Song Chops
“Your own voice is the voice that carries you through life the best.” – Nanci Griffith
5 Step System For Songwriting Success
An easy approach to start writing songs today! Combine with the Song Builder Template and the Songwriting Process Template as a starter kit!
Simple Song Builder Template!
Everything you need to get your song’s story and structure into a clear message. After all, you have a reason for telling the story.
Songwriting Process Infographic!
This easy-to-follow infographic will help you get from the beginning to the end of a song. We’ll also show you exactly how to implement each part!
Daily Creator Songwriting Worksheets
Each is designed to provide you with a song-focused action and help you complete songs!
Lucinda Williams “Car Wheels On A Gravel Road”
Lucinda Williams is a songwriting super-shero. Yes, most successful women who have to deal with a male-dominated industry often are. But, she was one of the first women, no - songwriters, to raise Folk and Americana music to a "maybe Nashville needs to grab a little...
Jason Isbell “Cumberland Gap”
Having worked in the Cumberland Gap area back in the day, I'd drive up 25E through Tazewell TN, past the Mustang Lounge, and wind my way through the gap toward Middlesboro Kentucky. Why do I remember these places so well? I was standing in the back room of a grocery...
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings “The Way It Will Be”
If you've followed the folk and Americana genres, or read Pat Pattison's books on songwriting, you know who Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are. Since Revival, their first album in 1996, Welch and playing partner David Rawlings have become Americana legends. One of...
Song Sketching Exercise Using Story Arcs
If you've ever been in a high school English class, you've studied how drama is created in a play, a novel or short story. So you knows the "story arcs" that can occur and the sequence of how drama unfolds. You know, the introduction of characters, their struggles,...
Song Sketching: Tell Stories Like A Movie
Song Sketching is very similar to object writing, and is the next step in the process to craft your song. Unlike object writing, which focuses intensely on a single object and allows for associations to occur, song sketching has a big picture goal: create a vehicle to...
Poetry As Lyrics: Using Anaphora
We've all heard it: poetry as lyrics just doesn't work. But, as your songwriting skills grow, and you begin using figurative language like similes, metaphors, anaphora and imagery, you'll naturally begin writing more poetically. After all, if you've been using a...
Rhyme Families: Your Secret Weapon
Using rhyme families effectively can help you not only move through a song, but add nuances to the rhythm, melody and feel or tone imparted. The goal is to find rhymes that don't sound awkward, like "with love I swing for the fences/when I see you it all commences;"...
Keith Urban & Mary Gauthier: Drinking Songs
Mary Gauthier's "I Drink", and "Nobody Drinks Alone," written by Matraca Berg and Jim Collins (recorded by Keith Urban) are two great examples of well-written songs about the same subject but with very different perspectives. There are two songwriting tools used by...
Rhyme Patterns
I think understanding rhyme and rhyme patterns is one of the best ways to increase your songwriting ability. To me, rhyme is one of the fundamental building blocks, or can be one of the most destructive forces, in a song. While a literal scene is important, the rhythm...
You have songs in you! Write your hit song today. And let the world hear it!