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As a songwriter, my job is to pack three minutes with as much imagery as I can, both lyrically and musically.

Sometimes, songwriting can feel like pushing a boulder uphill. But songwriting tools help us work through difficult songs or plateaus in our writing.

There are two topics they say never to bring up with your inlaws – religion and politics. Funny enough, those same topics carry some baggage for songwriters, too, though not for the same reasons.

What many artists don’t realize is that originality is not planned, but the product of fervent exploration leading to happy accidents.

There are a lot of reasons why finding collaborators is difficult.

If you’ve been writing songs very long, you may have heard how important “imagery” can be in songwriting.

If you’ve never written lyrics before, it can be overwhelming to imagine where to start. From my online students, I often hear how relieving it is to bring structure and tools into the mix

A friend of mine recently expressed frustration that she doesn’t get useful feedback on her songs. The kind of feedback she gets is too general

One of the most frustrating problems we experience as songwriters is difficulty finishing songs. We might get stuck at the chorus, or maybe after the first chorus.

Some genres of music are driven largely by groove. If we are not accustomed to writing with groove in mind, it can be difficult to push our songwriting into this space.

I’d like to talk a bit more in detail about melody writing, and specifically, the rhythm of the melody. Simply put, melody is rhythm plus pitch.

In my opinion, the most powerful tool a songwriter has is the ability to write using sensory language.

A great melody always makes a song more memorable. It sounds obvious to say, but it is amazing how often we put emphasis on other elements of the song such as groove or lyric

You don’t have to have a degree in music theory to write harmonic progressions that underscore your lyric well.

Recently a friend shared with me an experience she had at a publicly open pitch session in Nashville.

I’d like to write a bit about how to get going on a song when we start with the title. The online course Lyric Writing: Writing from the Title explores many wonderful tools

Many students taking the online lyric writing courses here at Berklee Online find the workload refreshing. Daily writing assignments push students to write nearly every day.