Tami Mulcahy: Start Writing

It All Starts With a Song...be a Songwriter


You’ve got what it takes...yes, you do?

Every song starts with a songwriter. A pen in hand, a melody floating in your brain and the guts to write it down.

Don’t worry about the radio. What you hear on the radio is production. Drums, bass guitar, lead guitar, synthesizers...it’s all added later, at the end of the songwriting process.

Write with your best instrument. No, that does not mean you have to play one well. My best instrument is my voice. Here’s a secret. I don’t know how to read music or write it down. I wish I did. But the melodies go around and around in my head and I play them best with my voice.

TEENAGERS: Don’t write for the radio. You don’t have to be the next Dave Matthews or Faith Hill. Be yourself!! Writing is about allowing 'yourself' to feel, express, be fragile, be honest. To quote a great writer, Gretchen Peters, writing is a time for “magical thinking”.

Here’s the scoop!

Fundamentals: FORM, FEELING & FURNITURE

FORM: Boring stuff first. Most songs heard on the radio are in the format of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. There are other forms but let’s stick with this one for the moment. Know the rules first before you break them.

The chorus has the title of the song. It should appear in the same place each time you sing it. The title is the main idea for the song and usually a catch phase...easy to remember-“Welcome To The World”. The chorus is the reason you write the song. The chorus is where the listener feels like they come home. It stays the same each time and that’s why most people really remember the chorus.

Each verse tells the story. Just like a story, it has a beginning, a middle and duh, an end. The first line of the song is like your kick off or intro line to a paragraph. The first verse is the start of your story and in the second verse continue the story.

Each verse needs to tie back into the chorus somehow as if the line were one continued thought. “...if it were up to you what would you choose...Give Some Back.”

The number of lines in the verses are the same. If there are four lines in your first verse, there are four lines in the second. Five lines in the first verse then five in the second.

No body likes a story that rambles all over the place. Keep your idea for the song very simple, very concise. You can’t save the world in three minutes.

So what’s the bridge. After a couple minutes of hearing a song, the listener wants to be taken somewhere different, melodically and lyrically. The bridge sums up the purpose of the song...just like the conclusion line in a paragraph. Give Some Back has a great example.

FEELING: Here’s the scoop on feeling. If the song doesn’t have feeling, why write it. I want my songs to make you laugh, cry, giggle, feel silly, feel encouraged, be mad, angry, happy. Feeling is what makes people want to hear the song again and again. Show your feelings in a song. It’s OK to very honest with how you feel.

FURNITURE: Now for the fun part. The details. I want to feel like I pulled up a chair and I am sitting in your story. If we are on the playground, I want to know what kind of day it is, who is on the playground, what noises do you hear, what does it smell like, what kinds of games are being played, what are kids actually saying to each other... “throw me the ball, hey, it’s my turn”. Get specific.

Use metaphors to describe the scene...leaves are falling like rain. My friend John smells like he just got out of the swamp and he looks like it too. If a friend calls you a name, what is it, how did it make you feel. In writing A Page From Your Book, the kids wanted to tell the story of a new kid at the school who didn’t have any friends yet so he was lonely and he looked really different. So I asked for exactly what made him look different and what does lonely look like?

Look at the furniture in Give Some Back. It could say-I went fishing with my dad and we talked about having a lot of money and wouldn’t it be nice to Give Some Back. But we painted the picture with lots of furniture. Fishing poles and bucket of bait. Trout were biting. Some were big , some were small, between the two of us there’s more than enough...Give Some Back.

Now, before you go writing your next story or song, do this..... Become a good listener. When you hear a song, I want to you listen to the furniture. Be critical. When you read a book, look for the furniture. Before you know it, you’ll be writing furniture like crazy, not on the furniture. Just kidding!!

Then when you write, go nuts on furniture. Let one thought lead you to another.

Golden Rule- Never, ever edit yourself when you are in the creative flow!!! When you are brain storming, coming up with all sorts of ideas, there is no wrong or right.

Write down anything that comes to mind. You will end up using a really small part of what you came up with but you’ll have a lot to choose from.

Is this you? Do you sit in front of the computer trying to do a school assignment and just stare at the screen. Nothing you type is good enough. Delete. No that doesn’t make sense. Delete.

So try this. Just start typing. Space down if you have a new weird idea. Leave lots of white space, room on the paper

In the old days, there were no computers and actually I don’t use them that much to do the creative stuff. I like to write all over a piece of paper, sideways, this way, that way. Keeps the mind open.

When you get a whole lot of stuff to work with, then use your cut and paste to get the ideas to come together and make sense. You may still need to do a bit more creative work but if the story is already there, you’ll just be filling in the blanks.

Don’t delete anything. I make a print out of all my ideas so I always them.
That way when I start moving things around, I have all my thoughts next to me to draw from.

I can tell you that most songs, people slave over for weeks and sometimes years. Sometimes it comes easy…we call that a gift. Sometimes it’s a painful process.

Rhyming- Roses are red, violet are blue, don’t rhyme all the time, catch a clue. Hard rhymes like those are great to use. But it gets old always hearing it and as a writer it boxes you in. You end up with what is called forced rhymes. It’s important in lyrics to write like you would talk. It’s hard to do.

Soft rhymes give you freedom. Anything for freedom. Put vowel sounds together. Soft rhymes includes proud/doubt, friends/in/him, guts/us.

You can use a combination of hard and soft rhymes with in a song.

There’s a lot of stuff here. If you have any questions, email me. A great resource is the WEST COAST SONGWRITING ASSOCIATION (WCS)

The most important thing: Pick up a pen…start!