Patreon member Miriam asked a thoughtful, and universally relatable question in our Patreon Q&A recently: One thing I’d love to hear you discuss is how you navigate the emotional highs and lows that come with creative work. Since starting to write songs and share them on YouTube a year and a half ago, I seem […]
In this series, I’ll go through my all-time Top 5 Exercises for generating lyric ideas, whether I’ve got a song idea going already or not. These exercises don’t require inspiration. They mostly require 10 minutes and a pen. Just like anything in life, you can get better at writing great lyrics with practice. I hope […]
And do your creative work this year As writers, creators, artists, and musicians, we all have the same ugly little inner voices that try to sabotage us from doing our work. They come in different flavors: You’re not good enough. You have nothing important to say. This is boring. Ssssleep is sooooo much better than […]
Studying and understanding the tools that go into making a song can help anyone learn how to write a song more effectively. I hope these conversations give you ideas for your own songs and songwriting. We were lucky enough to have a long conversation with Berklee Professor Pat Pattison. But was my teacher and mentor […]
Starting with loops is one of the most enjoyable and effective ways to spark new ideas and breathe life into your songwriting process. In this video, we write a whole song from scratch using loops as inspiration – featuring the sample-based instrument ‘Chromatic’ from LANDR. Save 30% now with this coupon: GETLANDRWRITESONGS30OFF LANDR Studio includes […]
The idea to offer access to a songwriting group to others comes directly from my own experience in my songwriting group, which I have talked about here on the YouTube Channel. My own songwriting group is the primary reason I wrote more than 20 songs last year, and have written almost 10 songs this year (we’re in May 2022 right now!). […]
One of the best ways to learn how to write great songs is to learn from great songs and songwriters. In this video, songwriter Ben Romalis and I take 6 songs that each taught us a crucial principle or technique about writing great songs. Drawing from a range of inspirations from Radiohead, Tom Waits, to […]
I was recently asked a question on my YouTube channel that went something like this: The most important part of building a career as a songwriter is building a network, establishing good contacts, and schmoozing. Could you please tell us how you did that? I’ve actually made it significantly more polite than the question was […]
In this video, I share the three pillars of my creative practice that ensure I write even when not inspired, and have given me the structure to write over 20 songs this year. Producing lots of creative work is more often about the habits, practices, and environments that we build, rather than about inspiration alone. […]
A student emailed me this question today, and I thought it was beautifully simple, direct, and honest. Here is the answer I gave her (unedited): The basic ingredients to getting better at anything are all the same: deliberate practice. The ‘deliberate’ part of that is key, though! Simple repetition of something is not enough to […]
