10 Things Worth Sharing | April
Attention spikes, sticky lyrics, rhyming like a pro, John Cleese, and more...
Hi all,
Let’s jump straight in!
1. Ever wonder how Taylor Swift (and other phenomenal lyric writers) come up with interesting, unexpected rhymes? I’ll be running a Workshop on how to rhyme like a pro in MAY! You can sign up here (and note: almost all of our Workshops this year have sold out, so please sign up soon if you are keen!).
2. At the end of every songwriting course I teach, I always give my students a list of further resources—books, websites, YouTube channels—where they can take their own personal study further outside of the class context. I recently made that list public here.
3. The single most practical tip I give to anyone struggling to write—or start, or finish—a song (or any project that requires creative, expansive thought) is advice I learned from John Cleese. Yes, British comedian, Monty Python John Cleese! The advice is simple: do NOT leave your desk after the first 30 minutes. The first 30 minutes is just your brain getting ready, and for the most part, actually struggling with you to settle in. You need to give yourself 90 minutes. That is the length of time that any session of creative work needs to last. Benny and I have made a collection of other absolute gems of wisdom on songwriting and creative work here.
4. Speaking of the brain…the podcast episode I have most shared this month has hands down been Dr Andrew Huberman on The Knowledge Project. This is a deep dive into the science of sleep, which is really a gateway for talking about neurobiological factors in wakefulness, attentiveness, creativity, and productivity. My favourite thing that I learned is that we all generally have a burst of attentiveness about 90 mins before our system is geared to go to sleep – it’s an evolutionary feature of human development (the theory being that it served our ancestors to have a brief burst of wakefulness before sleep in order to basically ‘secure the perimeter’) that I can totally relate to! I often feel a surge of wakefulness, like I should start a project at around 8pm, and then often feel confused and disappointed when I can’t follow through because I’m ready for sleep 15 minutes later…! (I love learning when things are not a personal failure, but part of the collective human condition…)
5. There are 3 practical ways that you can make any lyric you write more ‘sticky’ and irresistible to the ear of a listener…
6. …and flowing on from that, there are 3 different types of tension that we can employ in the first line of a song, that can help grab the ear of the listener immediately, and draw them into the world of the song. First impressions count ;)
7. 10 of the most beautiful chords on the guitar, and how to use them in a song…
8. My friend, songwriter Michael Paynter, hipped me to the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s. I am, as we speak, sitting in Melbourne Airport, listening to episodes. It’s so much more than a nostalgia tour – the 90s were seminal to so many genres and aspects of music that we now take for granted (and okay, yes, it’s a nostalgia tour…)
9. I was chatting recently to a friend whose parents—both of them—died within a month of each other, totally coincidentally. We talked about grief and the grieving process, and I was reminded of this amazing episode of Radiolab that unpacks the mostly invalid and inaccurate cultural meme of the ‘5 stages of grief’, which has a bizarre and fascinating history.
10. I spent the last 2 years writing a recording a record that has just come out…MOTHERTONGUES (The Soundtrack) is now on all streaming platforms! I was commissioned to write an album of songs for an audiobook published by Penguin Random House, which has also just come out! It’s all a bit exciting ;) The book/audiobook is (according the Penguin), “a genre-defying collaborative marvel, that brings the absurdity of motherhood to the page.”
The audiobook and book can be ordered here.
End broadcast! Thanks so much, guys. See you next month :)