Words are very tricky. There is an open-endedness and miscommunication to them that we can’t quite fully perceive. ‘Yes’ means ‘no’ and ‘maybe’ can mean anything. Lyrics are worse. Lyrics need to have a melody and need to make rhythmic sense!
Singers need to learn songwriting to compose their own songs with originality. When lyrics are made with intricacy, creativity, and logical reasoning, that’s when the peak of songs is found.
It is in the act of making original songs that you are defined apart from the crowd. There are a few things that compromise songwriting.
To Write Your Own Songs
Originality
The more parts of a song you produce from the scratch, from the initial idea to the final product, the more authentic it is. The more original it is. The more it is what you imagined it to be. The ability to write your own lyrics is the centerpiece of making your song sound real and original.
It’s not just about writing words, it’s about telling a story. Something that you have been through, your journey, or your perspective and ideas. It’s this beautiful idea that can be translated into words that are sung that come out as a song.
To be able to do that, it’s wonderful.
It’s also unique to you. Everyone goes to college or gets a job. The difference lies in the subtlety of life and how you perceive them to be. The idea isn’t original because you’re the only one who can have it. It’s original because you’re the only one who can tell it the way it is.
Control
Another great effect of being able to write your own songs is having control over your own music. I can’t emphasize how important this is for any creative person. In my humble opinion, it’s when you have control that you can really make it great.
Gone are the days when a record label’s director could tell you how you should like and what target audience you’ll have to target. No. This changed drastically when home recording became a viable option.
When writing songs, doing it yourself gives you control by default. You might be struggling with writing really strong lyrics but I’d suggest you learn the skill yourself. It’s almost mandatory in order to make an ‘original’ song.
Delegating the work to someone else can produce good work but it’ll never be what you want it to be or how you imagined it to be. If you’re new to this, try to soldier through the writing process yourself.
Practice Writing Bad Songs
Your first song isn’t going to be your best.
You have to practice living within a frame of rules of writing songs on a daily basis to get good at it rather than spending tremendous amounts of effort on a single one, initially. It is through the habit of writing bad songs that the ability to write a good one will emerge.
Once you feel you’re making good progress and are improving with your lyrics, take a step back and try to knock one single song out of the park. Do your best.
Then go back to your daily routine of writing songs.
What If I Write Bad Songs?
I will tell you the logic I use that I tell everyone. There are only so many bad songs or ideas you’ll write. Eventually and it’s sooner than later, you’ll come up with something amazing. A song that you can proudly say that it’s yours.
Believe in the numbers. If you write 100 songs, do you think all of them will be bad? Obviously not. Some of them will be great, some really bad but most of them will be okay.
As you go on writing you’ll start to improve your ‘average’ quality of the songs. That’s the meat you want to chew on. That’s the thing you ought to improve at first. Your basic ‘average’ quality of writing songs.
Opportunities
There are opportunities out there for songwriters other than just writing for yourself.
There is no shame in being under someone’s guidance which might also result in a job. Hey, someone has to write the lyrics for all the jingles too, right?
Getting an intern job as a songwriter will allow you to hone your skills while you might have someone above you, to begin with. If they can guide you (which they should) and provide you with a structure that’ll be amazing for someone who is starting out.
Someone like this will be your feedback system. Read about it in the ‘Why You Need a Feedback system’ subtitle.
Networking
Also, being a decent songwriter can bring you opportunities as you can now write songs for other people. It might be a bit of a challenge but a friend of mine once did it at a wedding for a couple getting married. Couldn’t believe it. Life is weird and crazy things like these do happen.
Put yourself out there with whatever skills you have and jump in and have fun. You never know when an opportunity might come up and what might lead to what. Write for yourself and then try to write for others as well.
About Online Courses
Just a quick little suggestion, here is something that will help you a lot.
You can learn songwriting from books and there aren’t any courses that I can fully recommend yet that are made just for songwriting.,
I have very strong views on why someone should learn music-related courses online and here’s why.
I have also made a dedicated page to which online courses you can buy and you can find it right here.
Whatever you end up doing, I hope you end up becoming better!