Who wants to write better songs?
I doubt anyone would answer “no” to such a question. If you’re a writer, you want to write better lyrics, better melodies, better songs—songs that connect, that minister, that set hearts on fire.
Much easier said than done, right? Great songwriting takes time and a tenacity to not finish until it’s, well … finished.
That’s why I want to pull back the curtain on my own writing a bit and share with you what I’m learning.
I love to study songwriting. Not just great books on songwriting, but listening to songwriters and studying how they write songs.
As a songwriter, I’m always wanting to develop and find new ways to craft lyric and melody. In the early days, I was all about the lyric.
I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t it always about the lyric? Yes, lyrics are important. Especially as worship songwriters. If we’re writing songs for the gathered church to sing in worship, we need to approach that responsibility with seriousness.
But my passion for lyrics became a problem of saying too much. I was (and sometimes still am) so paranoid about right theology, avoiding cliche and saying something of substance that I over-communicate.
Enter my song suffering.
The Suffering Song Equation
Yes, there is an equation to a bad song. Matter of fact, there’s a couple:
Great lyrics + bad melody & phrasing = Forgettable Song
Bad lyrics + great melody & phrasing = Unhelpful Song
No one wants to write forgettable or unhelpful songs, right? That’s why the marriage of lyric and melody is so important.
And in this post I’m going to show you how to get the best of both worlds.
The strength of popular, top-40 pop music is the hooks. Songs are crafted in a specific way to resonate with the human brain. John Seabrook has done some fascinating research in his book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.
