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Creating Your Own Material: Yes You Can

IN EVERYTHING you do as a performer, it’s your originality that will set you apart from the sea of gifted singers who want to sound just like someone else. It’s thrilling to develop the chops to sing like Sia or The Weeknd, but the next step is to incorporate some of their sounds into yours to create something that’s uniquely your own. That’s what I hope you’ve been working on. If you have, and if you keep practicing your technique until you can count on your voice to express exactly the emotions you want to convey, you can command attention with your distinctive style.

But there’s one more element to consider if you want to be in control of your own destiny as a singer or a band: You need to write or cowrite your own material.

I know that may sound daunting. Not every singer wants to be a singer-songwriter, and I’m not saying you need to be. But everyone who wants to feel comfortable with the material she’s becoming known for needs to at least try to shape her own message. That doesn’t mean you have to be a super-gifted lyricist or a have a talent for writing catchy musical hooks. Sometimes it just means you have to come to the table knowing what you want to say so you can be part of the process of creating the songs you sing.

The way to do that, even if you’re a singer who’s always been more interested in the melody than the words, is to start writing.

Anyone, and I mean anyone, can do this. I helped my son, Colin, and his bandmates get started when they were barely out of kindergarten, and what I taught them consists of the basics I suggest to all my singers.

The project started when Colin was six, and two of his friends, brothers named Oliver and Eliot, decided to form a band. Colin came home from school one day and told me that the band was called the Negotiators, “because every time it’s time to practice, they have to negotiate.”

“Great,” I said.

“They need a bass player,” Colin added, “and I said I’d be in the band.”

Colin had never mentioned being interested in the bass, or in music, for that matter. I’d certainly noticed that he had a beautiful voice and could sing on pitch, but I hadn’t pushed him to do anything specific with it. He didn’t want piano lessons when I brought those up, and he didn’t want to try guitar.

But now he wanted to make some noise.

Colin began taking bass lessons with Greg, the person who was teaching Oliver and Eliot the guitar, and rehearsing with them twice a week. Soon they were talking about performing in public, and they did. They started with the school fair, and then a few local parties, and by the time Colin was eight, they’d jumped right up to doing gigs at the famed Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. They suddenly blossomed into a band that wanted to get somewhere fast. Like a lot of kids with bands, they were thinking bigger venues and record contracts and tours. But I advised them that it wasn’t going to happen if they stuck to their covers of “Wild Thing” and Machine Head. So I told them what I’m telling you: You’re going to need some original material.

It may sound impossible to do that if you’re assuming that you need to provide all the elements to finish a song. But you don’t. Anytime I work with someone who’s not ready to write all the music and all the lyrics for a song, we start with ideas. And we all have them.

Step One: Start Listening to the People around You, and Make Notes

With the kids, our starting point was: What do you want to sing about? What have you been talking about? What’s on your mind? Our songwriting sessions began with questions tailored to the minds and hearts of first, second, and third graders: What’s happening in school? What’s upsetting you or getting you excited? What do you want to say to your parents or your teachers?

We began making notes, and I gave each of the kids a little notebook to carry around. Every time they heard a phrase that sounded interesting—something a school friend might say, an expression that made them smile—they wrote it down as the potential title for a song. The notebooks began to fill up with lines like “Stop copying me,” “Hit the beach,” and “Your shoes are cool.” If you don’t have an idea for a title, I told them, write down ideas for songs that come from what’s happening in your life. “If a friend is texting a girl he’s interested in at school, and she’s getting excited, you can write a song about texting to get a date,” I said. “It’s wide open.”

If you think this is crazy, consider this famous line from my client Carly Rae Jepsen: “Call me maybe,” a casual phrase that was waiting for someone to hear it. She turned that little phrase into one of the most popular songs of the decade, and a full-blown superstar career for herself.

Step Two: Do Some Stream-of-Consciousness Writing in Your Notebook

Once the kids had gotten into the habit of collecting titles and phrases, I asked them to write poems, or just some stream-of-consciousness thoughts, in their notebooks. Your assignment, if you’re following along, is to tell yourself, “Today, and X number of times a week, I’m going to take out my notebook and write about a subject I choose.” Start anywhere. You want to wind up with a page or two of sentences about mermaids, or basketball shoes, or your car, or your friends, or your feelings.

If you’re writing a free-form poem, don’t worry if it doesn’t rhyme. Just write. Get out of your own self-conscious “I’m not good enough” way. Write like you used to draw with crayons as a little kid, not caring if you stayed between the lines. You were creating and could not be held back by borders—you just felt free.

When I encouraged the kids to write about their parents, they came up with statements like “I hate it when my parents don’t let me stay up late at night or try to feed me protein shakes in the morning.” “They won’t let me play video games twenty-four seven.” “I like going bowling.” The point was to come up with as many such statements as they could think of, and not judge them.

For our songwriting sessions, we’d go through the notebooks. I’d look at the titles and phrases and say, “This is a great idea. Let’s start here. Let’s take this one line and see what we can do with it.” It might be a line like “I woke up in slow motion,” which we’d turn into a song called, you guessed it, “Slow Motion,” which ended up being about a future girlfriend, and wanting to hold on to every second they would be together.

We talked as a group, with each of the kids contributing ideas. One would throw out an idea or line, and the guitar teacher, Greg, and I would encourage him to elaborate on it, something you can do with your own bandmates or friends or kids.

The boys’ actual lines developed through this process into lyrics such as:

“I will hold you

Till you scream out

Enough, in slow motion

I will capture

Like a steel frame

Our love

In slow motion.”

At the same time, Oliver, the guitar player, was learning chords and had ideas for music. We’d say things like “Try to come up with something like Machine Head, but different. Maybe the same kind of rhythm.” The result might become the verse. Then he’d noodle out another pattern that could be a chorus. We’d help the boys sew it all together.

It’s a great advantage to have musicians in the family, and if you do, call on them. But don’t worry if you don’t. The important part, the key to honing your message, is to start listening to the world around you, and to carry a notebook to write things down. You know you’ve always got your phone with you. Use a notepad app that lets you keep your song/lyric ideas together and start writing. My daughter, Madison, has been doing this all her life, and as I write this, she’s a professional singer-songwriter with three songs on the charts, including the Jason Derulo single “Kiss the Sky,” which she cowrote. Yes, she’s talented. But it wouldn’t make any difference if she didn’t write all the time.

Going Deeper: Making a Good Idea a Better Song

Bob Dylan said you have to write about a hundred bad songs before you come up with something good. In other words, very few people can just put their pen to paper or their hand on the piano and automatically produce something great. When I have a multiplatinum-selling songwriter in my studio showing me a new song, sometimes it sounds great, and other times it sounds like something the cat dragged in. I’m serious. The best of the best make magic only every so many tries.

So if you want to be a great songwriter, you need to practice every day. Keep capturing ideas for lyrics on your journal or notepad or smartphone, and get used to writing them down or singing them into your phone recorder. Whether you have a title or a line for the verse or the chorus, just get it down. Capturing your ideas is the first step.

Many new writers go for the obvious lyrics and themes: You broke my heart. I’m leaving you. You ran off with my best friend. Those do have the virtue of getting people to write, and we’ve got millions of songs to prove it. But if you want your song to stand out, the challenge is to describe emotions, situations, and thoughts that all of us have had, but find a new way to evoke them.

It might seem impossible to write a song about having your heart broken, for example, without making it trite, predictable, and boring. But a songwriter named Diane Warren started imagining her way into what it feels like to be in the middle of heartbreak and found the words that would speak to what everyone really wants to say after a breakup: Fix this. Make me not hurt anymore. Un-break my heart.

So simple and so brilliant. People related in a huge way, and “Un-break My Heart” became a monster hit, a classic, and won a Grammy in 1997. You find words like “un-break my heart” by writing, letting your mind wander, playing with phrases, plugging in the words you hear your friends say that have never made it into songs. Warren says she wasn’t heartbroken at the time, but playing the part of someone who was, the way an actor plays a character, feeling everything, remembering her own experiences. You can try that too.

You can often find your way to what’s memorable simply by digging a little deeper, being more specific. When I was in my early twenties I wrote a song called “What Do You See in Him?” It was about a guy who lost his girl to another guy, something I thought a big chunk of the audience could relate to. But I was too on the nose. At that time I was coaching a legend in the rock ’n’ roll world, Robbie Robertson. (You might’ve seen him in The Last Waltz, the movie Martin Scorsese directed about him and his band.)

I asked Robbie to look at my lyrics, and after he did, he said that everything was all too predicable, except one line: “Does he sing you to sleep like I did?” He loved that line. Why? Because it focused on something so particular—a person who used to sing his lover to sleep, and no matter what some new guy had to offer, he probably couldn’t do that.

Robbie made sense—that line was just so much better than the rest of the song. “Does he sing you to sleep” pointed to the one thing the singer did that his girlfriend couldn’t help remembering—and held out the hope that if she did, maybe she’d realize she still loved him and would come back. I rewrote the song, and it became many times better and more real. That’s what you need to do to start writing great lyrics.

If you want to watch someone playing with words and thinking out loud about it, take a look at Lorde’s Twitter feed, @lordemusic. Sometimes you’ll see her spinning out lines in real time. Experimenting. Just like you.

A Secret to Help You Come Up with Better Melodies

It’s beyond the scope of this book to go into detail about composing music for your songs, but I can give you one tip that has opened up the world of melody for the people I work with: Be sure you start by being able to access the entire range of your voice—chest, middle, and head.

Most singers hang out in the vocal range they feel most comfortable in. If you’re a Broadway-type belter, or a budding rock star who likes to shout a bit, you probably sing a lot of notes at the top part of your chest voice, like Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine. If you’re a woman who sounds more classical, or a man who sings super-high, you probably spend a lot of time in your head voice, like Adam Levine.

So when you’re playing around, trying to come up with melodies for a new song, you probably go to that “home base” part of your voice and stay there, where the singing is easy—and ignore the whole world of notes you can’t hit. But you’re severely limiting your melody writing if you can’t sing every note easily. If you can move seamlessly through chest, middle, and head voice, though, you will feel no boundaries or constraints. That’s the best starting point for creating—the land of no vocal limits.

You Don’t Have to Do It All Yourself, but You Do Have to Be a Good Collaborator

As I mentioned at the outset, you don’t have to be a great lyricist or musician to make a significant contribution to the creation of a song. The important thing is to develop ideas to add to the process.

If you’re paralyzed by the thought of coming up with a melody, just pay attention to the words and remember that there’s no need to do everything alone. Reach into your community and make friends with people who have the skills you lack. Look for people who are further along the curve, and learn from them. If you play an instrument and are comfortable doodling with songwriting, connect with a word person. If you’ve got a notebook full of lyrics and need tunes, get to know the person who’s sitting in the corner with a guitar at a party or family gathering.

I can promise you that every band that’s popular right now started with people who went to their communities to find the skills they didn’t have.

Collaboration is what makes songs today, and being signed as an artist opens the door to a new level of development—the chance to work with people who have top-notch skills and much to teach if you pay attention. A sixteen-year-old artist I work with flew in from New York recently. His manager had him holed up with three people he didn’t know, producers and writers. They had ideas for him, he brought in his own, and they stirred them together in search of a hit. That’s a very common way for artists to create songs. They hook up with other writers and producers and put together something on the spot, hoping to spark some magic that turns into a hit.

A Cautionary Tale: Here’s What Happens if You Don’t Write

There’s just one big drawback to this system. The producers and songwriters who team with new artists are great. But they’re not you. And there lies the problem if you have not started writing and coming up with song ideas.

I describe this scenario to all my clients who want to make it in the music business but don’t think they need to bring in material: Say you go to meet with someone who owns a record company, and the person with your fate in his hands says, “I like your voice, I like your vibe. Do you write?”

“No, not really,” you say.

“Well, I think what’s going to be popular right now are disco songs about Jell-O. You can handle that, right? I have this whole bunch of songs that would be great for you.”

“That’s not really my style,” you say. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Too bad,” says the mogul. “You don’t have any songs of our own, and Jell-O is what I’ve got.”

You’re not ready to walk away from the deal you’ve always wanted, so you go with it. You record a disco Jell-O song, and suddenly you’ve got a hit on your hands. The public loves it. It’s viral. They want to use it for commercials. And you can’t stand it.

This is your biggest nightmare. Your name is out there, just as you’d dreamed, but you’re singing about Jell-O, or oatmeal, or stuffed animals. And you hate yourself.

I know that’s a silly example, but believe me, it’s not far off the mark.

If you want to have a say in what you sing, you have to show up with a message. You have to keep writing—even if you don’t think of yourself as a songwriter. Every real artist has a message. Taylor Swift became known for a message along the lines of “We’re all princesses. Our princes will come, and we’ll all live happily ever after.” And as her life has changed, her message has changed. It’s real for her, and it’s real to her enormous audience. Beyoncé’s unmissable message is “Women are incredible and powerful, and we can do anything.”

Neither of these women is trapped in someone else’s soulless idea of what will sell. What’s your message? Find it by writing.