Songwriting

Articles

• The Political Song: Seven Approaches
• Diary of a Song: Taylor Swift’s “Lover”
• Paul Westerberg on Songwriting
• NSAI blog post on “competitive” songwriting

Interviews

• Bit by “Bit Logic”: A Conversation with Brian Henneman of The Bottle Rockets

Under the Covers

This series of blog posts aims to capture some of that research as a way to help others better appreciate the songs under discussion too. I’ll share some of the thinking behind my own arrangements and sonic treatments of the song, along with what I learned about the relative “rightness” of those approaches during the recording and performing process. My hope is that whether you’re a songwriter/performer, a music writer, or just a fan who is interested in how songs get written and recorded, you’ll find something to make you revisit or begin exploring the tune and/or artist under discussion.

• The Yayhoos’ “Bottle and a Bible”
• Warren Zevon’s “Mohammed’s Radio”

Keeping It Real

“Keeping It Real” is a series of analytic essays on the wide variety of approaches, techniques and artifices songwriters use to make make their songs sound and feel “real” — in other words, authentic, believable, direct, dramatic, emotionally charged, immediate, impactful, meaningful, personalized, sincere, and (somewhat ironically), universal.

Some of the songwriters I will be profiling as a part of this series include:

• Ray Wylie Hubbard
• Will Johnson
• James McMurtry
• Todd Snider
• Lucinda Williams

Resources

Some songwriting-related resources I’ve found helpful include:

• American Songwriter magazine
• No Depression magazine
• Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas, ed. Craig E. Clifford
• Songwriters on Process
• The Contemporary Minstrel, by Anthony deLise

I’ll be adding more to this list as this site develops.

For a full list of essays, interviews and reviews on this topic, see the Songwriting category page.