On Songwriting Part 3

Back in June I wrote a few blog posts on songwriting and as this is something ongoing in my life, I thought to make these posts semi-regular feature on the blog. Songwriting should be something you are working on all the time. It is a craft that only gets better with practise. I have spent quite a lot of time working on getting my songwriting skills to the level they are now and I feel I am only scratching the surface. So if by writing an occasional blog post on the subject and share what I have learned along the way, I hope it could inspire some of you writing better songs: -) To read the previous posts you can check them up here:

On Songwriting
On Songwriting Part 2

So now let’s get started with “On Songwriting Part 3”

I have been working on a lot of new songs in the past month or so and I noticed something. It is so easy to fall back into the old habits. I mentioned before that as a songwriter we should be writing songs not about ourselves, but the listener. Nobody wants to hear you moan about your own life. People need to connect to your song and if it is all about you complaining about the miseries of your life, people will walk away. And I noticed falling into that trap once again.

But I came up with a pretty cool trick on this. Why don’t you just write that song about how miserable your life is, or is not, how your girlfriend/boyfriend left you, or don’t get you… Write the song, pour your heart and soul into it, then walk away. Take some time to do other stuff, for example work on getting your website online 😉 Come back to it the next day and just change the viewpoint of the song. Go from Me to You and from You to him or her. Give it a try and see what happens.

I had a few songs that I felt were… very introvert… I listen back to them and they just sounded like me moaning. But once I changed the viewpoint, where I was telling someone else’s story. The songs went from being e moaning, to being almost small movies. And also let me look at them from another perspective. I actually ended up changing the story of one of the songs, as it no longer was about me. It allowed me to go from moaning to telling a story 🙂

Happy songwriting.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get three of his free songs go HERE and click Download