The Book

Songfarmer: Writing More and Better Songs

By Owen Temple and Gordy Quist

Published by El Paisano Press, Austin, Texas.

This book lays out the complete Songfarmer method — a systematic view of the processes involved in songwriting that you can use to improve and troubleshoot your work, session by session, day by day.

Inside you’ll find:

• How to set a songwriting goal that activates your songwriter consciousness
• The four daily habits — Writing, Listening, Performing, and Reading — and how to build them using mini habits
• How to recognize and collect song seeds from your daily life
• The two modes of composing — FLOW and EDIT — and why separating them is the key to finishing songs
• Wild zones and manicured zones: a practical framework for moving raw ideas to polished drafts
• Techniques for improving FLOW (dreaming, morning pages, improvisation, writing fast) and EDIT (beat the line, overwriting, rhyme, phrasing, development)
• The SUCCESs framework for designing memorable, “sticky” songs
• A step-by-step guide to co-writing
• Exercises, prompts, and real-world examples from decades of songwriting

Whether you’re writing your first song or your five-hundredth, Songfarmer gives you a repeatable process for growing ideas into finished songs.