Chapter 4: Recognizing Song Seeds
From Songfarmer: Writing More and Better Songs
Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Prompts, Conclusion
Recognizing Song Seeds
“The concept, if there is a concept, or the hook, is all you’re concerned with. Because you know you can go back and fill in the pieces.”
- Harry Nilsson
“I’ve had a lot of songs that kind of intruded on whatever is going on. They usually come in the form of one line, which you might remember and go get alone later.”
- Townes Van Zandt
Your goal to write a set quantity of songs by a particular time will activate your songwriter consciousness and a part of your mind will always be looking for material to work with. You will find that while you are practicing your writing, listening, reading, and performing habits, and in the day-to-day of your normal life, you are screening your experience for song seeds.
Song seeds can be:
- short phrases that strike your ear in a pleasing way
- truths or insights about life
- grooves
- chord progressions
- pieces of melody
- symbols or metaphors that reflect truth of life
- interesting situations
- characters, real or imagined
- strong emotions you have experienced
- a setting or location where a song could be set
- a single word to put in a song
What qualifies as a seed? One definition: If it gets you writing, it was a seed.
A seed is an idea to start responding to, expanding upon, and seeking meaning around, and anything can be a seed. The importance of a seed is that it is a beginning. When a seed is placed in the soil and watered, it starts growing. Tiny buds and then leaves appear and those leaves can become branches. As it grows, a farmer can prune the plant and weed around it.
If you water your song seed, then words and melodies, like leaves, will emerge from it. Certain words will become phrases, and phrases will become lines, and lines will pair up and become verses and choruses. As a songwriter, you will remove words that don’t help the song, and you will reorder lines to help the song grow in directions that you find interesting or beautiful. Growing a song from a seed is a process that is marked by trial and error, expansion and contraction, and the slow emergence of interconnected ideas.
In the next section, let’s use the word “composing” to mean the creation and structuring of melody and lyrics or “growing a song from a seed.”