In preparation for a live recording we’re doing in May, I’ve been songwriting like crazy.
The more I write and study great songwriters, the more I’m convinced it is slave labor.
If you think otherwise, you’re wrong.
Make no mistake, I love songwriting. I believe it’s a sacred trust from the heart of God and a total joy…some of the time.
Most of the time, though, it’s straight up hard work.
How To Write Horrible Songs
When I first began my journey into songwriting, it wasn’t hard work at all. An idea popped into my head and I went with it. 5 minutes later, I was done.
Easy as pie.
But as I listen through those songs today, I’m confronted with the nasty truth. They’re weak. They won’t stand the test of time. I didn’t push them to their full potential.
How do you write horrible songs?
Settle on your original idea. Resist the hard work of pushing a song to its potential.
That’s what this post is all about. It’s about embracing the power of editing. It’s about refusing to settle on your original idea. It’s about experimenting, pressing into the frustration, giving up, and coming back.
4 Tips For Transitioning Your Songs From Mediocre To Great
So here are my 5 best tips for taking your song ideas and making them great; a checklist for taking a mediocre song and making it a great one.
I’m excited. Here we go.
1. Strip Everything Away
As a songwriter, if you’re spending all your time thinking about guitar riffs, drum grooves, clapping techniques, and tambourine dances, you’re wasting your energy.
Great arranging and great music can’t hide a poorly written song. A great song stands on its own, whether that’s accapella or with a simple acoustic guitar. Step into that tension. Resist the urge to think about arrangement and music in the early stages.
Instead, do this:
2. Obsess Over Lyrics
In my opinion, a great song will never be a great song with weak lyrics. In the early stages of songwriting, it’s fine to use cliches as you work out your melody. Matter of fact, that’s encouraged. But before you call your song quits, obsess over those lyrics.
Write and rewrite and rewrite. Simplify. Say what needs to be said. Look for new angles.
Great worship songs have lyrics that inspire people. Lyrics that make them want to stand up, shout, pump their fists, and scream “Amen! Yes!”. Look at your current lyrics. Is that case? Do your lyrics stand out or are they even putting you to sleep?
3. Experiment With Numerous Melodies
Take a lesson from songwriting guru, Paul Baloche: “In the jungle of songwriting, melody is king.” You may think that your content is king. Nope. If your content is heavenly yet your melody sucks, your song will never spread.
Melody is what gives a song its stickiness. Melody is what people remember. The best way I’ve found to find great melodies is try numerous options. Even if you think you’ve settled on one you like, try another one (and save them all in Evernote, btw).
Settle on a melody that soars.
4. Test It Out
When I write a song, I like to hear other people sing it. This step is somewhat peculiar to corporate worship songs, but maybe any songwriter can benefit.
I’m a pretty average singer, so I like to hear my song sung by a great singer. A great singer knows when a melody “works” and is “fresh”.
Congregational worship songs need to be accessible to great singers as well as poor singers. Observe how a poor singer sings it. Is it too much of a struggle for them to even get a word out?That might be a sign that you need to rewrite some.
Ready to Take the Challenge?
Maybe you’re not willing to embrace this challenge. But if you want to become the best songwriter you can be, you need to befriend this tension.
Most of the time, your songs will suck.
Most of the time, you’ll want to give up.
But if you stick with that 90% of the time, your 10% payoff will be worth it.
It’s worth it when you stand before your audience or your church and you see the presence of God washing over people as truth confronts their hearts.
In that moment, time stands still. In that moment, all the hard work has been worth it.
I know there some great songwriters out there who read this blog. I’d love to hear from you. How do you transition your songs from good to great? Join the comments!
Great stuff! I have written a song about 6 months ago, and I haven’t touched it since. I have been thinking about melodies instead of perfecting and “pushing” the actual lyrics.
I know that God will make the song come alive when He is ready…it is just a matter of when. But in complete honesty, I believe it is going to happen soon because the song is all about letting God break down the walls we have built up that separate us from him. I believe that this is why many Christians never experience God in the ways they would like to.
By the way, how are you rec your live CD?
I’ll be blogging about that in the near future. Stay tuned 🙂
I’ve never been much of a song writer, but I do find it strangely ironic that just last night I put my facebook status as “I really need to devote more time to writing music…I miss it tons. :-/” Thank you for these suggestions on how to make the most of what you are writing!
Anneke, consider this post your accountability 🙂 Get back to writing!
Awesome blog! So needed that. I had started on another song a few weeks ago and have been meaning to pick it back up, but HAVEN’T! But this post was good encouragement to start back and to just write, write , write. I wrote a song a few months ago and tried it out at church and for the lack of words, it was a “success”. So I’m trying to get back to songwriting more and just writing songs that being Glory to God
Cammie, keep it up! Have you been writing songs for a while or have you recently started?
Good advice. Here are some of my tips:
Melody:
I write songs in my head before I ever pick up an instrument. This way, the good melodies stick and the mediocre ones fade. Try your words against the melody of a song you love. Sing your chorus with the verse from a known song. This will spark your creativity to weave melodies around ones that work. Great melodies are like veins in a mine – they spawn lots of other good things. When you build off of a great melody, it will spawn instrumental hooks and harmonies easily with the band.
Lyrics:
For worship songs building around a biblical passage is a good way to have your lyrics stay meaningful. If you are able to build biblical phrases into them (that a listener will recognize as coming from scripture) so much the better.
Also, things like avoiding word crowding and counting syllables help a lot. Use a thesaurus and rhyming dictionary to get different ways to say things.
Build your song around a central theme – what are you trying to say? Your chorus should state that theme clearly. Build your verses around expanding the theme – adding color and detail around it. Your bridge is a great place to restate it or emphasize it. The song should have a one sentence ‘mission statement’ that everything supports.
Don’t neglect repeated elements, recurring elements. Things that give a pattern and a familiarity to a song as you sing through it.
Harmony:
Dissect songs you love and look at what was done with the harmony. Don’t settle for the first chord progression you hear – look at related ways to accomplish the same thing, or give a slightly different feel to the melody that might help it stand out. Don’t neglect the power of minor chords to create mood, and the ‘little touches’ touches like sustained chords. Look at some old songs to see how they use chords that are not in the main progression, but yet work and give the melody new places to go.
Overall:
Spend time in songwriting improvement activities. Things like Paul Baloche’s book ‘God Songs’, or the many great free resources such as the Sovereign Grace seminars. Read Gary Ewers material, especially regarding the theory of ‘song energy’. Just be a student of great songs. Co-write with people whose skills you respect. Build a circle of trusted listeners.
Brilliant, Mark! I’ll probably reference your comment in the coming weeks. Thanks for sharing this. Your point on Biblical passages is so true. That’s what makes the most popular worship songs stand out – they’re rooted in a Scriptural truth.
One thing Kristen and I have done is to test our songs with church members who are NOT on the worship team. With the last batch of potential worship songs we wrote, we invited our community group and a few other members to our house, gave them all lyric sheets and served coffee while Kristen played the songs.
We had them rate the songs 1-5 in subjects like melody, singability, theology and poetry (they wrote down their votes on paper we provided). Then we let them ask questions, give verbal feedback and hang out. We learned a lot.
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this idea! It sort of makes me nervous, too. I’m sure people don’t hesitate to speak their mind 🙂
David, great post. I love(!) that you said songwriting is “slave labor.” Too many people, especially Christian/worship songwriters, just think a song is given to them like manna from heaven and it can’t be reworked and critiqued.
And yeah, Bobby’s practice with his community group sounds awesome (scary awesome and cool awesome). Critiques have really helped my writing. It’s amazing what I “think” I’m writing and what people are actually hearing.
Brian Doerksen once said, “God gives seeds. It’s up to us to grow the song.” I thought that was great advice.
Ok, ok. I’m on it! 😉 Thanks again!
The greatest point of advice that I have learned/heard/told every young songwriter about is to always write complete songs. By complete, I do not mean mixed, mastered, and recorded. I mean write a complete first draft with all the pieces that make it a complete song (whatever that looks like to you at the time). Even if you have to make something up for a verse, just get it out of your head, onto paper, and recorded. (crude recordings are encouraged.) The burden of a thousand pieces of songs floating around in a hundred different notebooks can be paralyzing for any writer. But a few complete drafts that you can come back to and tweak, twist, or mash together are like Clark Griswold’s non-caloric silicon based kitchen lubricant to the songwriter’s process. Writing complete drafts builds momentum toward writing a lot of crappy songs and a few great ones as well! In my opinion, a few finished rough drafts with potential are so much more valuable than that one great hook line scrawled on a napkin stuffed in your songwriting notebook.
Brilliant advice. Love this!
And “Clark Griswold’s non-caloric silicon based kitchen lubricant” is a perfect analogy 🙂
nice point.
Wow, great post, comments and ideas. So glad my worship minister turned me on to this site.
Chad, glad to have you here! Where do you lead worship?
Very inspiring read.
Remember David, we are bond servants of Christ (willing slaves)with a gift to bring Him Honor.
It is important that you strip the melody and start all over again as you say.
Get the motif and then try to develop it in many different ways.
Personally I have found that once I get the melody going I need to find that motif that keeps going and vary it some.
It is a useful technique to listen to a song six months or so after its initial creation as you seem to imply. If you still like it after six months then you know you have a hit.
Otherwise there is nothing wrong with revising it or completely changing it.
Thanks for the comments.
robert
I couldn’t agree more with Lyrical content being the King of my music. Words are the reason I started trying to hack my way through guitar in the first place.
I (personally) am drawn to story lines and feel that because words are one of the main ways people communicate. It is also one of the most effective.
We all run deep with emotions and it is a true artform to be able to describe experience in a translatable way. A way that is familiar and yet fresh. In a way, that evokes at times, a deja vu effect of being there in the moment with the singer. To be able to convey the emotions we all feel with words, is more than just another songwriting tool or a necessary evil. I couldn’t agree more than most of songs that we hear that stand the test of time, have a lyrical connection to emotion.
The ones we remember most are the one that touch close to something we have felt somewhere inside before.
Thanks for the article.
If you would like to hear some of my words, please visit my page.
http://www.reverbnation.com/soontobeshawn