He remarked in class the final day, "You know, after I had been working on my songwriting for just two weeks straight, I already felt like a much more accomplished songwriter than I did after the first twenty years of writing on my own.  I know some people say you can't teach writing, but I'm proof that if you work at it, you can get better at writing songs, even as you get older."

It made me think about the human brain and its relative limitations and capabilities.  If you saw the movie A Beautiful Mind you know that most major mathematicians do their significant work before they exit their 20s.  Few make meaningful contributions after that time because the intellectual elasticity necessary for complex mathematical insight apparently shrinks and stiffens with each year beyond that third decade of living.  But the kind of emotional, intuitive elasticity necessary to craft songs seems to grow with age.  As songwriters, we can get better with time and practice.  The brain is, metaphorically, a muscle that can be trained.  And while we can't make inspiration happen, we can make the brain a facile muscle agile enough to respond to inspiration when true inspiration arrives. 

Whether you are studying with us in LA or toiling privately at your beloved craft in your creative corner of the world, below are a series of exercises humbly submitted to provide you ideas for starting new songs and revising older ones--to condition the muscle for when writing counts. 

Each week for the next 6 weeks we will add a new exercise to revise and to create.  Happy writing!

For more about The Songwriter's Workshop, which meets Wednesday nights at 7:30pm, go here.   

WEEK ONE
For Revising:
Take a song that you are currently working on and re-cast the movie by changing the pronouns. 
- If it's an I-you song, what happens if you instead establish an I-him/her song, with either an implied or stated "you" as your confidante?  This might mean specifically changing the point of view from first person to third or from third person to first.  And perhaps even an exploration of the slippery second person!
- How does the impact of your chorus change when you begin to talk about the global "we" instead of the personal "I"? 
- How does the impact and focus change if instead of pointing a finger at "you" the reflection turns to the behavior of the "I"? 

For Creating:
Imagine how songs not only might involve a dialog among the characters you create but how they might establish a dialog with other songs.  Lynyrd Skynyrd famously wrote "Sweet Home Alabama" as both a retort to Neil Young's "Southern Man" and a rebuke of the man himself (named 3 times in a single verse!).  Rather than picking a fight in your own songs(!), try one of these angles:

1) Take an I-You or an I-him/her song from among your pantheon of favorites and write a song that voices the unvoiced story or perspective of the other character.  This is an occupation of some feminist writers, for instance, taking a character created by a man and imagining and expressing the inner life of that character in empathic, empowered ways.  Your song can directly allude to its referent musically or lyrically, or it might make no reference at all.  Sometimes all we need is the starting point and the song takes on a life of its own.

2) Take one of your own songs and write the answer song to it.  Tired of all the break-up songs you wrote about him or her?  Write one from the villain's perspective!  Sometimes insight (and a measure of empathy) arise when we tell the other side of the story.

© Rob Seals, 2010, for The Songwriting School of Los Angeles