Song Writers???

[MikeZito]

Respect for those who can write songs. Like Jeff above, my brain just isn’t wired that way . . . So, I’ll have to be content with being like George Strait, who almost never did original material

If my memory is correct, I wrote my first song in 1984 - and it was TERRIBLE. I continued to write dozens more terrible songs for the next 10 years . . . until one day it finally clicked. Within a year I had enough decent material for my first solo album. One night in 1995 I was sitting around and playing music with a small group of other local musicians and played one of my original compositions. When I was finished with my song the guy sitting next to me turned to look at me and simply said; 'You WROTE that? Wow! I'm going to record in Nashville in a couple of weeks, do you have anything I can use?' Needless to say, the songs never got recorded (as far as I know of) and songwriting fame didn't come knocking at my door . . . but the point of the while story is DON'T GIVE UP. For most of us writing songs is like learning to play your first instrument - it takes time, study, effort and a lot of horrible noise before you begin to see results.

35 years have passed since I put pen to paper on that first terrible song, but when I checked the BMI website this morning, it said that I have written and/or co-written nearly 90 published songs . . . not a bad accomplishment for a guy with no talent, but a lot of love for what he does. If a bum like me can do it, so can you!

[bratsche]

Last week I was nearly awake one morning when I had a haunting melody come to me in that lucid state that's not quite dreaming and not quite wakeful.
.....
It got me so excited, I had to get up and whistle it into a voice recorder app on my Ipad so I wouldnt' forget it.

Same thing happened to me once, only I had to write it down on staff paper, as this was before the era of apps, etc. I was thrilled to have been inspired to write such a thing of beauty!

(I hope my song doesn't turnout to be an actual one that I simply remembered and thought I'd written, or I'll be awfully embarassed)

And that's exactly what had occurred, in my case. I had dreamed about and written down the main melody of a movement of a piece of music I had played many years before. Then, a few months after that, I heard it playing on the radio, and I thought, "That's my music! ...errrrrr, hey, I didn't compose that, after all - oops, my bad!"

Guess I'm better off sticking to arranging, rather than composing...

bratsche

[tiltman]

There's a book by a guy named Paul Zollo - "songwriters on songwriting".
If you haven't read it before it is very interesting, informative, and entertaining. In it he interviews seemingly everyone in the world - Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Patti Smith, Paul Simon, Tom Petty, and dozens more - about how they write songs.

Bottom line - some do the lyrics first, some do the melody first. There really is no wrong way to do it because everyone does it differently.

Kirk

[Nevin]

For me lyrics, usually just a catchy line, start the process. After that the melody I start from singing the line keeps things going. I almost always sing as I write so they go together.

[MikeZito]

A friend a fellow band mate once offered me the advice that you had to grab people with the first line of the lyric. If the song starts with something absolutely banal, you just might lose them for the rest of the song - but if the first line somehow catches their ear, you might be able to hold their attention long enough to find out if the rest of the song is any good or not.

I have no idea if there is any solid scientific research to back up this theory - but I have always personally found it to be pretty helpful.