chord. Disproportionately important. If there's one note in your chord that matters most for what the chord overall sounds like, I think is the bass note, by a wide margin. Second most important is maybe the, what are the highest note is, but certainly the most important is the bass note. So for instance, here's a C major chord, here's a C major first inversion, so it's a C major with an E in the bass, and here's an E minor chord. I don't know, to me, this, technically this is a C major chord, but does it sound more similar to this, or does it sound more similar to this? I don't know, I think it's maybe in between, and yet technically it just is a C major chord, but because of that all important low note, it kind of has a vibe, like it's an E minor chord, even though really it's not. So it's technically major, but it kind of has that minor three sound a little bit. But anyway, whether you agree with me or not, that it's disproportionately important to the sound of a chord, certainly I'm sure to you ears, you hear that this does not sound like the same chord as this, or as this. It is the same chord, but it does have a different sound, it just doesn't have the same character. So if you learn inversions, which is really just an extension of major and minor triads or any other type of chord, it's just understanding that changing the lowest note that you play and considering using something other than the root makes a big difference in the sound of the chord, you've effectively tripled how many chords you can play. Let's say that we're only using major and minor triads in the context of C major. So we have six different chords, right? Three major and three minor. If we had inversions, instead of just C major, we get C major root position, C major first inversion, C major second inversion, and that's the same with D minor and then E minor. So we have immediately tripled how many chords we know how to play. While technically not actually increasing the amount of chords we can play at all. But from a songwriting perspective and giving your song a sound, there's no question that inversions significantly change how a chord sounds, even though it is the same chord. So this is the next thing to learn. Inversions and really starting to integrate inversions into your song. So if you were to do this while you're songwriting, which is what I'd encourage you to do, you know, in your first song that you write after this podcast, concentrate on making sure you're writing using major and minor triads. You probably already do that, but maybe you're new to songwriting, so use just major and minor triads. By the way, a ton of songs use exclusively major and minor triads. Like a ton of songs don't use anything but major and minor chords. Tons. I might go so far as to say most. If you listen to pop music, then probably most. If you listen to all kinds of different music, that's where it's like maybe not most, but a lot of songs literally use nothing else but major and minor. And that inversions is already going to get you a ton more for a sound color palette, if you will, or a sound palette, however you want to look at that. So third thing to learn is actually a different type of chord, and that's a suspended chord. Now, a suspended chord is just taking any major or minor chord, remove the third, and then add a second or fourth. So we'll use C major again. C major chord has a C, an E, and a G. For a suspended chord, aka a sus chord, we just said that you remove the third and insert a second or fourth. So the third of a C major chord is not the C, that's the first. The third is the E, and then the fifth is the G. So we remove the E, and then we insert either a D, which is a second because C, D, or an F, which is a fourth because C, D, E, F. So if this is a C major chord, this would be what's called a C sus2 chord because we are suspending the third or we're getting rid of the third, and instead we have a 2, a second instead. So we have C, D, and G instead of C, E, and G sus2. And then sus4 is the one that takes the third out, the E, and adds the 4 instead, which is an F in this context. So that would be a C sus4. For those of you who maybe play music and you're used to reading chord sheets and stuff, and you're like, "Joseph, sometimes I just see C sus or G sus." Whenever you see just sus, that implies a sus4. This is a common theme in music. It's kind of like if you see a C chord, you know that you default to C major because it would explicitly tell you if it were minor, and that's because major chords are more common than minor chords. So, I don't know, laziness? Or I guess you could see it as it's a good way to reduce the amount of characters you have to read. When you just see C, you know, okay, C major is the default. It would tell me if it was specifically minor or sus or whatever. So in the same way, sus4 chords are way more common than sus2 chords, so by default if you see C sus, it means C sus4. Same with any other sus chord. That part doesn't really matter as songwriters unless you're writing chord sheets for other people to play your music, in which case, you're welcome, I guess. So take a major or minor chord. This would work with like an A minor chord. You can have an A sus chord, A minor sus chord, I guess. Although really, for the record, it's not a minor sus chord because you don't know whether it's major or minor. This could be an A major sus chord or an A minor sus chord. You don't know because it doesn't have a third. An A major chord has a C sharp and E, and back to what we said about major and minor triads. You just flat the third or see in another way you have a minor third instead of a major third. So flatting the third means take that third and just go down by one note, which if you're a guitarist means one fret. Go down one fret with that note. So an A major chord has a C sharp. A minor chord, the only difference is it has a C natural. When we have an A sus chord, we don't have either one. So it's actually vague whether it's major or minor, which by the way is a beauty of a sus chord. If you want to have a chord that sounds more vague and it's not minor and sounding more sad as minor usually does, or maybe dark, or you don't want as bright as major often sounds, a sus chord can be a great way to go. It's kind of more vague, more nebulous, which you can use to your advantage, especially if you want to essentially have, let's say, a three chord, but you don't really want it to be that minor. So you want to go from a C major chord to an F major chord, and then maybe you want to go to, let's say, a D chord, but you don't want it to be minor as it would be in C major by default. So you go C, F, and then you go to D sus. So now it's vague. We don't know if it's supposed to be minor or major because we just don't have a third at all, which is a great way to use suspended chords, by the way. And also, going back to the keys cheat sheet that I mentioned, another reason that I give you all the notes in every chord or in every key is because it's important to know that because otherwise you wouldn't know when we add the two or the four what note exactly because you could say, well, Joseph, for a C major sus two, how do I know if I'm adding a D flat or a D sharp or D natural? Well, how you know is in the context of C major, there is no D flat or D sharp. It's a D natural. So you would add a D natural. So and this is why, one of the many reasons why it's important to understand chords in context of keys. The chords you have in any key by default are going to be chords that only use the notes that are notes in that key, which is the same as a scale, by the way. So like C major scale and C major key, it's all the same notes. Just a scale implies that you're going up and doing a scale, whereas a key isn't talking about that. It's more concerned with the musical center of gravity, because made up of the same notes. D minor scale, D minor key, A minor, A minor, all the same. So those are suspended chords, which is the next thing I think is good to learn. And then finally, we're going to put two together with this one, because one of these chords I see as sort of a special type of the other one. And that's seventh chords and add chords. Really seventh chords are essentially a special type of add chord, but let's talk about what an add chord is. So an add chord is literally taking a chord and then adding another note to it. That's it. So if we want a C major chord, add four, that would be this. Or a C major chord with an add two, that would be this, because we have our C major notes, but we also add the two. By the way, this normally would be called a C add nine, which is probably how you've seen it written. For whatever reason, the music world decided to do the octave up version. So C add nine is the same as an add two. C add eleven is the same as an add four. C add thirteen is the same as an add six, etc. And then we have seventh chords. Seventh chords are add chords, but specifically that add is seventh. Now also I guess technically seventh chords are special because it has to be a major or minor or diminished triad that adds a seventh. So going to our major, our C major chord, C major is three notes stacked in thirds as all triads are. A seventh chord would be yet another note added to the top. That is another third. So we have C to E as a third, E to G as a third, and G to B as a third. Put those all together and you have a C major seventh chord. Now the notes don't have to be in that order, right? We could play it like this. In fact, very often when we have seventh chords it's not played like this. Very often it's played in different inversions. But that's all seventh chord is. Take major, minor, or diminished triad and just stack yet another third on top. Doesn't matter the order of the notes, but it is important that it is that seventh that you're adding. Wherever it's actually played, so this is the same, right? So I put the E at the bottom or E at the top. And then add chords can be any chord that you're just adding another note. An add is like a catch all. So if you just want a chord that is a C, a G, and an A, that would be a C5 add 6 chord. Why? Because it's a C5 chord. 5, the number 5, not Roman numeral 5. C5 is basically a power chord if you will, but it's just the first and the fifth. It is not major or minor because it doesn't have the third. So it's just C and then a fifth up, G, and then we're adding an A. So this would be a C5 add 6 chord, whereas it often would be denoted a C5 add 13 chord. We can do this with anything. Whatever chord you have, you could even have a C major seventh chord add 6. Because it's a seventh chord and then you add the sixth. Or C major seventh chord add 2. It's starting to be a lot of notes to play at once. But add chords are an important thing because you would be shocked. Or maybe you wouldn't because we just did some. But tiny changes to chords, tiny changes, whether it be a major versus a suspended chord, radically different sound. We talked about how just changing the inversion radically changes the sound. Maybe radically is the wrong term, but it certainly makes a significant change. You can hear the difference. They don't sound the same and they just sound different in context of a song. You can't just...like a song would change its sound if you decided, "Oh, I'm just going to do totally different inversions than the song normally would have." Or "I'm just going to replace every C major chord with a C sus chord." You can't do that without the sound of the song changing. A little bit goes a long way in music. So in the same way with an add chord, just adding one note goes a long way. If you have a super simple chord progression, let's say a 1, 4, 5, 4, you'd be surprised how big of a difference just changing one of those to maybe an add chord could make. So 1, 4, let's do...this would be, let's see, an add 4. So this is a G major chord with an added 4 because we have a C added. And then back to an F. Like, that's one note, but this versus...what I do? Like already makes a decent difference because we have this one chord that's actually kind of interesting. It's got a little dissonance going on. Whereas before we just had all just super major kind of happy sounding chords. So just swapping out one chord for an add chord or a seventh chord can go a long way or swapping out one chord for a suspended chord or an inversion. So don't go too crazy with any of these. In fact, I would recommend if you're writing a song, do something where it's like, okay, your first song, major or minor triads, great. Your second song, maybe to one chord progression in your song, have one inversion of a major or minor chord. Or maybe two. Or maybe in each song section, you have one chord where you figure out an inversion that you really like. And then in your next song, have one chord in one progression that is a sus chord. Find one place to use a sus chord. And then in your next one, find one place to have an add chord. Don't feel the need to make every single chord in a progression like a major seventh with an add 13 and an add 9, which by the way, you can add multiple notes. So you can have add 9, add 13, you can have stuff like that too. But don't go over the top. You can just know that a little bit goes a long way. So again, hopefully this was helpful to you. This is the order that if I were to go back to basics, if I had to learn from the beginning, from a songwriter's perspective, what chords I would learn in what order, because how important I think each one is. Start with major and minor. Once you have that down, inversions, learning inversions, which again applies to any type of chord, not just major and minor, but it's a great way to get a lot of use out of your major and minor chords without having to learn a new chord type yet. Add chords, which adds a lot, gives you that little dissonance that you don't really get from major or minor. You get more dissonance from minor, obviously, than major. And then seventh chords and the more generic type, which is add chords, which is sort of almost a coverall. I mean, almost any chord can be a sort of add chord. And there's almost infinite number of chords. Once you add add chords, there's like infinite possibilities. For a C major, there's C major, add 9, aka add 2. You could have an add 9, add 11, which would just be all that. That's a little gnarly. Maybe you'd want to play it not quite that way. But alas. So hopefully this has helped you. If it was, or if you found yourself lost when it came to certain things like, oh, well, he just was like, oh, a G major has G, A, B, C, D, F sharp. And he just knew, how do you know that? How do I know that? Do I need to memorize that? You should memorize it probably if you're going to write a lot of songs in the key of G major. But to start, a great place to start is my free keys cheat sheet. Because again, it's just going to give you every single major and natural minor key. It will give you all of the major, minor, and diminished triads that you have in each of them. And it will give you all the notes you have in each of them, which are going to help you make your own add chords or sus chords. Because you can look and see, oh, in G major, I have an A minor chord, and I have the notes B and D. So I know that if I do an, what would have been an A minor chord, but I do a sus two, it's going to be a B, E. If I do a sus four, it's going to be a D and E. And then you also know things like if you're going to do an A minor chord, again, in the context of G major, and you're going to make it a seventh chord, you know it's a G natural, not a G sharp, not a G flat. Because again, in the context of G major, there's a G, which you're going to know because I give you all the notes. And again, I kind of glossed over this, but I do think it's something that's good to memorize eventually, especially if you're going to be songwriting a lot. Because if I just want to improvise and I'm trying to songwrite, what's useful to me is not that I think through what are the notes in E major again, I just know the notes in E major and just can play them. And I don't have to think about it. In fact, it's easier, it's probably faster for me to just play in E major without consciously thinking about which notes I'm sharping and all that than it is to just play. I think I said that right. It's slower to actually think of the notes than it is to just play because it's ingrained. So be sure to grab my free keys cheat sheet because it will give you all of the answers. You can go out, write a song in G major, A major, A minor, B flat major, E flat major, whatever keys you like to use. And you will immediately know all the main triads that you have or all the triads you have because there's only seven in any given major or minor key. And then also all the notes you have, which are going to help you with things like building sus chords off of your chords or add chords, seventh chords, and also in versions. Thank you again for listening. I appreciate every single one of you. If you haven't already, if you're somebody that has been here for a while and you get value out of this podcast, something you can do to help me out is leave a kind review on Apple Podcast or Spotify wherever you listen. I know I don't say this a lot. You're probably supposed to say it every episode. I probably should say it every episode because it probably would be more reviews, which I think there are a decent amount of reviews. I appreciate those of you who have done this. But again, a great way that you can help out if you've gotten a lot of value from this episode or other episodes, even if you thought this episode was worthless, but hey, he helped me the last three episodes, which is why I listen to this episode. If any of those descriptions are you, great way to help me out is just take the couple minutes to leave. If you think I deserve it, a five star review and whatever suits your fancy to say in the review, or you can just leave the stars and not actually leave a text review if you want to make it really, really, really fast. If you feel like I don't deserve five stars, just let me know how I can improve. My email is joseph at songwritertheory.com. I would much rather, much rather if you think that there's something to improve, you think like, oh, this is like a three and a half stars, this is four stars. It would be better if you tell me how to improve that so I can earn five stars from you rather than tank in the rating so that other people don't give this episode a shot. So again, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for those of you who have left reviews, and I'll talk to you in the next one.

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

Transcript:

Something I think songwriters don't talk about enough are songwriting sessions, because not every songwriting session looks the same or should look the same. In fact, I think there are a lot of different types of songwriting sessions, and most of the time a successful songwriting session is one with a pretty specific goal, not just something like, "I'm going to work on song X." I don't think that is specific enough. So in this episode of the Songwriting Theory Podcast, we are going to talk about five different songwriting sessions that will change everything. Let's talk about it.

Hello, friend. Welcome to another episode of the Songwriting Theory Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Joseph Adala. I'm honored that you take some time out of your busy day, your busy week, to talk songwriting with me. It's coming out a bit later than usual, but I was sick with the flu for a week, so that's why this got delayed. And my apologies in advance for any coughing. I will be sure to try to do it not into the mic or anything, but still recovering from that. If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide, "20 Different Ways to Start Writing a Song," because a great way to make sure you don't get creatively stuck is simply by starting in different spots, starting with different things, not always starting with a chord progression, not always starting with a bass line, not always starting with lyrics, not always starting with music. Sometimes changing it up is a great way to stay creatively fresh and get some different results with your songs. There's something I don't talk about probably as much as I should, but these aren't just 20 ways to start a song, but they can be 20 different ways to start any given song section. So if you wrote your first verse, and that first verse is built off of a sweet bass line, that's how you started your song, and now you're sort of stuck on the chorus, or you're trying to figure out where the chorus needs to go, you can again go to 20 different ways to start writing a song, but in this case you're actually starting a song section, because just because you started the verse with the bass line doesn't mean that you can't start your chorus with something different, like your melody or with the piano riff or something else.

So let's talk about these five different song... so be sure to check that out. It's at songwritingtheory.com slash free guide. So let's talk about these different songwriting sessions. We'll start with the beginning, and that is simply an idea gathering session. And the beauty of these is, first of all, they're fun, and it's just a great way to get really excited about songwriting. If you're stuck on songs, just going back to basics and sitting down with only the intent of gathering ideas. There's something beautiful about the lack of pressure that you have when you know that you are sitting down just to come up with ideas. You don't need to care whether they're good ideas, you're just trying to get as many ideas as possible. And also the lack of pressure that you know you're not trying to come up with an idea so that you can write a song 10 minutes later off of that idea. It just frees you up to think of more ideas, to possibly think outside the box a little bit more.

So be sure to check that out at songwritingtheory.com slash free guide. So let's dive into the songwriting sessions that we are talking about. The first one is right at the beginning. It's an idea gathering songwriting session. And you can even argue this isn't really even a songwriting session because it's sort of a pre-songwriting session or as sometimes I like to think of it a song developing session.

And really that wording comes from a lot of times in movies they'll say like a movie is in development and what that means, what that usually refers to is the process before you actually start making the movie in the way that most of us think of making a movie. So principal photography is when they actually start to film the movie. It's really getting made. But development is sort of that stage where they're kicking around ideas, they're trying to figure out maybe casting, they're trying to figure out what's the right budget for this movie, is this something that we can do with the budget that we have, all those sorts of things. It's really the pre-movie making stage if you will. So in the same way there's no reason that we as songwriters can't have essentially a pre-songwriting stage. In fact I think it's a great idea. Authors do the same thing. Most of the time an author doesn't just sit and start writing a book. Some do, but a lot plan beforehand. They'll do exercises to really flesh out their characters and make sure they understand their characters before they start writing for them. They don't discover their characters as they write the book. They already know their characters before they write the book.

Or they know the general plot points. They try to outline the book, make sure that the story arc makes sense and it resonates with the characters and it makes sense. All the characters' decisions make sense before you actually put the proverbial pen to paper.

So this is something that I think we should do more often in songwriting. I don't think we need to do as much of it because a book is a pretty big endeavor. There's a lot when it comes to characters and story. And songs have less. So there's no reason to spend months developing a song before you actually write it in the way that maybe it does make sense to do for a book. But there's something glorious just about having no pressure to come up with a song idea and immediately execute on it. There's something just great about that. Because in an idea gathering songwriting session, you're not actually trying to write a song. You're really not even trying to figure out what is a good idea for a song. You are simply, you have one job, gather ideas. You're not worried about whether the ideas are rotten or great. You're not worried about anything like that.

That's for later in the process. For now, you just want to go find ideas and find as many ideas as you can. And really we're trying to maximize the pool of ideas we have that we actually go execute on. Because I think another mistake that is pretty common to songwriters is really, I could call it just impatience. I think impatience is something that negatively affects many songwriters where they're too impatient to actually edit lyrics. They're too impatient to actually craft a song. They just want to get a song done so every song takes an hour. And it's like, well, I can tell. It's not that you can't write a great song in an hour. Of course you can. But just like a book, can you write a book in a month? Yeah. But on average, if you took a million authors and said, okay, write a book in a month, and took those same million authors and said, okay, now write a book in a year, of course on average the yearbooks are going to be way better. That's why authors take a year to write a book. Right? You know, this is the whole process, not just the writing part, editing, all that sort of thing. But usually it's, you know, an author comes out with a book something like once every six months if they're pretty fast, or a year on this lower side.

And I think sometimes songwriters struggle with impatience. Whether impatient to start writing a song, they're impatient to finish a song, they're impatient to just, you know, put out there whether the lyrics make sense or not, whether the lyrics are really something powerful or not. They're just like, oh, it's done. It's done.

We think too improvisationally, I think, sometimes when it comes to songwriting, which we'll talk about a little bit more for songwriting session too. But a part of the beauty of this is it forces us to come up with more ideas, and then we can choose the best ideas for ourselves.

Because the pressure of I'm going to come up with a great idea and immediately execute on it, probably the idea sucks. Right? If you and I, right now, were to try to think through a song idea, and we were to go write a song off of the first idea that we have that's halfway decent, by tomorrow we might think that was a stupid idea. Why do we even make a song off of that? But when you have a giant pool of ideas, it allows you to pull from the best ideas you have, and it also allows you to pull from the ideas that most resonate with you at the moment. Because, you know, if you got laid off two months ago and you were ticked at your boss because you feel like you were not the right person to get laid off, blah blah blah, so you're ticked about it, now two months later when you have a better job and maybe you're not bitter about it anymore, maybe right now is not the time to write that song. Right? Maybe in two months when you have a new boss and they're kind of annoying you too or something, then maybe that brings back the emotions that you had when you were laid off and maybe now that's the time to write the song. So there's an element of that too, right? Where some nights or some days writing a sweet love song might be something that makes sense based on how you're feeling. In other days you couldn't do that if you tried, but you can write a bitter angry song. So when you have a giant pool of ideas to work off of, it allows you the luxury of sort of working on a song that best fits where you are at right now mentally, emotionally, etc. and it also allows you to be more picky, where if you have 30 ideas and you're only writing one song off of one of those ideas, you get to pick the best idea of 30, which is probably a much better idea than just coming up with an idea and immediately executing on it, because now it's one of one idea. That idea might have sucked. You might have just written a whole song in an hour or something that already you wrote a song in an hour, so on average they're probably not going to be that great, it's probably going to need a little more crafting after the fact.

And you might have built it on an idea that wasn't even a good idea to begin with, which you can still have great songs off of not great ideas. I think ideas are somewhat overrated to a degree, but ideally if you're going to spend time writing a song, don't you want it to be on some of your best ideas? And a great way to have best ideas is to have a long list of ideas. In fact, again this goes back to a mistake that I think a lot of songwriters make. Our ideas should far outpace our songs. Far outpace. You might have something like 20 ideas for every one song you write, or 10 ideas for every one song you write, at least. At least, because if you sit down to just come up with ideas for 15 minutes, 15 minutes, you probably have 25 plus ideas.

Easily. You might even have more. Maybe you only have five ideas. Okay, that still is at a rate of 20 ideas in an hour. And what are you going to do? Release any more than 20 songs in a year? So if you take an hour, have one idea gathering session for one hour, you have enough song ideas if you used every single one for the whole year.

So no matter how you look at it, it just seems silly to ever be in a situation where you came up with 20 song ideas this year, and all 20 of those ideas turned into songs. Why? There's no reason for it. Just spend an extra three, four hours just gathering ideas, and you might have 20 better ideas to then build 20 songs off of.

And for the most part here, we're talking about lyrical ideas. And there are many great ways to gather lyrical ideas. One is just sit with a pen and paper and just write down anything that comes to mind. A cool word, a song title that you think would be interesting, a piece of symbolism that resonates with you. You might not even know what it means yet. But you're just like, "Ooh, Shadow of the Tiger. That sounds cool." I don't know what it would mean, but it sounds cool. So write it down. You can figure out later if it has a sensical meaning, if it's worth actually developing further. You don't have to worry about that part here. Turn off that editor portion of your brain. Turn off that portion of your brain that says, "That's a bad idea. You suck." Turn that part of your brain off as much as you can, because it's not helpful to this. And that's the glory of this song-ending session. It's very clear about just produce as many ideas as possible. Turn the editor off.

Your job is not even to find a good idea. It's just to gather ideas as quickly as you can and as many as you can.

Something else you can do is look up, like Google Images, look up art. Go to an art museum. If you're somebody that really, you know, computer screens hinder your creativity, go to a local art museum. Take a pen and paper and decide that you're going to go to the art museum, maybe with your spouse, significant other kids, whatever.

And you're going to bring a pen and paper. And you're going to write every little idea that you get by going to the art museum. That can be a great way to go. And that might be enough ideas. Going to the art museum once might provide enough ideas for songs for the next three years.

Right? So, just taking the time to have an idea-gathering song-writing session, I think, is a great way to go. You almost certainly won't regret it. And they're just a lot of fun.

And then, sort of the other side of the coin is an improvisation song-writing session.

And if idea-gathering tends to be more on the lyrical side of things, improvisation is sort of the equivalent on the musical side of things. So this is where we are just trying to get in our instrumentalist mindset and just kind of try to create magic by just going. Just play. Just play until you find that guitar riff that resonates with you. Just play on the piano until you hit three notes in a row that's like, "Ooh, that's the start of a magical melody that resonates with me." Or just sing or hum randomly in the shower or anywhere else in the car.

And in that moment where you're like, "Ooh, I kind of got goosebumps from that melody I just made up."

That's your hint. That's something that's worth developing further into a song. So this is essentially doing the same thing, gathering ideas, but instead these are musical ideas.

And it's a great no-pressure way or low-pressure way to start writing interesting music because interesting music is less likely to come from picking a stock chord progression and going from there.

And we've talked a lot about stock chord progressions because I think two things can be true at once. It can be true that it's the easiest way to write a song, especially for beginners, especially for people who don't know any music theory.

But it's also true that as you develop as a songwriter, it is no longer the best way to write a song. If I were to help somebody write their first song, and I've done videos and podcasts about this, it is probably best for your first song to write with a stock chord progression. But if you're on song 2030 and you're still just using stock chord progressions, you are massively missing out because we're choosing to build our song on a, by definition, cookie cutter foundation. Why would you do that? It's essentially like saying, "I'm going to build my whole book off of I'm just going to do the hero's journey." Like, the hero's journey is by definition cookie cutter. That doesn't mean you can't make something magical off of it. The original Star Wars trilogy is great, fantastic, and it's off of the hero's journey. Now also it benefits from at the time most movies and stuff weren't built off of that. So now it would feel a little like, "Okay, here we go again." Whereas when Star Wars did it, whenever you're the first, you kind of have the advantage of... It's like if somebody sounded exactly like The Beatles today, you'd be like, "Oh, so derivative." Meanwhile, the same person is like, "The Beatles are the codes." So that's the glory of being first as you get credit that maybe sometimes you don't deserve.

Or you do deserve because you were the first. But anyway, by definition, if you start your song on a stock, well-used, overused chord progression, you are building your song off of something that is by definition uninteresting.

Because uninteresting is almost, when it comes to creative, is something that's just not different. It's the same old, same old. We've all heard it a million times before. If you start with the same stock characters for a movie, why would you do that? You should build your movie off of a cool, different, likable character.

Or you should build it off of... Be like Christopher Nolan. Build your movie off of a really cool concept like entering people's dreams for inception.

Or the Prestige, which is a cool concept with magicians back in the 1800s or something.

But why build your song off of a cookie cutter foundation when you can build it off of not a cookie cutter foundation?

And that's what improvisation gets us. Instead of building your song now off of, "Oh, I guess I'll use the 1-5-6-4, the 1-4-5-4." Instead of that, you're playing on your instrument or using your voice to try to find some magic that then you can build your song off of. That way, if you come up with a sweet bass line, now you're building your song off of a foundation that is already interesting.

Unlike the chord progression, which probably isn't interesting, now you have this really sweet bass line that, because you improvised for an hour, you've got this awesome bass line. And that can be maybe the bass line for your verse or maybe for your chorus. And now you can build a melody on top of that and then figure out the chords from there and write the lyrics and do the rest of the normal songwriting process. But at least now you've built it on an intriguing foundation. You've built your song off of a good idea instead of a, by definition, cookie cutter idea.

And also, improvisation is just fun.

To me, if you don't enjoy the process of gathering ideas, whether musically or lyrically, then you probably are not going to enjoy songwriting because this is like the most fun portion. This is where there's the least struggle. Because an improvisation songwriting session is sit down for half an hour and just play on your instrument. See if you can find something super cool. There's nothing really to get frustrated about.

You probably will get at least a few decent ideas. Maybe you won't find a magical idea per se, but it probably will still feel like, "That was fun. That was a good time."

And just as a last note on this, the beauty of improvisation too is I think it puts music theory and feelings in their proper place when it comes to music, which is largely we should be writing music off of what feels right, but using theory to inform us and to get us there faster.

Because that's essentially those two in their right role. Any time we say that there's some music theory concept or "rule," music theory doesn't really provide rules. It just provides ideas and concepts. But if there's ever a point that we come up with, say, an awesome chord progression or sweet bass line, and then we figure out, "Oh, well, based on some music theory concepts, I probably should..." No, if it sounds great, go with it. Go with the feel when it comes to music.

I think this is maybe an inherent difficulty of songwriting.

And I haven't thought fully through this yet, so I'm not entirely sure if I agree with what I'm about to say. I think when it comes to words, your brain is slightly more useful than your heart, but when it comes to music, it's the opposite.

Because I think trusting your gut, going with the improvised part, or just doing what feels right often is going to result in the best music, which doesn't mean we don't use music theory to inform it. Of course that's going to help.

But ultimately going with your gut, going with the feel.

But I think with lyrics, it tends to be a more... I mean, this is why books... Any form of writing, right? Every form of writer except songwriter acknowledges that the editing process is the most important part when it comes to words. Whether you're writing essays, articles in a newspaper that don't really even exist anymore and suck, but whatever. Back in the day, they were legitimate, I guess.

Whether you're writing a book, a screenplay... Editing is where usually the magic happens. You take something that's kind of a good idea but rough around the edges, not actually good, and you form it into something good in the editing.

And that's true, I think, with lyrics too. So I think a hard part of songwriting is switching our brain back and forth. Because some of the things that will make you strong as a music writer are actually weaknesses as a lyricist, I think, and then vice versa.

So...

Improvisation. Great songwriting session. So we've talked about idea gathering, that's basically lyric ideas and improvisation, which is essentially music ideas. Then we have one hour song drafts, or what I call song sprints. And I've talked about this a decent amount recently, especially if you've been listening to me going through your answers to what your biggest songwriting struggles are. But maybe you may or may not have been keeping up on those, which is totally fine. I don't want to make... I will re-say it here, just in case.

Or if you're new here, you could be new here as well. But I think something that probably every creative person, but certainly songwriters,

need to think about is, where are you on the spectrum of obsessing over quantity versus obsessing over quality? Or seen another way, are you somebody that leans towards, if anything, you are too busy just pumping out song after song to actually take some time to maybe edit the song into something better, or spend more time crafting the song to make it better instead of just moving on to the next song before that song is actually done or ready or actually good? It's like you write it and it's like a five out of ten. And instead of editing it into an eight out of ten or a nine out of ten, you just move on to the next song, which is missed opportunities.

Or are you somebody on the other side of the spectrum where you spend so much time crafting and obsessing over every single piece of a song that you don't actually get songs done?

And probably all of us are going to fall into one of these two camps. And I think regardless of what camp you're in, you need to be cognizant of that and push yourself towards the other camp. Partially because I think probably the best is somewhere in the middle, right? If you tinker too much and you only write two songs a year, that's a problem. If you write 200 songs a year but they're all crap, that's a problem too.

So a song sprint is especially for those of us that lean into the quality element. And if anything, probably need more help getting out of our own heads and just going fast, working on quantity.

If you're somebody that, oh, every song they write takes an hour, then this is not the thing for you. If anything, you need to push in the opposite direction. Because if your average song takes an hour, I'm sorry, you're not spending enough time on a song. You're just not. You're not.

I don't even have a follow up to that.

I think it's self-explanatory, but just as a side story, I have a friend who is a professional songwriter paid by Sony just to write songs. That was literally his old job. And it was a 40 plus hour a week job that it was paid a lot of money in the 80s to do. And the expectation was that he would have one song a week, which if you do basic math means their expectation was something like 40 plus hours on a song.

So if you think one hour is plenty on a song, but Sony thought 40 hours plus on a song, those numbers are wildly different, wildly different. So maybe, maybe one hour is not enough.

Can you write a great song in an hour? Yes, absolutely. You can write a great song in 15 minutes. It's been done before.

That's the exception, not the rule. It's the exception, not the rule. Even if you listen to songwriters, yeah, the most common story they tell is that magical song that came together in 20 minutes because Americans like that crap. We like the success story overnight that conveniently ignores that they worked for it for like 10 years. So it just seemed like an overnight success. We love, we eat up the stories where we can delude ourselves that, oh, just, I don't need to work to earn it. I just magically, there's this moment where I go perform on an open mic and somebody really important is there. So the first open mic I go to, I get discovered, whatever that means. And then it's just easy from there. We love that story, even though it's very much the exception, not the rule. So I think that's why those get told the most. But any songwriter, if you listen to the full story, it's, yeah, most songs, there's a struggle. Sometimes it takes a while of revisiting the song because the lyric just isn't working or I just couldn't figure out the bridge.

And a lot of it is not time necessarily even spent writing as much as it's resting on the idea or tinkering with the idea. There's a bunch of different things that go into it. It's not usually like it took 50 hours of active work finishing a song. It's not necessarily that. Sometimes it's just sitting there and listening to the song and thinking, what is it? What is it about this that isn't resonating with me? What is it about that lyric that makes me cringe? And then figuring out how to rework it. So anyway, so if you're a person that averages one hour song, look, you need to push in the opposite direction. But for those of us that, if anything, are in the other camp, where if anything, we probably spend too much time obsessing over every little detail, a good habit to get into is a song sprint.

Because it forces us to get out of our own hands, trains us to stop overthinking if we are falling into the trap of overthinking.

And also trains us to be biased towards finishing over perfection because perfectionism is a double edged sword like most things. I think you need a little bit of it. Otherwise, your standards are too low. But if you have too much of it, you never get anything done because nothing's ever going to be perfect. So it has value.

I think people who don't have any perfectionism at all and have no artistic standards at all, they just pump out. Like, oh, it took me 20 minutes, pump it out just the way it is. Like, well, you have no standards. You have no artistic standards. And that's fine. But like, I don't know, don't be upset when people are like, yep, that song exists.

That's what's going to happen. Like, on average, a 20 minute song is going to sound like a 20 minute song.

Chocka, I know. It's almost like if you or I wrote a book in two weeks, it probably would look like a book that took two weeks. And books that take a year, on average, are going to look way better. It's almost like there's a reason for that.

It's so weird to me how we know that's true in literally everything, but then deny it when it comes to songwriting. For anything creatively. If somebody built your house in two weeks, you would be like, I'm sorry, I am not entering that house. Explain how you built my whole house in two weeks. If somebody built you a piece of software and it took two weeks, and you're like, I don't know, that's a pretty involved web app. You built that in two weeks? What's the code look like? Is it really buggy and bad?

Something's got to give. We know this for literally everything, except we deny it when it comes to songwriting. But anyway.

Song drafts or song sprints, which to me should result in song drafts, not necessarily finished songs. Now they're finished in the sense that they have all the parts, but most of the time, if you do a song sprint, I think what you will get probably, most of the time, not always, is a finished draft of a song that then you can edit and craft into something better. Maybe the bridge needs to be reworked because the music just wasn't working for the bridge. Or maybe the lyrics need a lot of work is probably most likely to be the case. But at least trains us into being biased towards getting things done. And it also reduces the perceived value of each individual song in a good way, I think. In the same way that we want to do with ideas.

Where if you know I'm going to finish one song a week, guaranteed, because I'm going to do one song sprint a week, and I'm also going to do more in-depth crafting for my other songs throughout the week. But I know that at the very minimum, I'm going to finish one song a week. That helps you to not fall overly in love with any specific song. And then you're less likely to obsess and just overly tinker on one song. Because the reality is value is somewhat seen as how many...

If you finish two songs a year, the amount of pressure and value on each one of those songs is huge. If you write 200 songs in a year, you probably don't remember or even care about half the songs. Now I think that's too far in one direction, and two is too far in the other. I don't know where the sweet spot is. Probably 20 to 50 songs a year is probably the sweet spot. Maybe 15 to 50 somewhere in there.

But song sprints, especially for those of you that are more like me, which is probably a lot of you because you listen to this podcast, but people who spend time, if anything too much time, crafting, obsessing, maybe not finishing.

Song writing session number four, song developing.

So we touched on this, but I think this is another thing that is often missed that can be so helpful. It's just taking time to flesh out a song, the background of the song, maybe the outline of the song, what you're communicating each song section. What does the chorus have to say? What does the first verse have to say versus the second verse? Making sure that they have something different to say. They have something to contribute to the conversation. We're not just repeating ourselves.

Developing the characters a little bit more.

Figuring out the symbolism. So going back to that idea gathering concept, I think I said something like Shadow of the Tiger. Song developing is when you would take the, okay, let's say you think Shadow of the Tiger is a sweet song title. I think it maybe is a little too try hard. It just sounds like it's trying to be cool to me, which it is cool, but it's kind of like Black Sun or something. It just feels like it's trying too hard, right? Like, of course. It's like take some space thing and make it dark. Every metal band just does that over and over. Some of them are kind of cringe, right?

So anyway, to me Shadow of the Tiger is, at least right now in my head, it's borderline cringe is maybe trying too hard to be cool. But let's just say that that's the idea we're going off of. In the song developing step, that's when you would take that idea and be like, okay, let's see if I can make Shadow of the Tiger into an interesting symbol for something. Like, what does that mean? What is the Shadow of the Tiger? Is it that there's this tiger that's going to eat me and its shadow is overcast over me? So then what does the tiger represent? Clearly some form of danger. What is it? Is it addiction?

Is it maybe the beast within, right? Is it a darker side of me that threatens to eat me whole? Is it we're just spitballing here, right? But you know, that's what right now what I'm doing is sort of sound developing, right? We're taking an idea that we have and we're trying to flesh it out a little bit more. We're not jumping into let's write the song Shadow of the Tiger. I'll figure out what it means later. No, that's a problem because now we've written a whole song that means nothing because you didn't even know what it meant before you wrote the song. So that's a problem. We need to get clear on what is that about?

And if the one hour song draft or a song sprint is biased towards just going, right? Getting out of our own heads and just going. Song developing is biased towards making sure you go in an intentional direction, making sure you don't get stuck when you get to the second verse because you didn't figure out before you started writing what the first verse needs to say versus what the second verse needs to say. If you have a third verse versus what the third verse has to say, we can avoid those pitfalls just by planning it beforehand, right? It's like an author. If they get halfway through the book and they're like, now what? Well, you didn't take the time to outline at the beginning. So that's the problem. Maybe you think you're at the middle of the book, but really you're at the end of the book. Maybe your whole plot was just going nowhere because you haven't figured it out yet.

So this song developing is being biased not towards just going, but making sure that the direction we go is actually the quote unquote right direction or a good direction or direction that we can make work.

So excuse me, but you can think about this as like mapping out before you go on a trip, right? So my wife and I went to Denver last year because I had never, as you may or may not know if you've been a listener for a while, I'm a pretty diehard Denver Broncos fan. I mentioned it once in a while, but you know, I've watched every single game for as long as I can remember. I've suffered ever since Super Bowl 50, etc. Maybe you don't care about football. That's fine. Just know that they are in Denver, Colorado.

So I had only been to Denver, Colorado for one day and we visited the stadium as a part of our honeymoon, which based long story short, I just worked out that way where they screwed up our flight and I said, look, I'll forgive you if you drop us off in Denver for a day, give us a day there. And then that flight takes us back home to Ohio.

So it wasn't a part of the plan, but we kind of made it happen. But I had never, you know, I'm a diehard fan and I had never been in Denver for football games. So we planned a three day trip, right?

And when we did that, we planned out one of the main things we have to have. We have three days in Denver, really like two and a half days. So what are the things we have to hit if we never come back, which I'm sure we will, because again, diehard Denver fan and also Denver is beautiful for any of you who might live in Denver. Holy crap. I mean, Colorado is just so beautiful. But before we committed to the trip and how many days it was, we figured out what are we actually doing? Right? What are we doing here?

That's a normal thing that you would do with the trip. Otherwise you just get to the hotel and be like, now what? And that's a problem. You're already there. You've already committed. Maybe there's nothing to do. Maybe you went to a city where there isn't that much to do. Or maybe you needed more time and three days wasn't even going to begin to cover it.

So song developing is doing that, but instead of for a trip, it's first song. It's first song. It's figuring out, you know, how many song sections you need to tell the story you're going to tell, how to flesh out your idea, making sure that, you know, the song structure is going to serve what you're trying to say in the song.

And also song developing frees you up to explore creatively without the pressure and burden of meter and rhyme and just the overall lyric pressure.

There's something about being able to just write and write in prose, write basic English or whatever language you're writing songs in or whatever your first language is and just write.

You're not worried about meter and getting the rhyme scheme. You're just writing. And you may, if you just write a page just worth, have a bunch of different lines that you came up with right on the spot that actually make perfectly great lyrics. And maybe they'll need some adjusting. Maybe there are just some good ideas in there, but it's a great way to just get your thoughts out and start developing out your idea before you are committing to the actual writing of lyrics where you are worried about meter and rhyme and all that.

You can think of it as it's sort of the same idea as a lot of music producers will talk about. They always, if they have a vocalist in, they'll be like, all right, let's just do a practice run. And they tell the vocalist, oh yeah, I'm not recording. We're just doing a practice run. They always hit record. They always hit record. Why? Because a lot of times the singer will do much better in that first take when they think they aren't being recorded. Because psychologically there's something about, oh, this is a practice take. It's not even being recorded. That frees them up to just sing. But then they tighten up a little bit when it comes to when they know they're being recorded. It's the same idea as, you know, it's playoff football right now or, you know, any sport of your choosing. It's a thing to freeze up a little bit in the playoffs. Get a little tighter because now you know if we lose or out, it's done.

So now there's all this pressure that there wasn't before.

So song developing helps with all that. And really what it looks like is planning out your song a little bit, outlining your song, figuring out the background of your song, fleshing out your characters if applicable, figuring out your symbolism, what does it really mean. Doing some prose writing just to flesh out your idea with no expectation for it to be calm lyrics or anything. Just fleshing out your idea before you really try to start writing your lyrics. And then a fifth songwriting session is lyric editing.

I don't think a single song should be released without the lyrics going through some form of editing phase.

I don't think a single song should be released that doesn't have at least one pass for an editing phase.

Are there exceptions to this? Probably.

But very much the exception.

So if you're not editing your lyrics at all, you don't even entertain the idea that maybe you could word something a little bit better or cleaner or clearer or in a way that's more poetic or more powerful that would give people more chills.

Or you haven't considered that maybe some of your words, especially verbs, are particularly weak and don't really incite any emotion in anybody and just by going through your verbs and seeing if you can upgrade them to something that is maybe a little bit more emotionally packed.

If we're not doing that, missed opportunities. Because just changing one word in a line from a met verb to a really powerful verb can make all the difference in the world.

In fact, I think you should go through every word generally or almost every word.

But at the very least, go through all your verbs. At the very least, you should never put out a song without looking at all the verbs you have and saying, "Is there a better verb that I could use here?" And you can literally plug the word into thesaurus.com and sometimes it will literally give you a word and you're like, "Oh yeah, that is a much more emotionally packed, better, more precise word. That is exactly what I'm trying to say." There's no reason to not at least do that.

You'd never release a book or a poem or a movie, unless you're Disney maybe, a movie or anything without editing first.

Without editing the screenplay, without editing the book. Again, usually multiple times. I mean, I just watched a Brandon Sanderson update video and I think he talked about how they're on draft four for a book and they expect to have five total drafts for a book.

That's what writing a book looks like. That's what writing looks like, is you have to edit.

And a common phrase, or at least one that I heard a lot specifically in college from my composition professor that's really stuck with me because the more I've written, the more it seems obviously true to me. Writing is editing.

And all he meant was, it's a very concise way of saying that most of the final quality of your writing is created not in the writing process, not in the first draft. It's created in the editing process where you find better ways to word things, where you clean up the clunky wording, where you find better words. You think about sentences that just don't feel like they're quite working, so maybe they should just be cut out. Maybe they need to be changed. Maybe they just need a verb change and all of a sudden they work much better. Maybe you need to get rid of your adjectives which didn't really add much, they just kind of get in the way.

Editing can take so many different forms, but simply, again, simply finding one verb that you can upgrade in a song section or in a line can make a huge difference. A huge difference.

So don't overestimate how much even a little editing can do for your lyrics.

I'm a big fan of spending a decent amount of time on editing.

Also, I think there's some part of the process that you could argue is like a hybrid between editing and writing. A lot of some people call this rewriting. I technically put this in my editing process.

That's when you technically have written a line, but instead of trying to fix the line, you entertain the idea that maybe the line is inherently broken, so you just rewrite the line. Is that editing or is that writing? I don't know, it's kind of both, right? Because you're taking a written line that the writing has already been done for and you are rewriting because in the editing process you saw that the line wasn't working. It's kind of a hybrid. I personally put it in the editing process. It doesn't really matter, but that's a part of editing too, right? Rewriting. Another common phrase, somebody brought this up in the live stream, I think a commenter brought this up, but they said writing is rewriting. That's very common. It's similar to the writing is editing phrase. It means sort of the same thing, right? That rewriting or editing, that's where the magic is made. That's where you get from a good idea that's meant in execution to something that is actually good.

So five songwriting sessions, idea gathering, improvisation, one hour song draft, or what I call a song sprint, song developing, and lyric editing. If you aren't having these as songwriting sessions, you totally should. Totally give them all a shot. Probably more than one shot.

See which ones work for you. I have a feeling all of them will work for you again, unless you're somebody that leans into quantity over quality, then the one hour song draft. You already do that and you probably, if anything, should do less of it, not more of it. If your average song is something that takes half an hour or an hour, my challenge to you would be pushing the opposite direction, because just like quantity people or just like quality people need to push towards quantity or people who obsess about quality need to obsess more about efficiency, being faster. People who are already just obsessed with efficiency maybe need to work on actually crafting a song instead of just pumping out every single idea they come up with.

So that's my challenge to you if you're one of those people. If not, all five songwriting sessions should be for you. I guess all five are for anyone. Just don't concentrate on it as much if you're somebody that already does that by default.

But hopefully this has helped with you. Again, be sure to grab my free guide. 20 different ways to start writing a song. Again, I can help you with starting a new song, section two for a song you've already written. If you already have a baseline for your first verse and you're trying to write your chorus now and you're stuck, you can start with a melody. Just know that it should be in the same key as your bass line. So if you wrote your bass line in A major and now you're trying to start your chorus with a melody, just make sure it's also in A major. Because most of the time you don't change keys between song sections. And if you do, it might be something like to the relative minor and the bridge. Of course there are exceptions, but most of the time your song is going to be largely in one key, maybe with the key change at the end, especially if you're trying to model after 70s music, which seemingly every single song did that. And now it's almost dead. I feel like key changes almost never happen now. If anything, maybe it's time to bring them back. But songwritertheory.com slash free guide. Hopefully this episode has helped with you. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate every single one of you. And I will talk to you in the next one.

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this bonus episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're continuing to talk about your #1 biggest songwriting struggles. We'll be talking about:

• I can't flow on a beat or sing on an instrument
• I'm not able to concentrate
• I often just give up
• I am afraid to write lyrics
• Getting into a creative flow
• I get stuck after a verse or two
• If I'm not inspired, I don't write songs
• I can't write about certain subjects intentionally!
• How Do I Start My Song?

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about the 3 Simple Steps To Create a 2024 Songwriting Plan You'll Actually Accomplish.

We all have dreams, but we need to create goals off of our dreams, then break those goals down into habits that actually inform the day-to-day of how we accomplish our goals.

0:00 Introduction

2:35 Step 1: What Would Make You Thrilled A Year From Now?

9:03 Step 2: Create Tangible Goals

14:27 Step 3: Create Supplementary Habits

►► Download the 6-Step Lyric Writing Checklist here: https://songwritertheory.com/lyricchecklist/

In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about the easiest way to write a song if you're overwhelmed with songwriting. There are a nearly infinite number of ways to write songs. We can start with chords, melody, lyrics, different song sections, hooks, and more!

So, naturally this can be pretty overwhelming. In this podcast, we're going to just talk about the single easiest way to write a song. This is by far the easiest if you don't know any music theory or meter and is even the easiest for those of us that are leveraging great writing tools like music theory, meter, rhyme, story structure, and more.

❤️ If you find my content helpful and want to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee! - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/josephvadala

0:00 Introduction

2:00 The Background Logic To This Songwriting Method

10:49 Step 1: Write the Chord Progression or Song Engine

16:33 Step 2: Write the Melody

23:12 The Easiest Song Section Writing Order

27:19 Step 3: Write Lyrics

32:47 Detailed Version of my Favorite Songwriting Process

►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this bonus episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're continuing to talk about your #1 biggest songwriting struggles. We'll be talking about:

• Where To Find "Great" Ideas for Songs
• Syllables and Meter for Lyrics
• What are the # of Words Per Bar Normally?
• Writing a Memorable Chorus Melody
• How Do I Figure Out What To Write My Songs About?

►► Download the NEW 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about 3 easy ways to stop overthinking your song. It can be so easy to run into writer's block when we are overthinking our songs. Overthinking can come from different places such as perfectionism, a lack of a plan, or even allowing our knowledge to get in the way of what SOUNDS right in our song. So let's talk about 3 easy ways to STOP OVERTHINKING your songs and actually keep songwriting.