The Real Deal – Songwriting Websites I Recommend

 I spend a lot of time surfing the web in search of websites for songwriters, usually because I’m looking for something to write about in my monthly column at the Muse’s Muse :) (For anyone interested, the newsletters along with my articles are archived here).

Occasionally, people will ask to use my articles on their songwriting-related websites, or to link up with me. In the beginning, I would readily allow anyone who wanted to to use my tips or link to my page. But these days, I’m a little pickier! Now I check out these websites as thoroughly as I can before associating myself with them. I have noticed that there are a growing number of websites that offer lots of promises, but they really don’t deliver. I hate to say it, but anyone who wants to charge you for something, should cause you to send up a red flag, with a few exceptions.

Let’s first talk about the “free” websites, good places to start with when you are just beginning your search, and some of these you will return to again and again. The Muses’ Muse is simply one of the best songwriting websites out there, if not THE best. Jodi Krangle, the proprietor, makes little or no money from her website, and yet it always manages to be fresh, up-to-date and an extremely thorough collection of links, articles, advice and services for the beginner to the advanced songwriter. It is a HUGE site, so be prepared to spend a lot of time there! I have known Jodi since I first came online in 1996, and I’ve never met a nicer person! We have continued to help each other to promote and support the idea of songwriting on the web, and The Muse’s Muse continues to exist because of a person who is truly committed to the art and craft of songwriting.

Another really huge, and wonderful website is Just Plain Folks. Again, Brian Austin Whitney has created a wonderful community for songwriters that is almost too much to explain in one small paragraph! You have to see it to believe it. Brian has extended his JPFolks community out into the “real” world, with events all over the US and Canada, and branches of his organization in just about every major city! Again, this website is so full of stuff, it’ll take you literally weeks to go through all of it.

Even if a membership in an online organization is NOT free, ask yourself if you are in a place to truly benefit from their services. For instance, a lot of songwriters ask about TAXI and whether or not they are legitimate. In my opinion, they are. But many songwriters are simply not ready or at a level yet in which to really make use of what they have to offer! You wouldn’t buy a car before you even knew how to drive it. The same rule applies here. If you don’t yet ‘know’ how to write a song, why spend mega bucks on a service where you will be competing with a zillion others who DO know how to write? That sounds very practical, but I have met many, many songwriters who are ready long before their songs really are. So TAXI is a part of my list because I believe they offer a legitimate service for a fee.

Another legitimate service is SongU.com . I will say right up front that I am associated with them, because I’ve written two courses for their website. Danny Arena and Sara Light are IN the business of songwriting, they teach it and they live it. SongU.com will eventually become a collection of online courses which the songwriter will pay to use. Many of the gurus I’ve already mentioned are contributing courses to this website and it will become quite a full and fascinating resource for songwriters at all levels. SongU.com hasn’t fully launched as of the writing of this article, but in the meantime, you can also check out Danny & Sara’s other website, Craft Of Songwriting.

These are only a few of the major websites that I can personally recommend, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t more that are equally as good…there seems to be another songwriting website popping up every month or so. But the ones I’ve mentioned here have built up over time and have become as successful as they are because of all of the hard-working people behind them. Give them all a visit and tell ’em Irene sent you!

IJ

The Verse’s Purpose

In a more recent article “Don’t Bore Us, Get To the Chorus“, we discussed the obvious importance of that part of a song. But while the chorus might be considered the “sexiest” or most pivotal part of the song…the verse is what really sets the chorus up to succeed. Behind every successful chorus is a strong verse :)

So it’s important to understand that the verse plays as crucial a role as the chorus, and that you need to pay a lot of attention to whether or not your verses are doing their job. If the chorus is the summation, the peak, if you will, of the song, the verses are the storytellers that help to make the chorus make sense. And when I say story, I don’t necessarily mean “once upon a time”. This is something that confuses a lot of people at first, because not all songs are little 3 minute stories in the traditional sense of the word. However, all songs need a beginning, a middle and an end. When you look at your verses from a lyrical standpoint, sometimes it’s a good idea to give a one-line summation of each one, just to see how they are adding up within the context of the song.

For instance, the first verse might be “I met him (her)”, the second “we had a great time” the third “something went wrong”. That’s just a very basic story line, but you get the idea. You can examine other songs that way to see how they work. I took a look at a couple of more recent pop/rock hits, for no particular reason and with no bias toward any, other than the fact that my guitar students have wanted to learn them. One of those was “Bubbly”, by Colbie Caillat. Now I wouldn’t exactly call the lyrics of that song brilliant or inspired, but they are kinda cute.

Bubbly is basically just a love/lust song, describing how he gives her “tinglies in a silly place” :-). So how do the verses stand up to the story test? The first verse starts with “I’ve been awake for awhile now”. The second describes being in bed and “the rain is falling on my window pane”. And the third verse begins with “I’ve been asleep for awhile now”. The rest of the song more or less describes how he makes her feel, especially the chorus. But the verses do meet the criteria of creating a beginning, a middle and an end. Waking up, fooling around, going back to sleep :-).

Another song is “Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White T’s. This song is almost written in the form of a letter, the first verse being a kind of “hey, how are you and how’s it going?”. “Hey there Delilah, what’s it like in New York City?”. The next verse is expressing the thought that one of these days things won’t be so hard and we’ll have a better life together. The last verse more or less says take care of yourself…something you might end a letter with. The chorus, interestingly, is just one line “Oh, it’s what you do to me.” repeated over and over…the melody is what makes that chorus stand out. It’s beautiful. So in this song, similarly to “Bubbly”, the verses are telling the story, the chorus is simply expressing or describing a feeling.

The third song I’ll look at is Taylor Swift‘s “Teardrops On My Guitar”. Again, this is a love song…this one about unrequited love. It sets up the story with the first line “Drew looks at me, I fake a smile so he won’t see”, and goes on to lament the fact that Drew has somebody else, but the singer is still pining for him. There’s continuity with the first line of the second verse, “Drew talks to me, I laugh because it’s so damn funny”. And the third verse begins “Drew walks by me, can he tell that I can’t breathe?”. In this particular song, the bridge carries on the story “So I drive home alone…”, and at the very end of the song, the last line is a repeat of the first line “Drew looks at me, I fake a smile so he won’t see”. This is a little songwriting trick that I’ve used myself before. I call it the 360, because the effect is to create a feeling of coming back to the beginning again, coming full circle. In a song like this about unrequited love, the feeling is never resolved, is it? So the effect of the 360 is that the story continues on indefinitely.

One very critical final point about the verse; the first verse, specifically. The first line has to draw the listener in, so in spite of all of the hullabaloo over the importance of the chorus, pay attention, very special attention, to your first line. Sometimes the chorus is sung first for a similar effect…to draw the listener in.

So far we’ve only discussed how verses can work best in a lyrical context. But what about the music? Usually there is a musical contrast between verse and chorus, and more often than not, the chorus melody lifts to some degree. I once heard someone say that the chorus always contains the highest note in the song :) I can see why he’d say that because there is certainly is a feeling of a lot of choruses being at more of a fever pitch compared to the verses. Sometimes that is created just as much by the production than anything else; lots of background vocals coming in, maybe strings or other extra instruments being introduced, and the drummer riding the cymbals. This can give a sense of the chorus being louder and “higher”.

If you listen to the song I mentioned above, “Bubbly”…the melody of the chorus is not all that different from the verses, the notes are simply organized a little differently, they are shorter in length and the chords change more frequently. The melody in the chorus of each of the other songs definitely lifts up to some degree.

“Teardrops On My Guitar” follows the classic contrast of a softer verse and more emotionally dominant chorus. The notes are longer in the verses, the melody is in the lower register, but there’s a kind of intimacy in the way it is sung that pulls you in. Verses do tend to be more low key (I don’t mean IN a lower key, I just mean softer), but if you make them too much so then you take the chance of losing a listener pretty quickly. Where else do you think the line “don’t bore us, get to the chorus” came from? :) Songwriters often make the mistake of paying less attention to the verse melody and chord progression. But just as the verses need to drive the “story”, they also have to be compelling musically, enough so to keep those listener’s ears perked long enough to get to the chorus, if there is one. The performance, of course, also has an integral role. A lackluster vocal performance will make even the best melody a little mediocre. But I digress!

In “Hey There Delilah” the verse melody is again in a lower register, but the verses are more developed and much longer than the chorus. That’s because they are really doing the job of telling the story because the chorus has only that one emotional statement and that’s it...”Oh, it’s what you do to me.” You could write just about anything around a chorus like that. But it is made stronger by the verses, which do exactly the job they are meant to do, melodically and lyrically–to set the chorus up. Sometimes as you’re writing or re-writing a song, you realize that your verse melody seems to stand out more than your chorus. This is a good lesson…what do you do? One possibility is to switch them…make the verse melody the chorus and vice versa. Or you might want to find a new melody for the chorus altogether.

So now that we’ve examined the role of the verses more carefully, it’s time for you to go back through your songs and see how they measure up! It doesn’t mean you have to re-write anything that doesn’t work (although that’s certainly a good exercise!), but it will make you more aware of the function of the verse the next time you sit down to write a new tune. And remember, that sometimes things just work because they work, even if they break the so-called “rules”. Think of everything here simply as a guideline…but remember that sometimes it’s just as interesting to colour outside the line :)

IJ

The Muse – Some Personal Experiences

 

© I.Woloshen

A “muse” as a noun in the dictionary, is defined as “A guiding spirit. A source of inspiration.” You’ve likely heard many songwriters say, when discussing their writing, that they often don’t know where their inspiration comes from. Well, sometimes we know EXACTLY where it comes from 

The fact is that most of your inspiration comes from the people and events in your life. A new lover can be a “muse” (as can an old lover remembered :-). This is probably the most common…why do you think there are so many love songs out there?? But your muse can also come from emotional events, whether these are personal events that leave you deliriously happy or totally grief-stricken, or world events which can have the same impact. The events of Sept.11, 2001, for example, inspired thousands and thousands of people in creative ways. When good or bad things happen, we all get the muse at some point or another.

Stories about other people can inspire songs. I once wrote a song called “Calling” after watching a news magazine show on television telling the true story of a traveling salesman who died in his car on a mountain pass in the middle of winter simply because he got stuck in the snow. That may not seem very inspiring…but what HAUNTED me about the story was that this guy kept waiting for someone to drive by and help him out, and didn’t realize that JUST after he drove through the gates leading to the mountain pass, they were closed for the winter. So no one knew he was there. He sat in his truck and waited for someone to come along, and while he waited he started writing in this journal, a kind of long love-letter to his girlfriend. There’s much more to the story, but he was essentially stuck there for months trapped by heavy snow, and finally succumbed.

For a long time, I had that story at the back of my head. I began to write one song about it, but it just wasn’t working, so I left it again for awhile. One day, I was watching a special on television about another Canadian songwriter, and something about the way he played inspired me to sit down with my guitar and try some folkier chord progressions. I didn’t think of it right away, but once the music and melody were finished, I realized it would work perfectly for the story I’d been carrying around so long. The lyrics took me about six months to get right, but it finally came together.

One thing I’ve learned is to be patient. If you try to force your muse, it just doesn’t work. Your muse also pops up at the most unusual times, so be prepared! My muse often comes in the form of people; people who’ve inspired me or said things that resonated for me, and people I’ve fallen in love with, of course  But I can also find inspiration in IDEAS. I fall in love with ideas! The things I’m most interested in (besides music) often put me in a very heightened state of awareness. Books I’m reading will begin a flow of thought, and sometimes a line will come out of that, or an entire idea for a song. Science interests me, as well as philosophy, psychology and spiritual thinking. In one song I wrote years ago, “Fusion & Fire”, I used astronomical properties, like fire, the planets, and the universe, as metaphors for long lasting love. Sometimes I still stick astronomical references in my lyrics.

I am fascinated by eagles, and once wrote a song based on the fact that eagles always die with their faces turned toward the last light they see. I heard a preacher once talk about that fact in spiritual terms, so I used the the light as a metaphor for life after death. The result was a song called “Eagles Eyes”.

But really personal experiences often creep into my writing too. Like many hormone-crazed teens, I had a mad crush on a math teacher in high school. Many years later when I saw him again that same ol’ feeling hit me, and the result was a song called “Good For Me”. I used a few math references in it, enjoying the idea of playing with these terms in a different way. Not that long ago, a good friend moved away, and I wrote a song called “Miles Away”…but the song ended up being about the distance we feel in relationships sometimes. So your personal experiences don’t have to come out exactly as you experienced them, they can be used in many other ways.

The latest song I’m working on came from one line…this often happens to me. One line will come and I have to fill in the rest of the story. Where did that line come from? It just sort of popped out when I was fooling around with some chord progressions and a melody. Sometimes I wonder… 

Lovers, stories, world events, personal events, your own interests, the past, old friends…they can all be sources for your muse. I’ll bet you can even think of a few on your own 

IJ