Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of Oliver Chesler

December 8th, 2009 – Have you ever stopped everything you were doing, and decided to write a song? Not because you had an idea for one, but just because you wanted to write? The problem is, when you try to force creativity, it often doesn’t come. So how do professional songwriters generate huge catalogues?

I’m nowhere near as prolific as David Foster or Timbaland, but I’ve found that the writers block is generally caused by too much possibility. By this I mean that sitting down to write “something” is too broad. Sitting down to write a folk song is better. Writing a folk song in the style of City and Colour is even better. The more specific, the easier it is to write.

But doesn’t too much specificity stifle creativity? Not at all. In my experience, when I have less tools, I write even better. Of course, for the modern songwriter who also produces the track, listening to exactly what you want to produce, helps immensely. While you definitely don’t want to copy a song and it’s production, knowing why a song works and resonates goes a long way when you’re writing your own.

Some of the things you can examine are the meter, tempo, structure, and even chord progressions (as long as you don’t copy them). If you are a lyricist, you might also look at rhyming pattern, melody lines, rhythmic flow, and context. Choose a few of the parameters that will be similar and get to work. How about a folk song in the style of City and Colour, at 91 bpm, in 3/4 time, using drop D tuning? That’s much more specific and will give you somewhere to start.

When I wrote the soundtrack to Leaps and Bounds, the scenes were pre-cut to temp music. The music was comprised of famous tracks that were definitely not cleared for sync licenses, so I was brought in to write music that would work with the cuts, and evoke the same feeling. I matched the mood and the BPM and nothing else. The songs didn’t sound at all related, other than those two attributes, and yet they conveyed the same feeling. I don’t bring up that case to show off, but rather show that you can take attributes of another song and apply them without copying. The soundtrack was an extreme example of very strict requirements that spawned something very different.

Writing to preset guidelines helps a great deal when you sit down to write. Of course, if you come up with something completely different in the process, go work on that instead. The best ideas come out of nowhere, and are a blessing, so work on those!