How to Write a Great Song – You must learn this above all else!

What is the number one thing that you need to know in order to make it in the music industry?

It’s the thing that the greatest artists all know and it’s the one thing that all record company A&R guys and managers are actually really looking for – no matter what other bullshit they might feed you.

Imagine what you can do for your career when you actually face up to this fact and this challenge.

And it’s simple. You must learn how to write a great song and also learn how to identify it when you’ve done it. Simple, but I’m afraid it’s not easy.

This is an edited version of one of the 10 Key Steps that we talk about in the guide that you can get from us by signing up over there on the sidebar at the right.

I decided to cut it down and use it as our second post as it is the most essential piece of advice you will ever get about how to make it as a recording and performing artist. Period!

This is the golden rule. Make no bones about it – without this you may as well pack it in now and go and do something much more sensible.

I’m really just handing on two of the greatest pieces of advice that I was ever given in this industry about songs:

(i) All the greatest songs are either basically ‘I Love You’ or ‘I Hate You / Don’t Need You / Am Better Off Without You’ etc; and

(ii) There are very, very, very few great songs and most bands / acts / artists only have one, or a handful, and that can sustain them for a career.

These are two pretty strong but simple, perhaps even obvious, statements but they need clarification and a pinch of salt for all their brilliance.

On the first point, if you look at your national music chart I guarantee that more than half the Top 40 or 20 or Hot 100 or whatever you have where you live, will be essentially conforming to that ‘I love you / I hate you’ paradigm. If you include general self-empowerment, I’ll bet its more like two-thirds. Not all of them will have an obvious title containing ‘love’ or ‘hate’ words but the basic lyrical theme will be on that topic.

In most cases, great songs are about raw human emotion.

On the second point, look at a career band once they have made four or five albums, and you are likely going to see something around 50 to 75 songs that they have recorded and released. How many of them are poor, how many are average, how many are good, how many are very good and how many are truly great? The answer is, not many, a handful.

It’s such a hard thing to define, but being truly great must mean that it’s a song that emotionally connects, moves you on a basic level and is so hooky that it’s in your head all day long. You know when you hear one, but they are hard to capture, hard to define, and crucially, really bloody hard to write!

But you know from your own experience that it really can take just one great song to break a band or act, and one per album from then on is enough to sustain the career momentum. If that is backed up with a bunch of very good songs, then even better. We all know of bands that seemed to go on and on for years with mediocre material after one huge smash.

Don’t set out at the start of your musical journey trying to write a hit song. You need to do some practice and it’s going to take time. What people forget is that songwriting is a craft.

Like any craft, experience and learning are key. You should study hit songs and try to take them apart and see why they emotionally touch you and why they work. You should try and identify the tricks of the trade. And then, later, you should set the toolkit that you have built to work at writing great songs.

I’m afraid I can’t teach you how to do it though! Sorry, I’ve been behind the scenes in the Music Industry, not out there being creative. There is good advice out there, but what I would hope you’d take in from this post is that you need to learn and perfect the skill.

I do know that for most songwriters I have worked with, they let the melody come first and let it dictate the flow of the lyrics. A melody isn’t good enough if you can’t easily remember it. Simplicity is a key part of their toolkit too. All too often a great talent fails because they over complicate a song and ruining it. K.I.S.S – Keep It Simple Stupid!

One last thing. Don’t think that a song has to be the way you first came up with it – there is always room for improvement. Smokey Robinson, not content with having written ‘My Guy’ for Mary Wells (fulfilling the golden rule above – unconditional love from a female perspective), then went a year later and wrote the flip version of that for the Temptations – ‘My Girl’. But, so the story goes, he and Ronald White knocked the song out in an hour or two and played it to Berry Gordy at Motown convinced that it was a hit.

He wasn’t impressed and they had to go away, rewrite and re-pitch it at least three more times, spending 50 hours plus on it before he agreed. They changed notes around, moved lines from the bridge to the intro, honed lyrics etc. Maybe it’s a myth, maybe it’s all true, but the lesson is clear. Keep honing a song until you know it’s a smash.