what goes into writing a song

I'm posting this on impulse (as usual) since some people have asked how I come up with songs. I'm a bad example so don't learn from me. Go learn from John Mayer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXfErND38PI

But anyway. It goes one of two ways:

1) I stumble upon a nice riff/ chord progression.

What this means is that I take a guitar chord and bend it, twist it until I find something new. It's a very long and difficult process and I've only succeeded once. Which is a very bad statistic, considering I've been trying for six months.

Horrifying thing is I can do that in 5 minutes on the piano. BUT I don't want my songs on the piano. Which is a frustrating reality.

2) I have an idea/motivation.

What this means is that during the day I could just be thinking about random things and suddenly a nice line pops into my head. As I was telling a friend, "One day I was walking with Anne and Rain, and I was beside them, and there was this stack of signs in front of me that I was being forced into because of where Anne had positioned herself. And suddenly I remembered all the movies where guys gawk at girls and they let go of their drink, for example. Or walk into signs. That's a huge cliche but suddenly this line appeared in my head:" You walk me into signs."

Which has the potential to be some super sweet cute line in some soppy love song. Which i will never write. I claim ownership over the line though, so hands off.

Or I want to write something for someone. Although this is quite rare this kind of project gets finished, not abandoned halfway or thrown by the wayside. I don't know why but it just does.




Then you have to write lyrics. How do you write lyrics? I don't really want to go into details but first you should set down a criteria for the words you use. Then you 'force' words into that criteria. e.g. John Mayer's 'heart in my hands'. Or 'tiny tragedies'. By themselves they don't make sense but in the larger sense of the song it works and when people see the way it works, that particular way you 'forced' it in they think it's great.


I think.


oh well.