lyric writing

Fast Lyric Writing: How to write single concept song lyrics for licensing. #songwriting

In my last blog post, I discussed ways to write several songs at once and how to keep them from all sounding the same. Today I'll talk about writing a lyric with a singular emotion quickly. [Scroll to the bottom if you'd like to hear a finished product of something we did last week.]

One of the few remaining lucrative frontiers in songwriting and production is for film and TV licensing. Not only do films and TV shows need songs for IN the shows, they also need songs for the advertisements ABOUT the TV shows. Each of these contexts has special requirements lyrically and musically. Today I'm going to specifically talk about the types of lyrics that are appropriate for use in an advertisement for a TV show...

The Story Behind "Human" - Dedicated to Nichole Nordeman

I'm excited to tell the story behind this song because the past two months' singles had much different inceptions than this release.  Instead of writing to someone else's target given for a pitch opportunity and having to crank it out in a couple of days, this song came to be through the more artistic and organically inspired path.  I simply wrote it because I wanted to. It was something on my heart, the melody just "came to me" as the muse whispered it in my ear, and I documented what was forming in my head as I went about my days.  I'm going to break it down into the various facets and talk about the reasons and creative process.

The unorthodox story behind "Until I Have You"

As so often is the case, the path to creating anything is rarely short or straight, and this song is no exception.

As I've written in the past, one of the few remaining ways for songwriters/artists/producers to make money with music anymore is to license songs to film, TV, and advertising.  Sometimes we get an email that has come to us [and goodness knows how many others], giving the specifics of what someone is looking for.  Sometimes there's another song they've temped into their video, but it's a song that's either unavailable or too expensive and they want something that FEELS and SOUNDS like that song, but is NOT that song.  And sometimes we decide to set everything else aside and do our best to crank something out that might fit their needs, in hopes that we might land the license and pay some bills.  

The Story Behind "It's You I Love"

This month's release was one of our "in case of emergency, break glass" releases for the Year of the Groove.  We had planned to put out a song I wrote called "Human" this month, but after talking about the promotional angles, we decided to wait on that one until we could properly line things up and not rush. So, we pulled out this track that was never officially released, polished up the mix, mastered it, and sent it through the pipeline.  It would have been released eventually on an EP I've got planned in my head, but I'm excited it's out there now because I actually really love this track and I'm glad to be able to talk about how it came about.