This is article is based on my book How to Write a Song (Even If You’ve Never Written One Before and You Think You Suck). You can also explore this process in even more detail in my new How to Write a Song Video Course.
How do you write a song? It’s a good question.
And like a lot of good questions, there isn’t a single, simple answer. In fact there’s a pretty much infinite number of great ways to write a song.
Still, in this article I’m going to focus on one powerful and reliable way to write a song – and one that you can use even if you’re completely new to songwriting.
In fact, the ten-step process in this article is based on the process in my book How to Write a Song (Even If You’ve Never Written One Before and You Think You Suck). It’s a simple and reliable process that will help you write a song in virtually any genre time after time, whatever level of experience you’re at.
And best of all, all you need to continue is some basic experience on an instrument like piano or guitar, or with a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) like GarageBand, Ableton or Logic.
Oh, and if the title got you wondering – no, you don’t suck. Even if this is your first song. See, songwriting is hard. It takes time to get good. But the only way to get better is to write – to get plenty of practice.
So if in doubt, just remember that in songwriting – or any kind of writing – to suck less, write more. That’s the only way to improve.
That said, let’s dive in. Here’s How to Write a Song (Even If You’ve Never Written One Before and You Think You Suck).
When it comes to figuring out how to write a song, there’s one question that comes up over and over again – should you write the music or the lyrics first? And the answer is that nine times out of ten, the best place to start is with an idea. That way, whether you start working on the music or the lyrics first, you help make sure that every part of your song fits together as one piece.
So how do you do that? What makes a song idea great?
The first thing to remember is that songs tell stories. The best songs are about people, they’re about situations, and they’re about what people say to other people because of the situation they’re in.
In a song, those stories are usually ultra-simple – two people in love, two people breaking up, somebody warning someone about someone else. But the power of thinking about songs this way is that it gives you a concrete concept to build the rest of your song around.
To come up with a solid song idea, you’re going to want to answer these three fundamental questions:
So to find a good song idea, all you have to do is come up with a situation or story and use it to answer these three questions. That’s not as complicated as it sounds – your song might be a love song, sung from a guy to his girlfriend, and he’s trying to say ‘I’ve never met anyone as special as you’. Or your song might be sung by you to the world saying ‘war is bad, you guys’.
In fact, these are the two common song formats I recommend you stick with if you’re new to songwriting:
These aren’t the only song formats, but they’re common, effective and beginner-friendly ones. So if in doubt, they’re always good to rely on.
So take some time to come up with a few different ideas you like – I recommend brainstorming at least five or six then picking out your favorite. You don’t want to rush this stage, because everything else you do in this process will come from your song’s big idea. You can write about anything you like, but if you’re totally stuck for good song ideas I have a handy list of 107 song ideas on the site you can use for inspiration.
Once you’ve settled on your song idea, make sure you write it down somewhere. On a notepad is good. In a note in your phone is also good. On a big piece of paper to put in front of you for the other nine steps is great.
Next in your journey through time, space and how to write a song, you’re going to decide on your song’s lyrical hook.
In songwriting, the word ‘hook’ can describe pretty much any catchy or memorable part of a song. But a lyrical hook is something specific – a word or phrase that neatly captures what your song is about, and a word or phrase you’re going to use really prominent in your song’s chorus.
Your song’s lyrical hook is usually also its title – you’ve probably noticed how most songs repeat their title in their lyric a lot – but sometimes a song has a title that’s different from its lyrical hook, so we’ll use the phrase ‘lyrical hook’ here to be clear.
To come up with a good lyrical hook, you basically want to brainstorm a few words and/or phrases that encapsulates what your song says, from the perspective of the person singing it.
That last part is really important. There aren’t many love songs that say ‘Imagine being overwhelmed with amorous desire’, because nobody speaks like that. Instead, a good lyrical hook for a love song might be ‘I like the way you dance’ or ‘Your pretty eyes’ or ‘Damn, girl’ – because they’re all natural, human ways you might express or circle round the idea ‘I love you’.
As a general rule, a lyrical hook can be anything from a single word to a full sentence of maybe seven or eight words. And like with your song idea, it’s worth brainstorming a few different lyrical hook ideas because sometimes it takes four or five tries before you start coming up with your best ones.
So go ahead. Get thinking. Trying and get yourself inside the mind of the person singing your song, and figure out how they might express what your song is about.
Now that you’ve got a song idea and a lyrical hook, you can start work on your song’s lyric.
Again, there’s no law that says that when you try to write a song you have to start with your lyric, but that’s where we’re going to start in this process. (And if you were wondering, this how to write a song process is based around writing a verse-chorus structure – because that’s the most common and versatile song structure.)
Chorus lyrics come in different sizes, but for simplicity’s sake, I recommend you stick with the most common length – eight lines.
Next, your job is to write a chorus that does at least these three things:
In other words, in your chorus lyric you want to try to state your song’s main idea as directly as you can, while you make sure you repeat your lyrical hook a handful of times. (A lot of chorus lyrics basically just repeat the song’s main message over and over, only in different ways, using the lyrical hook somehow.)
To start, I recommend you try placing your lyrical hook – pencilling it in – in at least two spots in your chorus lyric. There are lots of ways to do this, but here are three of the best spots for planting your lyrical hook:
If your lyrical hook is a complete sentence or phrase – like ‘I like the way you dance’ – then that’ll fill the whole line. And if your hook is something shorter – like ‘Damn, girl’ – then you’ll probably need to fit it into a longer line that makes that word or short phrase make sense. So you might write a line like ‘You got me saying “Damn, girl”’ or ‘Damn, girl, you really stole my heart’.
Then, from there you’re going to want to build a complete lyric around those lyrical hook repetitions you pencilled in. This, honestly, is a trial-and-error process. There’s no quick fix for it – only trying out a ton of different things that either extend the hook word or phrase or lead into it in a natural way.
At the same time, if you want to include some rhymes in your chorus – and it’s usually a good idea to do that – I recommend you stick to a really simple rhyme scheme. One of the simplest and best is a rhyme scheme notated as XAXAXBXB – where the ‘X’ lines don’t rhyme with anything and the ‘A’ and ‘B’ lines rhyme with each other. So the final words of lines 2 and 4 will rhyme, and the final words of lines 6 and 8 will rhyme, but with a different rhyme sound to the one you used in lines 2 and 4.
And when you’re done, you should end up with something like this Whitney Houston knockoff lyric from the book version of How to Write a Song (Even If You’ve Never Written One Before and You Think You Suck):
I wanna dance with somebody
’Cos dancing’s what I love to do.
I wanna dance with somebody,
I wanna dance the whole night through.
This week had me feeling down
But now I’m feeling fine.
Yeah, I wanna dance with somebody
’Cos it’s my time to shine.
As you’ll see, this version uses an XAXAXBXB rhyme scheme and places the lyrical hook – ‘I wanna dance with somebody’ – in lines 1, 3 and 7. (I also added a sneaky ‘Yeah’ in line 7 to keep things fresh.)
Don’t spend forever agonizing over the perfect chorus lyric – simple words and phrases work great. And if this is your first time trying to write a song, don’t worry if your first draft or two sounds awkward or weird, that’s normal. (There’s a reason this article is called How to Write a Song (Even If You’ve Never Written One Before and You Think You Suck) and not How to Write a Grammy Award-Winning Song on Your First Attempt (Because That Definitely Sounds Like a Thing That’s a Realistic and Achievable Goal).
So try and come up with a lyric that works – that’s all it need to do for now. Then, when you’re ready to move on to the next part of how to write a song, let’s keep moving.
Now you’ve got your chorus’s lyric, it’s time to give it some music. There are three main parts to this step, and we’re going to tackle them in this order: writing your chorus chord progression, writing your chorus melody (or topline), and writing your chorus groove or accompaniment.
So let’s dive in.
Your chorus’s chord progression – or harmonies – are the foundation of its music. So if in doubt, that’s often a good place to start writing.
Harmony in songwriting is a whole subject in itself, but truth be told, simple chord progressions are really common in songwriting and usually work great. So you don’t need to be a music theory expert to choose a good progression.
In fact, one of the best ways to come up with some chords for your song is to write a four-chord progression. These do pretty much what they say on the tin: they’re chord progressions that are four chords long, one chord per measure, that you can then repeat and repeat. And while all that repetition might sound boring or over-repetitive, in practice four-chord progressions are a really effective songwriting tool.
If you have a strong understanding of music theory, you can use whatever you know to choose a key and write your chorus chord progression. But otherwise, here’s the combination of chords – or chord palette – I recommend you stick with:
If you’re writing for a keyboard instrument or with a DAW: Write in C major. Focus on the chords C, G, F, Am and/or Dm.
If you’re writing for guitar: Write in G major. Focus on the chords G, D, C, Em and/or Am.
Download a printable chord palette summary here.
For starters, you’ll notice I’ve given you five chords when you only need four for your progression – so obviously you’re not going to use every chord. (You might even use the same chord twice in a progression.) I’ve also listed the chords in their rough order of importance in each key – most important to least important, left to right. So if you want to keep things easy on yourself, you’re welcome to stick with using just the first three chords in each key.
But whatever chord palette you choose, all you have to do is try out some four-chord combinations – try playing them – until you find one that sounds good to you, and voilà, that’s your chord progression.
Like with lyric lines, there are lots of different lengths a chorus’s music can be. But I recommend you stick with the most common length – at least for now – of 16 measures. (Especially if you wrote an 8-line chorus lyric – two measures of music for each lyric line is a good rule of thumb in songwriting.)
So, if you’ve got a four-chord progression, one chord per measure, and you want to repeat that so it fills 16 measures, you guessed it – you’re going to have to repeat your chord progression four times to fill your chorus, like this:
