This marks the sixth installment in this series of assignments to keep your pen moving to create or revise songs.  The previous five chapters are available here.  We welcome and sincerely appreciate your ideas for such assignments.  One of the ambitions of The Songwriting School is to centralize and utilize the collective wisdom of the tribe.  Thank you in advance for the brain wattage.

For Creating
One of the things that makes The Olympics fun to watch is all the human drama surrounding the games.  Take last year's Winter Olympics for instance.  You may not be a knowledgeable fan of the moguls, but you might be compelled to cheer for the first Canadian to win a Gold Medal on home snow in three Olympic Games when you learn that his older brother has cerebral palsy. The older brother's inability to act on his dreams drives the younger brother to push himself toward his own. When the Canadian skier won that first medal for his country, no one was cheering louder than the older brother. That's a story worth telling. And worth writing about.

Keep your ears peeled for a story like that one this week that gives you a clear sense of the objective (the motivation) of the voice of the song. Use the setting metaphorically or literally, as feels appropriate to you. If the story moves you in the hearing, see if you can move us in the singing. Tissues will be made available.

For Revising (This offers an opposing strategy to Week 4's challenge to withhold the home or I chord as long as possible)
We want our songs to move our listeners. The desire to move them often leads to movement in our chord progression. The over-eager among us will introduce more and more chord changes hoping to further build momentum. Sometimes that movement masks a lack of true dynamic content: melodically, lyrically, rhythmically, or structurally. Let's rip a band-aid or two off this week.

Take a song or a song-in-progress of yours that has a lot of chord changes in it and consider...
a) why every change happens  (Seriously.  Ask yourself WHY each time.  Earn each change.  If last week the 1 chord cost the most, this time each change costs.)
b) the beat on which the changes tend to occur
c) how often every change happens
d) the pattern to the changes
If you are like me, some of your chord changes happen because you LOVE chords.  Sometimes that approaches self-indulgence rather than beauty. 
- What happens if the line of melody that originally implied a change to your ear actually works against the static chord? 
- How much drama could you build by staying on a single chord?
- How could you make a single chord change give a powerful release to the tension you have built?  How might this connect to the emotion and intent of the lyric?
- What would it feel like if the change never came?  The melody itself could give the feeling of tension and release!

© Rob Seals, 2010, 2011 for The Songwriting School of Los Angeles.  All Rights Reserved.