So How Do You Write A Song?

How do you write a song I hear you ask? Well, how do you paint a picture? You look at something, or imagine it and then brush some colours onto a canvas and voila! Well, it’s the same with songwriting. If this is your first time, think of something you want to sing and sing it! Go on, have a go, right now!

Yikes! Was that you? That strangulated cat sound and terrible lyrics? (welcome to the world of being creative, for every creative and beautiful endeavor, there’s a critic who knows better and enjoys putting you down). Well, it’s a first attempt. Don’t be hard on yourself if it wasn’t a masterpiece. I doubt if Van Gogh’s first picture looked much like a, er, Van Gogh!

The thing about everything we do is- our first attempts aren’t going to be the pinnacle of achievement in that field. The first time I kicked a football, I didn’t score a goal (in fact I fell over). But it was fun. In fact, many years later, I still haven’t scored a goal because I don’t practice and i’m a bit rubbish. Anyway, I digress….

My first song was called ‘What Would You Say If I Say I Love You’. I wrote it when I was 11. It went a little bit like this.

What would you say if I say I love you
What would you say if I cared
What would you say if I said I loved you
Would you even care.

(repeat forever)

Evil dictators could have used this song as an instrument of torture. I recall the melody having one note and the song alternating sporadically from one chord to the one next to it at a funereal tempo (I couldn’t change chord very fast). I played it all day, every day for a week. In my mind it was a work of staggering beauty and heartbreak. I was my biggest, and only fan. None of my family spoke to me after day two. After day four, I discovered the power supply to my half size Casio keyboard had mysteriously disappeared.

So I suppose the question isn’t really how do you write a song, It should be how do you write a good song? And this raises the question – what (or who) defines whether a song is good? I thought my first song was good because it expressed exactly how I felt. Looking back though, I can see that not many other people would like it because it was lacking in a few departments, namely- Lyric, melody, harmony, rhythm and structure.

So how did I get better in these departments? Well, I guess it was a combination of writing a whole bunch of terrible songs (Carole King said her first 500 songs were awful) and copying songs I liked. By copying the songs I liked, I learned a few things about chords, and lyrics and what a good length for a song might be. I imagine Van Gogh did the same when he was learning- sketching, copying artists he admired, mixing paints and producing some embarrassing pictures along the way.

I suppose song structure (or form) is like learning how to fill the canvas. I remember learning to draw and my picture would be a timid scribble in the middle of an enormous white rectangle. Perhaps you were the same, or were you one of the unfortunates who started drawing a face to find out the paper was only big enough for two eyes and a nose?

I remember getting to grips with complementary colours and perspective in art in the same way I struggled with rhyme and chord sequences in songwriting. It took a long time to get more confident in writing songs and then one day- a revelation – I began to write songs that sounded like me. Somehow all the stuff I’d learned didn’t get in the way anymore. I could, so to speak, draw a picture without worrying if it would fill the sheet of paper. I knew it would, and if it didn’t, it was because I wanted to break the ‘rules’

So what’s the moral of this blog? First of all, don’t be disheartened if you don’t immediately write something great- just keep writing. Learn from all the writers you admire by copying them. There’s no shame in this. You should be a sponge, soaking in all the skills you can. Try not to be too hard on yourself, and lose yourself in the process of creation. If you have something you need to say, and the patience to say it wrong over and over and over again, you’ll eventually say it right and write a song that blows you away, a song that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Nothing worth finding is within arms reach.


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Love to you all.

Jez