we're back with another bonus episode of the songwriter Theory podcast this is going to be part eight of addressing your biggest songwriting struggles no I didn't forget about this series just didn't have time for a hot second but we're back we're going to finish out responding to these not necessarily in this episode unless actually almost certainly we're not going to finish in this episode no it's not important to have watched the other ones if you're thinking oh my goodness part eight do I ha
ve to go watch the other ones no they're all self-contained each one is me addressing different of your responses to this survey that I sent out and whether you are somebody that actually responded to this and you're waiting to hear specifically what I have to say about your songwriting struggle and maybe the advice I give or whatever it might be but also you might be somebody who shares a struggle with another songwriter out there in fact in going through these I've realized wow there are a lot
of themes that come up over and over so there might be something in here to help you as well let's talk about [Music] it hello friend welcome to another episode of the songwriter Theory podcast another bonus episode talking about your biggest song writing struggles if you haven't already be sure to grab my free guide 20 different ways to start writing a song starting songs and finishing songs or some of the recurring themes that come up here and this free guide will help you with starting songs
it's a cheat sheet now it's much shorter it's very easy practical to apply great way to stay creatively fresh and just it's good to have a variety instead of being stuck in one way to start a song Especially because sometimes the one way to start a song isn't actually what's best for us maybe you've always started a song writing lyrics first and you haven't even contemplated that maybe an easier way to write songs for you is actually starting on the music side maybe something specific like a ba
seline or a guitar riff or chord progression regardless it's a great way to mix things up songr theory.com sfree guu let's dive into question or feedback I guess response there's the word number one lately I've been having trouble getting into the flow and starting a project Andor staying focused it's a big problem in today's society yes yes it is also I have trouble finishing projects and following through and letting them out into the world I'm not very experienced at the mixing process but I
know what sounds good at least to me and I know I can figure out how to use the mixing Tools in Ableton Live 11 Suite which I recently acquired I'm not an EDM artist however Ableton is perfect for the kind of music I want to play and I'm playing with all of its tweakable sounds and effects and features but I feel like my music is so far removed from the mainstream that there's no point in putting it out there because a no one is going to like it or listen to it and B I want people to hear it but
that's not the most important thing I like I I make music because it's what I've always done I'm originally a singer songwriter and trying new things with Ableton on keyboard guitars bass drums do I need an attitude adjustment should I go back to busking on Ninth Street with my classical guitar and harmonica what do you think there's a lot in that one let's start with the first main thing that I get from that which is having trouble getting into the flow in starting a project Andor staying focu
sed and I'll give you the what has become one of my favorite phrases for this that helps keep me accountable and I think is is just a a very short way to say what I think encapsulates what the combination of inspiration flow what to do when not inspired and that's ride the wave when it comes ride the waves when there is no wave paddle anyway I guess a sort of a surfing analogy or some other Beach based thing but the idea is that yeah when you do get into Flow State when it does happen which will
get into how I think it happens generally in a second but when you do get into it double down on it right if if you write songs like I do from 11 to midnight every night uh with room to expand it right and and on weekends I spend more time but for week nights that's kind of my 11 to 12 uh half the time it ends up being 11 to 12:30 or longer but on a night where you reach Flow State maybe don't be done at 12 right just ride that wave as long as it will take you within reason right if if you thin
k you can stay up till 2:30 that morning and man inspiration is there do it ride that wave while it's there and when it's not there when you're not in Flow State when you're not inspired paddle anyway because you can still make good progress on songs you can write great songs without inspiration this whole total Fable just made up crap that's probably largely from Hollywood and what we glamorize which is like oh the magic moment and all that crap which is just not a realistic look at Art um but
you know a lot of great songs probably most great songs are perspiration not inspiration and that's not to say that inspiration played no part but the the fantasy of like oh it's just a perfect song came together in half an hour that happens but that's very much the exception not the rule and if you were to hear the stories of your top 10 favorite songs from your favorite artist in all likelihood maybe one of them had that magic 30 minute story but probably the other nine if not all 10 are like
yeah you know I I for the longest time I couldn't get the verse lyric to work so I kind of set this song on the shelf for a couple of years this was originally going to be for the previous album that happens all the time and artist will say this was originally going to be for the previous album but I just couldn't get it done in time it just wasn't working and now it turns into one of the best songs on the new album because it just needed more time to digest that happens and that's through persp
iration very often work paddling anyway that and how to get into flow state is working without without uh expecting that you must get into Flow State it's like inspiration most inspiration is earned yes you can sit on your couch watch Netflix and be inspired to write a song absolutely that happens but you're going to be more inspired if you don't just wait to write whenn inspiration strikes there's many times that at 11 o'clock I'm tired I you know I don't think I'm really in a songwriting mood
I don't feel inspired but I start getting to work and 15 minutes in 5 minutes in in 30 minutes in all of a sudden I get into a flow State because I force myself to work on it anyway and you know I think that's advice people don't like to hear but I don't know it is what it is what it is many times work is the same thing in fact me recording today is the same thing almost any time almost any time that I do recordings I try to batch to a degree so when I set my camera up I like to at least get two
video recorded out of it sometimes more but a lot of times when I first set up the camera I'll sit in my chair and just hem and ha I'm like I don't know my hair looks stupid today I feel bloated I just feel tired and I just I don't know if who cares about what I have to say you know there's a million things that can enter my mind right or you know sometimes the video I just feel like H there's something off about my outline I feel like I overthink it there's a million things that come up excuse
s but usually when I hit the record button and just get started maybe even in the first couple minutes I have some bad takes and I just but then I hit I hit stride and then I love it I love doing this but sometimes I have to get started to remember that I love doing this or to hit that flow State and with songwriting and anything else is the same so you got to earn the flow state by working without expecting the flow state to always come or without expecting it to come you know within 5 minutes
or I'm out that's a part that's part of it so Ando are staying focused it's a big problem in today's so Society it certainly is put yourself in a position to make it easier right I this something I feel like I've talked about a lot as sort of a central concept that I think applies to life in general but certainly to songwriting is remove the the friction points remove try try as best you can to make it as Downstream as possible to do the right thing so for instance should you try to write songs
when your adorable daughter is crawling around around you and she's playing and she's eating food and your wife is you know busy cleaning the house or working on her side project and she's right next to you or she's chalking you or she's watching that's not the right time to song WR right it's just not the right time to do some songwriting of course you're not going to be able to concentrate don't try to song write songs when while you're watching football I've tried before it doesn't work very
well I get very engrossed in football the reason that I do my songwriting from 11 to 12 is my daughter has been asleep for hours at that point so I'm out of dad mode more or less I'm always in dad mode to a degree but you know I'm even the high of like spending time with her and playing with her until she goes to bed has kind of faded I've I've had time to you know think by myself sort of get into more of a songwriting mode and my wife is asleep most of the time and if not she's been upstairs fo
r hours reading or something so it's quiet in fact right now we're almost at 11:00 it's 10:45 technically I'm going to bleed into my songwriting time recording this uh so I'll just go past midnight is what I'll do but I'm putting myself in a position to be able to succeed even things like I do it in the basement and I I keep it pretty dark right now it's not because I need the lights for video so that I'm not just casting Shadows but but I have one lamp in this basement that I turn on and someti
mes I this this one back here for those of you watching on video I'll I'll leave that one lamp on for a whole 500 foot basement that is what personally gets me sometimes I'll even like change the color of like this blue one back here to something that just is inspiring me am I doing Rock Hard music maybe I'll turn it into red maybe I'll keep it blue if I'm doing something that's more calm think about all those sorts of things how do you reduce the friction to staying focused I've talked to about
things like leave you know turn your phone off leave your phone upstairs don't have your phone on you something I've done recently is especially when I'm writing lyrics I for the most part now don't write lyrics at the computer anymore I did for a long time I've been writing lyrics in a notepad now now when I compile the lyrics and start to edit the lyrics that I do on my computer because it's easier you can have saved versions it's easier at that point but for the initial writing process or wh
en I go back to the rewriting process pen and paper and I hate writing I'm bad at it now because I type I've T I typed everything for like 15 years I never really wrote except when I'm signing a check or something which who signs checks anymore so I'm slow at writing I hate writing I feel like my wrist is going to fall off because just awful and yet it is distraction free because I can't you know go to YouTube I can't anything that I would be distracted by a text me I can't it's just a pen and p
aper there's nothing to distract me so think about putting yourself in a position to focus and then give yourself some Grace right it might take some time I I don't know your situation maybe you're one of those people that's like helplessly attached to Tik Tok and you scroll three hours a day I don't know U my guesses you're not that um which I'm guessing largely based on the apply to Age based on some of these other things you're saying um I'm guessing you're older than I am and I feel like the
people that are helplessly addicted to Tik Tok are mostly people who are like 10 to 25 or something um but anyway we could go on about that I feel like I've talked about this a lot in other sections hopefully there's a lot of good actionable stuff there um but give yourself Grace but work at it actually I I'll throw one more example in there this is more for the recording thing uh if you've been a listener for a while you know that my personal Bugaboo is recording vocals uh songwriting I don't
really tend to struggle with finishing songs the the writing of songs I don't really even struggle with finishing the recording of songs except for vocals and that's because I just feel weird about recording vocals in that in a house that isn't very sound proofed at all where like a lot of my vocals are are belty and stuff and so it's something where like if if my time to work on music is 11: to 12 I would wake my wife up if I did my style of singing recording in the basement so that is a huge p
roblem right it's a huge problem because I do have to spend a decent amount of time on vocals so the fact that I have to wait for my wife to be gone you know out of the house so if you know there's an afternoon where she's going to my sister-in-law's basketball game and she's taking our child that's like I I better hope that I'm vocally I get vocally in the zone for those two hours cuz that's the only two hours I'm going to have for the next two weeks that's a problem so I realized recently you
know what fixes that problem is if I finally build not my vocal booth that is good for you know making the sound inside the booth good and that but it's not good for preventing me from bothering other people with noise and it's not good about keeping the freaking furnace or my dogs barking from ruining the recording and I realized you know what with some help uh I can build a vocal booth for like a th000 bucks maybe 1500 bucks that does a really really good job that I could sing very very loudly
and not worry about disturbing people in the house so that now in 25 minutes if it were built it's not yet but if it were built I could be like vocals is what I need to do so I'd be reducing the friction to recording vocals and not only that but I'm going to have my computer monitor in there and my Mouse in there what or what a computer monitor in there and my mouse in there why because I don't want to have to get outside of the booth and click record and go back into the booth no no no I want
to be able to even do something where it's like okay there's one word I keep screwing up I'm just going to record me singing that one word over and over click go click go click go I don't have to move I'm reducing the friction I'm making it as easy as possible to record vocals so i' I've constantly been working towards that even the way I set up this video studio is in the same way I have two camera things now on the wall so they literally like won't move the camera is exactly in the right place
I just place the camera and basically go you don't care about the details of this I'm just giving examples I could go on forever about the things that I've personally implemented for songwriter Theory and also for songwriting and planning on implementing in the future that is all designed to reduce the friction to being productive reduce that friction to almost zero make it as easy and trivial as possible to get into the zone to not have an excuse uh by the way book read Atomic habits if you ha
ven't read Atomic habits I think that will help with a lot of this fantastic book all right another main point you made I feel like my music is so far removed from the mainstream that there's no point in putting it out there because a no one is going to like or listen to it and B I want people to hear it but it's not the most important thing so and then you basically go on to ask uh you know do I need an attitude adjustment should I go back to busking on 9th Street with my classical guitar and h
armonica what do you think so I don't know the answer to the busking on Ninth Street with my classical guitar and harmonica I don't know the answer to that that's up to you is that something you enjoy doing I think you need to Soul search about like what what is your goal with music right because the answer to this depends on what your goal is um it sounds like you're saying that I just I guess I would say I don't you go on to say I make music because it's what I've always done I'm going to push
back on that a little bit I don't think that's precisely true I think you just haven't thought really sat down and thought why do I do this there's of course a deeper why you don't just like spend a lot of your life doing something for no reason like strug mod I don't know I just do it there is a deeper reason right is it how you process things is it how you deal with emotions so that you don't you know you don't destructively deal with them by turning to alcohol or drugs or you know something
bad or you know you're a more pleasurable person to be around because you process things with your songwriting uh is is it is it that you understand the power of music and for you person Al music has changed your life or saved your life or impacted your life deeply and you want to be able to have that impact on other people too you know I don't know what the answer is and it doesn't have to be any of those things it could be something totally different but I would think about what what is that a
nd then and then probably you will answer your own question uh but I would say don't worry about what other what you think other people will or won't like first of all because everybody's wrong uh for for example right now there's something called bardcore and I'm pretty sure the YouTube channel has like half a million or a million Subs so very popular and it literally is like Eminem Disturbed I think uh I think I want to say this some Breaking Benjamin I I don't remember all the artists but uh
a bunch of rap and hardcore music I want to say there's a corn song or two that is literally in the in the style of I don't even know what the name of that is but like when you think of of you know ancient England King Arthur kind of vibe and bards right it's that style of music which would be the epitome seemingly of antiquated oh nobody nobody listens to that anymore and yet it's back because somebody brought it back and they found a way to make it cool and that people like oh it's Eminem Lose
Yourself or whatever song they picked I don't remember and it's it's B it's in it's SP thing and then a lot of people are like actually I kind of dig it like not ironically I I dig it or uh I know this through YouTube shorts not through uh Tik Tok but presumably I'd probably start on Tik Tok but there's this trend especially with like North Sea videos I don't know if you've seen those I'm a sucker for them right now um but basically they have this SE Shanty Style song and it I think it's techni
cally a song from Pirates of the Caribbean and a cant style but guess what that's going to do it's going to repe people going to be like dude SE shanties are sick like why did we just let them be in like pirate movies and and you know originally of course they were a a real thing but we don't listen to that anymore but they're cool so don't worry about what you think people do or don't like cuz who knows and then also who cares and and if there's even one person out there that desperately wants
music to exist that is your music who are you to take that away from them right so I encourage you you know release it anyway if you have it done release it anyway don't get in your own head about you know oh I don't even care if people listen but I do kind of care which is usually how most of us are right like oh I don't care if people listen but of course you do of course we would all rather rather have a million people listen to her song than two right um but yeah don't worry about mainstream
that like I don't know I I think we're at the point where mainstream is almost a complete facade like it's just made up where a lot of things that are considered mainstream are actually on their way out a great example of this is like mainstream media I don't know if you've seen the numbers of the percentage of people that like trust mainstream Media or still watch mainstream media but like we're at the point where like an episode of Joe Rogan which is considered like alternative or whatever he
gets more listeners than like NBC CNN and all those joke mainstream media Outlets combined right so you think oh mainstream is what most people listen to for music or movies or but in movies I think that's probably still true I guess by definition but for a lot of things what we perceive as mainstream like oh it's what's on pop radio like yeah that's a specific subset right there's there are people that will just listen to the crap pop stuff that's fed to them and that's their idea of this is w
hat today's music is those people exist that's even a lot of people a lot of normies who like don't even really care about music they're just like oh my gosh I love Taylor Swift because that's what the radio fed me and she speaks to me and it you know those people which is not to say you can't be a legit musician love to I'm not I'm not trying to dis that I'm just saying like the average Swifty is is not uh you know it's just your average person who listens to pop artists is a person who would l
isten to pop artists and that's fine but there's a whole other squads of people that would never listen to what's on pop we think it's horrible and not all of it but a lot of it and I just like I would listen to almost anything but what's on pop radio there are some exceptions but tons of people like me exist nobody I know personally almost nobody I know personally actually likes pop music my wife is probably the closest and she detests most of it but nobody I know personally that I'm friends wi
th or have any sort of close relationship with is like oh my idea of music is what is on mainstream pop radio and by the way I don't have hipster friends I don't have a single hipster friend I'm not hipster at all I actually I could rant for hours about how I think hipsters missed the point which hipsters that thing's dead isn't it it's like man buns it was like a thing for 4 years and then it just disappeared thank god um anyway not the point at all hopefully that was helpful though um so yeah
release your music don't get in your own head about what you think people do or don't like uh because I bet the people who released the bardcore stuff that nobody's going to like this um and yet here we are creating a Melody I have lots of lyrics but struggle with creating tune I do not have much music theory okay I think music theory is most helpful when writing chords for a Melody you already have or writing chord progressions just in general or making your own chord progressions or writing mu
sic that isn't necessarily strictly a chord progression that's where Music Theory comes in I'm not sure there's any scenario where you need music theory to write a Melody because in any scenario let's say let's say you have lyrics you can speak your lyrics out loud and then start to try to sing your lyrics out loud and you don't need to know music theory to know oh that Melody sounds good and that works um where you would need music theory is then you need to figure out the underlying chords and
without music theory that's going to be a very long painful process with music theory that's going to be a way shorter way easier process can it be done without yeah uh but it's it's going to be way more painful and you're probably going to end up with worse music it's just going to take is excruciating it long I don't recommend it if you don't know Theory um and then in the opposite order or if you start with Melody again it's probably you singing in the shower kind of thing you don't need to
know music theory you know if the melody works or not uh and then if you start with a chord progression or Harmony Baseline whatever it might be and then write your Melody on top of that again you can probably do it by ear so it it depends what you're doing but if you're imp if you're improvising with your voice to write Melody you don't really need music theory if you're using a keyboard or a guitar to write your melodies or any instrument really to write your Melodies that is where Music Theor
y comes in at least super basic music theory but it's something as basic as okay I have a chord progression it's in the key of C major so I know that the notes I have are all just natural notes CDE e f g- a b did I just skip letters CDE e f g a b did I skip G for some reason um but um so so back back to creating a Melody if you're trying to do it with your voice you don't need music theory if you're trying to do it with an instrument then yeah you're going to need to at least understand what key
your song is in or start with a key if you're starting with Melody or if you're starting with lyrics just starting with the idea of like okay I'm going to use C major which on the piano is all the white keys easy that's why pianists use it so much uh or I'm going to write it in E Major so I know that I have e FP gsh a b c and dsharp but even that you can Google that just know that you should generally your song should be written in a single key whether that's a minor or maybe even a mode right
you have a a Fran generally you stick with one key uh I guess with modes that that's where things change sometimes you go in and out of modes but you still keep it minor we could get deeper and deeper but for Mo the vast majority of songs you're going to write them all in a major key and then maybe sometimes you'll write them all in a minor key for so creating a Melody this is a huge thing right and I'm sure you didn't expect me to answer in 10 minutes this creating a Melody uh because we could
talk for 5 hours and still not fully answer this question we could actually probably talk for an infinite amount of time and still not fully cover this subject but one thing I would say so when you say struggle with creating a tune try to think in terms of phrases I feel like this is where a lot of people go wrong is they think of Melody as a one single thing rather than a single thing and also a sum of Parts let me give you an an an an analogy that is closely tied a song is one thing but a song
also is made up of three parts chords Melody and lyrics You could argue chords you know Harmony many different ways to sort of break it down but generally you could see it as that or across time you could see it as yeah a song is a singular unit but also a song is comprised of other singular units like a verse A Chorus a second verse a bridge you could think of it like a cell is a singular thing but the singular thing that is a cell is also made up of other singular things molecules and molecul
es while they are their own thing and they are parts of one thing a cell also not and obviously not all molecules are part of cells but let's assume a living thing here but also every molecule is made up of atoms Our Song is the same way and seeing our Melody the same way we don't just have a Melody for our song that would be overwhelming and largely and that's a helpful perspective but we can't just have that perspective we also have to be like okay but our verse has its own Melody that is a pa
rt of the song's Melody but it also is its own thing and then from there we have phrases within our Melody so not only do we have a verse Melody but within a verse Melody we have different phrases so if you you have four lines in your verse presumably you have four phrases for your Melody you have the first phrase which goes with the first line Second phrase goes with the second line Etc phrase is essentially the melodic equivalent of a line in a lyric so thinking in terms of that and then think
ing of common or really just when you have four things you can only have so many different combinations of what the melody actually is so for instance a lot of things will be like a a so if we take some stupid simple Melody I don't know sure we'll say that that's a so the first line might be that's a you might do an a a a b pattern which would be that the first three lines or first three phrases of your melody in your verse be there's one that's two that's three and then we finally would have a
b part so there's our our fourth part right or we could have a b a b there's our a and then let's have BB that's B I hate it but that's we'll say it's B this is sp the moment right so then back to a and then B again now that Melody sucks but that's not the point right Melodies are seeing it in in all of these perspectives is helpful and I think where people go wrong is is at the phrase level it's simpler than you may think common phrase patterns you know a b a b a b a c right a b a c right so it
's a b a very common a b a i don't know if we said that already yeah there's a a AA that's a little more rare because it gets repetitive and usually boring a AA B happens but it's probably more rare than ABAB or AB a which by the way are probably by far in a way the two most common and then you know there are some there like a a BB those exist too but a lot are ABAB or AB a probably the two most common so if you're going to pick one and just go with it probably pick one of those most of the time
uh there's also patterns for groups of of three because almost everything is like a group of four or a group of three in music so like you might have a a b a a b so it's six two units of three um we go into that in depth in other places I don't want to spend too to too much time on this one question for the sake of you and for the sake of everybody else so we will leave it at that but um we'll we'll end with this last one because I think we're basically at time I struggle with writing Deep lyri
cs using metaphors which stops my songwriting process because of this I have yet to finish a song all right one thing is a I don't know if you're under the impression that a song needs metaphors it does not you can have a great song with no metaphor whatsoever it is all 100% literal no symb ISM and it'd be great second Point Don't Force metaphor a philosophy of mine with art is there's a in life there's always sort of this push and pull um I heard somebody say this recently and I think it's very
true most human beings their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness this is true of almost every human being right if your greatest strength is your honesty almost certainly your greatest weakness is sometimes you're a little too honest right if your greatest strength is that you are an agreeable person and people really like you almost certainly your biggest weakness is that you're an agreeable person and Bullies or people who take advantage of your agreeableness you're going to be
taken advantage of routinely because you can be because you're very agreeable so I lean towards being a disagreeable person um I just I'm very comfortable with conflict I'm very comfortable disagreeing I'm the type of person that eats up if I'm in a room and 10 people disagree with me and I'm the only person that has an opinion I love it I love it I'm like yes give me the challenge I'll take you all on I love that stuff I could literally enjoy having a podcast that's just arguing all day eight h
ours a day I would love that right um which is a strength of mine because it means that I am willing to do the right thing or willing to say something that I believe to be true even when it's not the popular thing because I don't care I don't care I'm not going to be swayed by if I think everybody's wrong together I'm not going to be swayed by it so that's a strength it's a weakness right for example some employers don't appreciate that you know being the person who's willing to say some of the
things that other people aren't willing to say and sometimes I say things where it's like I probably should just shut up and leave it alone right I don't h i don't have to always argue but I love arguing like not in a mean way but like I like a good healthy constructive debate where we are both trying to seek truth and you're challenging my point of view and I'm challenging your point of VI I love that stuff um but not everybody loves that right so sometimes I rub people the wrong way because of
that right now you're thinking you're rubbing me the wrong way but but um so so anyway there's that's one Concept in life where there's this push and pull right your greatest strength is almost certainly very often your greatest weakness the same thing and I think something that we struggle with often as songwriters is of course as artists we need to we're creating something that doesn't exist right so we are choosing what the characters do we're telling the story so we choose the direction tha
t it goes but the key to everything we do is to not show the hand of the artist right it's like in a movie in a movie or in a book or any story we have to maintain the illusion that Luke Skywalker or whatever character is a real person that operates like a real person would which is consistent with their character and the second you break that illusion by an by uh an author or a Movie Maker making the character do something that doesn't make sense for the character to do right they establish thi
s girl is super smart and then she does the dumbest thing imaginable so that the rest of the plot can happen that's showing the hand of the artist we all know the hand of the artist is dictating the story but we need to maintain the illusion that it's not there and that's a part of what makes art sometimes bad right that is why Star Wars episode 8 is bad or one of many reasons why it's bad is L what Luke Skywalker does makes no sense to what we know of his character the guy who went as far as hi
s psychopath murderous father who killed tons of people in the Galaxy he believed there was still good in him to the end to the point that he was willing to throw his lightsaber away and he was willing to be shocked by Force lightning and he saved his father because of that undying Faith meanwhile later his nephew who hasn't even fully turned to the dark side yet certainly hasn't done half the things Darth Vader's done hasn't been a bad guy yet really at all he's going to murder him in his sleep
but yet his father he who already was a murderous psychopath for like 20 years he's like I still have it makes no sense the same character would never ever ever do both of those things it makes no sense whatsoever which is a part of why that movie sucks and why most Star Wars fans hate it because obviously Ryan Johnson was like Luke Skywalker is going to be this now but even Mark Hamill famously said I had to pretend that I was Jake Skywalker because everything I was doing is not what Luke woul
d do that's part of why it sucks movie is a mess in every way but it's part of why it sucks you can't do that as an artist so connecting it back the key to metaphors or anything is if we sense that you forced the metaphor and we see your hand being like oo see guys this here's a metaphor immediately that's going to take us out of the song feels illegitimate and people not everybody but you can feel when that happens it's like when you somebody forces a rhyme scheme is everybody going to be able
to tell no but a lot of people will and even if people don't consciously know oh that rhyme scheme was forced they might cringe and be like I don't know why I cringe at that but I do it's kind of like a lot of people might not be able to articul I don't know how they couldn't because it's so obvious but like a lot of people watch Star Wars episode 8 hated it but they couldn't necessarily articulate why uh because sometimes you can sense it without knowing it so basically I guess what I'm saying
is Don't Force metaphors if it fits great go with it is but they're not necessary Don't Force It Don't Force It and and also if you really want to get some metaphors to work out are you try going in reverse think of a cool symbol or a cool IM piece of imagery metaphor and then reverse engineer what does that mean what does does it seem like that could mean that seems legitimate that might be an easier way for you to go than for you to already be in the scheme of a song and be like okay what's a
metaphor that represents this instead go in the reverse figure out a metaphor and then figure out what does it represent that might be a better way to go uh for me that results in things that are much more natural than the other way around not always sometimes I'll think of a symbol be like yes that works also last thing on this a lot of songs revolve around one Central piece of or symbol so certainly don't think like oh like I need to have a line and then I need to have you know a symbol that s
ort of says the same thing as the previous line but I do it symbolically and metaphorically because I don't know that's my idea of poetry or something don't get caught up in that and then ultimately lean into your strengths as an artist so if you really right now struggle with metaphor then don't use them don't use them tons of artists don't use them and it's great they're not necessary if if you're good at metaphors lean into it use them uh also final final thing I think unless I think of somet
hing else you can practice metaphors in the same way that you can practice uh increasing your vocabulary which is what I would call semi- passively if you a lot of people will say Joseph I have a small vocabulary and you know I think that is not the end of the worlds but yeah bigger vocabulary certainly helps with songwriting to a degree um not big words necessarily but you know being more cognizant of maybe instead of sad I have like wistful and bitter and those are more specific more precise w
ords that sort of thing I think helps because more precise words are generally better in songwriting because it communicates more with less uh and it tends to hit our emotions more but you know just being in the habit of when you hear a word or you read a word and you don't know what it means a lot of people will just be like it's not a big deal no you look it up and then try to use it that day that little habit will increase your vocabulary faster than you think and better than you think and th
en so for metaphor be in the habit of like when you see something and it kind of moves you right maybe maybe you see a father and his daughter at a playground and she you know Falls a little bit or falls off the slide and she starts crying and and her dad comes over and smiles comfortingly and she raises her hands up and and just for a moment you see that image and something hits you think of get in the habit of start to think huh what's something that that could symbolize or what does that remi
nd me of just be in the habit of things like that or maybe you go to the ocean it's super beautiful you go to the Grand Canyon and you're like wow this is amazing get in the habit of just practicing what what are what does this remind me of which would be practicing metaphors essentially in a fairly passive way right you're not actively practicing the way you would actively practice guitar you just get in the habit of trying to think more like a songwriter I guess all right hopefully this was he
lpful we only got through a few different pieces of feedback maybe there'll be 20 parts to this who knows hopefully you're enjoying this hopefully it's helpful and again if you haven't already be sure to check out the free guu songr theory.com freu 20 different ways to start writing a song great way to not get stuck on songwriting and I will talk to you in the next [Music] episode
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