The process?

[Bushleague]

Wondering what other peoples process is for writing songs. For me, I need a lick and a chorus line, quite often these are written independently and various pairings are experimented with before the right match is found. Whole songs are sometimes written and then scrapped, the pieces put back into my mental scrap pile. Once I get the right match the song pretty much writes itself

Earlyer this year I completed a song, and realized the main riff, and other portions of it, had been written at least`15 years earlyer, on a barely functional classical guitar I found hanging on the wall of a marina in rural in Panama, the chorus had been just a line rattling around inside my skull for probably 3-5 years, finally I got around to introducing them to each other and they hit it off... a number of elements to this story are pretty typical for me. If you care to, you can check the song out here... https://soundcloud.com/user-348714923/are-we-there-yet

I like listening to other peoples songs and trying to figure out their process too... was recently listening to an album where it sounded like the guy had pretty much come up with a killer line then wrote these linear, non-repeating lyrics that built up to and wrapped up with that killer line, and another where the lyrics basically seemed like random snippets from different conversations assembled like a musical scrap book, all of which I found pretty novel. Anyhow whats your writing process?

[Chipotle]

My songwriting isn't a repeatable process--it's pretty much different for every song. Some start with the music; a lick, riff or chord progression I want to build on. Others start with a line or two of lyrics and get music and more lyrics added later. Still others start with an idea or prompt (particularly the case where I've been commissioned to write a song with a certain topic or theme).

I think most, if not all, songwriters have a "library" of scraps, either text or music, that didn't make it into one song but are sitting around waiting for the right situation.

I also like to "borrow" from songs I like. I'll be writing something that wants a gentle, bouncing tempo like song A, or maybe song B has a cool riff I can play off of, or song C does some neat chordal things I want to incorporate. By the time I'm done, it's different enough that I don't think you'd think it was ripped off from something else.

The one place my song process ends up the same, though, is at the finishing stage. I have a skeleton--maybe one verse of lyrics and most of the chorus, or several partly-finished verses, or it still needs a bridge or pre-chorus--that needs to be fleshed out. At this point, I spend lots of time with an online rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, and searching for idioms and turns of phrase to complete things. Often I'll write down what I want to say in boring prose (e.g. "the night sky and stars are beautiful") and then look for things that rhyme and might fit ("bars, Mars, guitars...") or thesaurus for similar or related words that could work ("heavens, atmosphere, twinkling..."). I do searches for metaphors and similes ("like a velvet blanket..."). Sometimes it has to roll around a while for just the right word or phrase to appear. If I need another musical section, I'll jam around on lots of chord changes and hum melodies until something clicks.

It's a bit like a puzzle, except if you find a perfect piece, you also have the option of going back and changing the "shape" of pieces around it so it fits.

[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by Bushleague

Wondering what other peoples process is for writing songs.

Hi B-l

For me it's fragmented. A piece of a chord progression or lick that I like, or a melody lingering in my brain which won't leave me alone.

I just record fragments (I have a Zoom H1n around most of the time or my phone).

Often they interrupt me while I'm playing other music. If I don't stop and grab the thought it disappears.

I rarely sit down to write formally.

[TBman]

A few lingering notes is all I need at times.

[rick-slo]

Usually melody driven. Add repetitions and variations.
Sometimes the driving force is rhythmic and/or some base line hook.

For training your ear it's helpful to dissect and analyze what is going
on in the songs or tunes you like that other have put together.

[raysachs]

I don't write songs, but as a disgruntled Philadelphia 76er fan, I feel obligated to point out that your thread title is triggering... I opened this thinking it was going to be a (fully justified) rip on the Sixers, may they RIP. Glad to see that wasn't the intent. Now back to your regularly scheduled song-writing discussion...

-Ray

[FrankHudson]

I often resonate with the songwriter who said that "If I knew where good songs came from, go back there again and again."

That said, for the past 5 years I've been working on my Parlando Project which has resulted in over 500 songs mostly using other people's (mostly poets in the public domain) words. To write that many songs (and record them, and increasingly play all the recorded parts) it helps to have a few tactics in hand rather than waiting for the muses to wander up and bless you.

I'll often start a composition process with 4 or 5 poems or sets of words and see which one speaks to me and what musical ideas I'm fooling around with.

Having words first often suggests a structure or even something of a melody line. But since there are some poetic forms that are structured, I can also adapt music between alternate words sources with light alteration.* So even in my naturally words-first project, maybe 10-20% are music first. Oddly, it's not uncommon for me to adapt an old poem to a blues structure, including re-doing the words.

Example:

Distance Blues (Dorothy Parker as blues)

In those cases the words get altered into the traditional blues stanza form.

As I mentioned in my comment on a music theory topic here recently, I sometimes seek to write using a different harmonic progression, just to explore it. Not only does it expand your harmonic ideas to force yourself to try something out of the ordinary, it should open up new melody ideas too.

And even if I'm words-first in my project a lot that doesn't mean the process doesn't include some give and take.


*Beside iambic pentameter sonnets, there's the hymn meter used a lot by Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, which just like church hymns make the music in that structure "portable" between words.