Songwriting 101
A thing that I’ve learned about writing songs is that you should always start with the melody (or at least chord progression) first. I can’t believe it took me as long as it has to come to this conclusion, but I realized recently that of all the songs I’ve written for my band, the only ones that have stuck were the ones that started out as just guitar parts and had the words added later.
I think the reason it works better that way (for me at least) is that generally playing the riff over and over does a few things: it allows me to flesh the riff out more fully, generally after playing around with it enough the bridge/chorus parts will begin to present themselves, and more importantly when coming up with the melody for a song first, it allows me to hear that melody in my head for a couple days. When I’m fairly certain that I have a good structure to hang a song on, it tends to bounce around in my head for a few days, until a subject matter for the song presents itself, which I can then write out to fit the melody.
That process is a lot more organic for me than what I’ve done sometimes, which is to try to write a song just with lyrics first and then fit a melody or chord progression to it later. This almost never works since the lyrics when I write this way tend to be much harder to fit into the framework of a song in anything approaching a natural manner, and it seems much more likely to fall back on some chord progression that I end up not really liking or that seems forced, and I usually give up on them eventually.
So, basically writing from a “music-first” standpoint seems to work way better for me. I just wish I had realized it sooner. The only problem becomes that an idea or theme for a song might present itself at a time when I don’t have access to a guitar, (usually this happens when I’m bored at work or during a lecture) which I suppose means I should just start carrying a Moleskine or something. It’s also an approach that will force me to play around on the guitar more, which is not a bad thing.
