Teaching the Tricks of the Trade

If you’ve visited my Ko-Fi page before to hear the unreleased songs I share with my subscribers, you may have noticed that collaborative coach songwriting is one of the services I offer on the commissions tab.

One of my favourite things to do is to teach aspiring songwriters about the craft, and I truly believe that one of the best ways to teach people how to write songs is to walk them through the process of writing one together. After all, you can talk about how to ride a bicycle all day long, but until you get on it and figure out where to put your feet and how to turn the handle bars, none of it is really going to sink in. 

So here’s what I do: I ask my commissioning co-writer to bring some title ideas to give us a place to start. We connect on Zoom (sometimes from opposite sides of the world), and I walk them through the steps of deciding what direction the song should take. We flesh out the lyric and melody, make every word fight for its right to be in the song, and we mold the idea into a finished product that meets the goal for the session (whether that’s a commercially country radio pitch, a pop song, a sync pitch, or just a straight up great song to sing for the people you love). Three hours later we’ve birthed a brand new song. It’s a beautiful thing.

If you’re interested in hearing a brand spanking new song from one of these coach songwriting sessions, you can tip me a cup of coffee and hear it on Ko-Fi: here’s that link. (If you’d like to hear more of my songs that haven’t been released into the world, consider subscribing for a $4 coffee per month and you’ll unlock a zillion more to explore.)

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