I wrote a new song yesterday. 

Songwriting is a very intense, very personal experience. It requires at least a basic proficiency in a couple of disciplines – first, you have to understand music theory – chords, scales, harmony – that sort of thing. As a lyricist, you also have to be able to both rhyme, and express yourself as a poet does – either telling a story or using a verse form to advance an idea. Do that, and you can probably cobble together some kind of workable song. 

But real songwriting goes way deeper than that. When you get past the ‘learning your craft’ stage, you get into the area where you are exposing your soul through the combination of lyric and melody. As a result, I don’t think it’s possible to compose a real song without revealing yourself. Lyrics come from the heart, and demand 100% honesty. You can’t fake that – at least I can’t.

I get people asking me all the time, how the creative process works. “What comes first? The lyrics or the melody?” “Do you write the all the lyrics first and then write the melody?” “Do you write the music first and then write words?” And my honest answer is – “It depends.”

Sometimes (like yesterday) I noodle around on an instrument – in this case my guitar – and come up with some melodic fragment that appeals to me. That fragment suggests a melody, which in turn suggests chords. As I started firming up the melody, I put the idea that I wanted to express into words. The melody suggested a rhyme scheme, which then influenced the way I could advance the thoughts through the form of the song. The lyrics, in turn, helped dictate where the melody would go, especially on the bridge section. 

After I wrote the song, I played it a couple of dozen times, refining it, and thinking about the format (number of versese, instrumental chorus, intro, ending). That helps me get past the initial phase where I accept my first instincts, and forces me to take a critical look at what I’ve written. At this point, most of the flaws jump out at me, and I’m able to deal with them. Sometimes that requires that I cut things that I like – but just don’t fit for one reason or another. It may be that they’re redundant. It may be that the rhyme just doesn’t work. Or perhaps I’m putting too much emphasis on one point, and need to work another into the narrative. Changes like this can be brutal, but they are necessary to push a song from “okay” to “good” or even “great.” 

Sometimes, my workflow is completely different – at times, an entire song suggests itself as a lyric or a melody, and the rest comes later. It depends. Whatever the intial stage is, however, the refining process is fairly consistent. 

After it’s refined, I generally write a lead sheet of the melody, lyrics and chords. That way, I can’t forget it, and can submit it for copyright. More importantly, wriing it down helps me insure that I’ve got a consistent form (verses all the same length, etc.) and that I’m not missing something important. 

Now let’s pretend that everything I just wrote was not about songwriting, but instead about marketing. The song is your marketing campaign. The lyrics are your headlines and copy points. The melody your visuals, your harmonies, your audio, TV, radio – whatever. 

So how does your creative process work? Do you think about your marketing creatively? Do you allow inspiration to dictate what you do, or are you locked into a rigid process that stifles creativity? Think about it. Try some new ways to nurture that creative spark into a conflagration of creative ideas. Then the next time someone asks you how you work, when you come up with insanely great marketing campaigns, and if you write the headlines or copy points, or central theme first, you too can say, “It depends”…and mean it.