Songwriting Tips and Help

Whether you’re a beginning songwriter or have some experience under your belt, there’s no shame in feeling stuck. We all go through it. This is especially true whenever you’re working towards a breakthrough in your writing. To get to the next level, you’ve got to work through the ‘growing pains’.

Hopefully, these songwriting tips and tricks will help you write better songs. You might even want to revisit some of your older songs after you read this article, and see if you can improve them even more.

Tip #1: Be brutal about cliches

Songwriting experts recommend you avoid the use of cliches. Sometimes, though, it can be hard to spot them. You probably already know some of the obvious ones like “Oh baby”, “love you all night”, “don’t walk away”, etc.

Eliminating those types of cliches is pretty easy. There are whole lists of common cliches available online for you to double-check.

What might slip past your filter, though, are the cliches of imagery and storytelling.

For instance, you might be relying too heavily on words like “hot”, “cold”, “night”, “day”, “sun”, “moon”, “stars”, “sky”, “heart”, etc. There’s nothing wrong with these words per se, but what writers often do is overuse them for similes and metaphors (e.g. “my heart is a cold star shining in the night”).

As for the storytelling cliches, these usually come down to overused “themes”. Most sad love songs, for example, tell the same story about how things used to be so good, then it all fell apart and the broken-hearted lover doesn’t know how to move on.

I’d try changing that storyline if it were me. You could write a song about falling out of love and being elated about it, or about falling in love with two people at the same time. Just mix it up a little bit and you might surprise yourself.

Tip #2: Go back to the basics

As artists, we often like to think that our creativity demands no limits. Sometimes, though, imposing a structure on your work can be the absolute best thing.

If you are used to sitting down and improvising, then see what happens when you add an element of restriction or control. Assign yourself the “task” of writing in a specific key and time signature, and stick to an exact rhyme scheme.

When you are forced to work within pre-determined boundaries, your mind has no other choice but to come up with new ideas to make the situation work. True inspiration and creativity often respond mightily to a perceived challenge.

Tip #3: Change your environment

If you always write in the same place and/or at the same time of day, you may just need a change of scenery. If you always write in your bedroom, then try your living or your back porch. If you always write in the evening, see what happens if you write in the morning not long after you’ve woken up.

You might also want to experiment with changing the lighting in your environment or burning some scented candles or incense to help put you in a different frame of mind.