Write a song in a single sitting Sound difficult? You might be surprised to learn that some very popular songs were written during single sessions of explosive imagination. Feel free to cheat a little by including song ideas that have been stewing for a while. This assignment isn’t as much about stream-of-consciousness songwriting as it […]
The first Wednesday of January is New Year’s Day. The January meeting will be held on Wed., Jan 8, starting at 7 p.m. The suggested songwriting assignment is lyrically challenging: Write a song in which every line contains five words.
The assignment for the December meeting is a no-brainer — write a holiday song.
Write a response or reply or continuation of a popular song. An “answer song” doesn’t work as well if the listener doesn’t know the original. But when it works it’s a tribute to the original song. The “reply song” is hardly a new idea. Everybody knows “Space Oddity,” the 1969 David Bowie classic about an […]
Write a song about faith Interpret the word as you will. Go ahead and get all churchy. Maybe you see love as faith in a partner, or courage as faith in yourself. Maybe you’ll write about an absence of faith. With infinite ways to perceive faith, this assignment might present an opportunity to venture beyond […]
Write a song about murder It doesn’t necessarily have to be confessional and could be written from the perspective of the doer, the do-ee, the weapon, a witness, a news consumer or a songwriter who just got a killer songwriting assignment. Songs about murder go back as far as the linkage of words and music. […]
Write a character-driven song It’s not about the vibe or the production, not about the musicianship or even the story line. Character-driven songs take a deep dive into the central character’s personality. It’s not what happens, it’s how he or she reacts to what happens. A good character song can describe an actual person, but […]
Write a song in the voice of another performer On an audio clip aired sometimes on The Beatles Channel (Sirius satellite radio), Paul McCartney remembers fooling around with a melody and trying to play and sing like Ray Charles. The result was “The Long and Winding Road.” He wrote, played and sang like Little Richard […]
Key changes for dramatic effect Last time we did this assignment I noticed that several members had inserted the key change without taking full advantage of its capability. Nothing wrong with that — a key change can help to hold the listener’s interest in the song, and in many famous songs that’s enough. But what […]
Bass lines for songwriters — write a bass line into a song Giving a song a bottom end isn’t just the responsibility of the bass player. Songwriters can improve the structural stability of their songs, and their catchiness, by writing in a bass line as the song is being crafted. The bass line is the […]
