How to write as a character, a narrator, an alter-ego, a ghost, a god
Sometimes the only way to tell the truth is to lie a little — or at least to wear a mask long enough for the deeper voice to come through. Writing from persona isn’t acting, and it isn’t pretending. It’s opening a side door in the brain and letting someone else walk through it with your shoes on. Continue reading
Song Forms: Beyond Verse–Verse–Bridge–Verse
You don’t need to be a musicologist to write a killer song. But knowing a few basic shapes — the containers songs like to live in — can save you a ton of grief and open up creative shortcuts you didn’t know were there.
Most people think song form is some mystical textbook thing, but really it’s just pattern recognition. You already know these forms because you’ve heard them your whole life. All we’re doing here is shining a flashlight on what your ear already understands. Continue reading
Style is the secret sauce that nobody can quite point at, but everybody feels. There’s style in music, style in fashion, style in cooking — there’s style in pretty much anything you do, wear or live in.
Style isn’t something you “add on” at the end of a song, like you’re applying glitter glue — it’s baked in from the first phrase that pops in. The first note. It’s the fingerprint, the gait, the swagger, the limp, the wink, the shrug. Marshall McLuhan told you in his book, “The Medium is the Massage” It’s how you say a thing, not what you say. The voice behind the voice. Continue reading
Editing the Song Without Ruining the Magic — How to fix a song without killing it.
Editing a song is like trimming bonsai miniature tree: a little snip here, a gentle tuck there — not a lumberjack attack with a gas-powered Tesla chainsaw. This is the chapter where you learn how to clean up a lyric, tighten the emotional spine, and fix the wobbly bits without strangling the living soul that made the song work in the first place. Continue reading
Two different modes, both useful. When to use which???
Let’s get right to it: every songwriter has two gears, even if they don’t know it.
One gear is fast, the other is deep, and the real craft is knowing exactly when to slam the pedal on one, and when to sink slowly into the other, like a hot stone into cold water.
Most writers — especially beginners — try to write everything at one speed, usually whatever speed their anxiety or caffeine level happens to be set to, that day. But the pros? They switch gears intentionally. They don’t wait for inspiration; they pick the right mode and force the muse to keep up.
Let’s break these two modes down in a way that actually helps you use them. Continue reading
Back in the mid-sixties, when I was at Otis Art Institute in L.A., I took a 3D design class where the legendary art teacher Bob Glover cheerfully announced, “No limitations — bring in whatever you like, so long as it’s a 3D object.”
You’ve never seen a room go blank so fast. Continue reading
Groove is the secret life inside a song — the heartbeat you don’t see but absolutely feel. You can strip away the chords, mute the melody, throw the lyrics into a blender, and if the groove is still there, the thing will live. If the groove dies, the whole song goes cold on the plate, like forgotten oatmeal. Nothing sadder. Continue reading
If you don’t play an instrument — or you only play one instrument the way most people do their taxes, meaning “not very often” — this chapter is your lifeline. Because despite what musicians like to imply, you do not need theory, training, experience, or finger gymnastics to understand chords.
You only need one idea:
Melody scares people for absolutely no good reason. Folks can write sharp lyrics, clever rhythms, even whole songs in their heads, but the second you say “okay, now give it a melody,” they freeze up like someone just asked them to rebuild a steam engine using only dental floss. Total myth. Total illusion. If you can hum while making breakfast, congratulations — you can write melodies.
Here’s the truth musicians don’t say out loud because they like to seem mystical and complicated, but a melody is actually just talking with style. Continue reading
Contrast, revelation, emotional pivot points. The “why now?” of the bridge.
A good bridge is the plot twist nobody saw coming, but that everybody admittedly needed. The bridge is the flashlight beam that suddenly hits the attic rafters and shows you a whole new shape you’d been stumbling around in the dark trying to guess. A bridge is the moment in the song where the floor drops out and you realize, “Oh… that’s what this has been about all along.” Continue reading