How to Avoid Songwriter’s Block

Three useful techniques to obliterate songwriter’s block and get your songwriting mojo back!

Three ways to work through Songwriter’s Block

1. Get Back in the Habit

Habit is the best way to get better at anything. We’ve all heard the psychology masters talk about how ‘you are your habits’ and when it comes to songwriting, this couldn’t be more true.

The more you write, the more you think about songs during your day, the better you become at songwriting. Simple. So how do you get back into the habit of writing regularly?

Easy… (well sort of…). Let’s do this fun songwriting challenge together. Let’s write one song per day for a week. You HAVE to finish every single song in order to pass, but here’s the kicker – they don’t have to be any good.

That’s the trick my friend! Write crap. lol. I mean, dont deliberately start writing a song with the intention of it being awful, but do let yourself be free from agonizing over whether your lyrics are deep enough or whether your chords are too predictable etc etcetc…

You see, once you take away the whole ‘this song needs to be the next epic hit song of the universe’ mindset then it becomes easy again.

So that’s our challenge. Write seven songs in seven days and report back to base with how you did. 🙂

2. Brainstorm Lyric Ideas

Similarly to the first point, we’re not going to worry about coming up with amazingly heart wrenching, deep and super catchy lyrics here. Let’s just brain-dump whatever comes out onto a sheet of paper.

The technique is to pick a friend who has constant relationship drama to draw inspo from, or a book or a movie or some random topic that catches your fancy. It doesn’t matter. the exercise is just to write.

Bear in mind that you might write crap… and that’s ok… but after day three of doing this I bet you’ll have at least one choice phrase on your masses of screwed up paper.

3. Write the Sequel to a Popular Song

I LOVE this technique. Someone else has already done the hard work for you by coming up with a smash hit song… so why not use that as inspo for your own tune.

So either write a sequel to the characters in the song or flip it around. Let’s pick ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ just as an example. Its about being lonely and unable to cope when this guy’s crush isn’t around anymore. So let’s flip it.

You’re going to write about wanting someone to go away and how amazing you feel when they are gone. ‘oh that topic has already been done to death’ you say? Well I didn;t say we were finished.

Now use the songs spacing of lyrics. SPARSE. Use the groove… but change the melody.

See how you go…then report back to base (ie in the comments below).

Nicola xx