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The prolific Josh Woodward has an interesting post about songwriting and brain hemispheres:
I am not at all prolific, and, surprise, my process is pretty different. I do improvise with instruments all the time, but those improvisations, while they provide a sort of primordial soup of musical ideas for me to draw from, rarely lead directly to songs.
Almost all of my songs--and I think all of the ones I still enjoy singing--started with a kernel of melody and lyrics that showed up together out of nowhere: "Daisy I'm leaving your shadow behind." "Atlanta, would you whisper in my ear." "Let's go outside and watch the cars go by." All of these arrived with melody attached, and the chords were there, too, I just had to listen a little harder to hear them.
And then I tend to work methodically forward, or outward, from there. Why am I leaving only a shadow? What's so interesting about passing cars? Okay, so the sun is shining now; as opposed to what? And what rhymes with it? The words and the chords and the melody all grow together in a sort of symbiosis.
I don't work with a big picture in mind; I rarely know what my songs are about until they're about half written, and sometimes not for months afterward. Instead I let that first fragment tell me where it leads, and then see where I can go from that, and eventually I've got most of a song and I just have to fill in some blanks.
I was going to start analyzing why I write this way, but I think I'll go work on a song instead.
It just struck me, though, that there's one key thing that really drives my songwriting process: the left brain doesn't get invited to the party until late in the game.He starts by improvising on the guitar, then adds nonsense words, then starts shaping the song structure, then writes lyrics. Creative to analytical, step by step.
I am not at all prolific, and, surprise, my process is pretty different. I do improvise with instruments all the time, but those improvisations, while they provide a sort of primordial soup of musical ideas for me to draw from, rarely lead directly to songs.
Almost all of my songs--and I think all of the ones I still enjoy singing--started with a kernel of melody and lyrics that showed up together out of nowhere: "Daisy I'm leaving your shadow behind." "Atlanta, would you whisper in my ear." "Let's go outside and watch the cars go by." All of these arrived with melody attached, and the chords were there, too, I just had to listen a little harder to hear them.
And then I tend to work methodically forward, or outward, from there. Why am I leaving only a shadow? What's so interesting about passing cars? Okay, so the sun is shining now; as opposed to what? And what rhymes with it? The words and the chords and the melody all grow together in a sort of symbiosis.
I don't work with a big picture in mind; I rarely know what my songs are about until they're about half written, and sometimes not for months afterward. Instead I let that first fragment tell me where it leads, and then see where I can go from that, and eventually I've got most of a song and I just have to fill in some blanks.
I was going to start analyzing why I write this way, but I think I'll go work on a song instead.
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Except the chorus is a little on the Depeche Mode side.