Contents
Songwriting Tools and ResourcesClayton Werner's tips from the January 2005 Join Us Workshop
Some Books that might be worth reading
Some recommended references(these belong on your shelf - you need them!)
Some tools to Developing riffs, chord progressions etc.(Remembering that from my normal perspective that's where I start - this might be somewhat limiting.)Here's my music cheat sheet. With a good riff, a chord or 2, I try to work out what are key the music is in and from there, what other chords might fit to add some interest to the progression (trying to mix up full chords with others with some additional notes to add colour). Sometimes playing around with different things from a book of (nearly impossible) chords can be an interesting way to make some new and different sounds (new and different at least for you!). There are some classic books out there with chords in them (for musical illiterates like me); I sometimes have a look through these, finding chords and progressions that work nicely together.
Also working to develop chord progression cliché, like say:
Another approach is to eject the "clichéd" or starter chords and try to other sequences together - can you make them (or parts of them) work OK? Collecting song ideas and storiesRead lots of good books, non-fiction can be rich in stories.Keep a notebook and always put in brief thoughts, a diary used for this purpose, as well as its normal job can be dual purpose. Be prepared to talk to people (even more importantly listen to people), some of them will have some interesting ideas that will result in stories & songs. Especially I have found people may approach you at gigs and other events where you might have played and have stories and song suggestions - be prepared to listen! Remember that the ideas someone tells you about - have at least a resonance for that person (if the resonance is more broad then you have something to write and sing about!). But it's not always the story that you are told; it is where it leads your thinking. Use a folio to keep your current works in progress together. This can also contain photocopies, chord cheat sheets, a pen, some staples and other items that might be worthwhile for this purpose. This means that if you go somewhere (into another room, away for the weekend etc.) your current WIP can accompany you without getting too disorganised along the way! You also need to consider where you see yourself as a songwriter, and whether you are intending to record and self-promote these songs, whether you hope to sell them though a publisher for others to record, or whether you are writing 'cause you need to, irrespective of the result. Understanding this can make a huge difference for what kinds of ideas you might be interested in pursuing! Or it might be that you recognise that in writing various different songs, some are for different purposes / markets etc. TimeFinding time to - work on stuff everyday (or at least most days) - it is reputed that Leonard Cohen, who might write between one and several pages everyday, will typically only find one line or one phrase per day, still that amounts to about 12 complete song lyrics per year.Finding time to draft and re-draft. Finding time to put things aside sometimes to be able to come back to them with fresh eyes (& ears) Find the time to record and listen back or to play them (open mic etc.) and get some feedback! Be careful about feedback, many people have very poor critiquing skills, some have crap personal skills (masquerading as "up front") and some might not be "in tune" with what you are attempting in your song. Some suggestions about working with collaborators.Considering a collaborator: Are you interested in a little collaboration, or do you feel that without writing / performing with someone else you won't make it work? Who might be an interesting collaborator, do you like their work? Can they add a different dimension to what you might normally do (i.e. female v male perspective, poetic writing to complement your story telling, great choruses to complement your verses.Most books that discuss the selection of potential collaborators suggest that you aim to find yourself someone who is a better songwriter than yourself, thus to improve your techniques and likelihood of success - fine if it works out that way - but personally I think various strengths working together can help each party! Agree before you start as to how the song credits will be shared, some will divide the music and the lyrics, some will just suggest 50/50 on stuff that they collaborate on, some might take credit only when they think they have made a significant input. Be a little careful performing with someone with say 2 guitars or 2 voices but effectively only presenting one part. Find harmonies and other chords and other parts to play/sing! My typical method of SongwritingPlay with some chords, find a groove that you find interesting and continue to develop the progressions, thinking about what might be a chorus and what might be a verse.Once something takes shape, thinking through the ideas of the day or the list of song ideas that you have collected and dutifully written down - is anything likely to fit? Get to work on the lyric and melody. Which key does this belong in? - it's always easy to add a capo and bring the song "up", not so easy to take it down without changing the chords, thus changing the voicings etc. I'd like to go the other way - it is only recently that I have ever written some music & melody to a lyric - that's a result of this workshop series! Copyright © Clayton Werner 2005 
Award winning songwriter Clayton Werner is SCALA's Treasurer and he also organises the "Join Us" Songwriting workshops at the Joiners Arms each month. His input can often be seen on SCALA's Message Board.
Abridged and adapted from Songwriting Tools and Resources by Clayton Werner - first presented as a workshop for SCALA on 18th January 2005 then printed in SCALA News # 102, April/May/June 2005.
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Mentors, Models and Influences on My SongwritingGeoff Hastwell's May 2005 Join Us WorkshopIn his poem 'Ulysses', Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote: I am a part of all that I have seen. In an interview many years ago, Bob Dylan stated: Open y'r eyes an' ears an' y'r bound to be influenced… These two quotes are the basis for the following piece - I very much believe they apply to most creative accomplishment, and songwriting is no exception. The multiple influences on this writer began in his tender years - children's stories, read to me by parents and later read avidly by me; poetry at school in early and later anthologies; many novels, such as every 'Biggles' book I could lay my hands on; radio plays on late 50s ABC radio/wireless - kids' epics with titles like 'The Gorilla Hunters', 'Captain Silver', 'Hop Harrigan' (complete with screaming aeroplane engine in a power dive!) and (naturally) 'Biggles' radio adaptations. Even the Saturday 'flicks' would have made their inroads on this young writer. ALL gave me a vocabulary, glimpses of human beings in a variety of settings and situations; all helped, to a greater or lesser degree, show the black and white and shades in between that we exhibit. I still have a Grade 7 Poetry Book, kept since 1961 (!). This may illustrate how much words meant to me even then. I cannot recommend highly enough, for a serious lyricist/writer a WIDE, eclectic, constant range of reading matter, as well as extensive listening and viewing. Ideally for a songwriter, allied with this should be an equally diverse and eagerly sought musical and melodic range of influences. Here I must confess, I have been less adventurous, less restless in seeking new lodes to mine and explore. Even so, over more than 40 years of collecting records and tape and CDs, I have managed to come across many musical guides. Back in the early 60s, there were several musical and lyrical influences on this writer. At the top was (and is) Bob Dylan, followed closely by Leonard Cohen, Donovan Leitch and Joan Baez. All were major formative models for my songwriting. My very first song/s were parodies of others' efforts. One, composed before I could play one chord on guitar, was entitled 'Don't Take Your Sign To Town', based on Johnny Horton's (?) 'Don't Take Your Guns To Town'. It was written for a Flinders Uni revue/play we were self-devising with one of our lecturers in 1968. But the first 'real' song, also using a borrowed tune, came along in 1969, in the third year of my Arts degree. I was 'only 19', and very much against the Vietnam war then so massively dividing this country and killing millions in South East Asia. I simply grabbed Dylan's 'Desolation Row' and began a 'musical history of the Vietnam War' entitled 'For An Audience Which (Still) Believes in Vietnam'. The whole opus is LONGER than Dylan's original, and uses the same melody and the verse-concluding refrain 'Desolation Row'. Soon after this time I finally learned a few chords on a nylon-string guitar and began playing a lot of Dylan and Cohen and other folk tunes. Joan Baez' version of 'Wildwood Flower' provided a melody for a little ditty about a tree we'd bought and planted in our first flat, simply called 'Something Green'. (The song that is, not the flat!) The poet T.S. Eliot and Leonard Cohen were plundered/imitated in one song from this time. It aimed to capture what it is like to live in a big, impersonal, cold and dirty city. Lines like green grass grows on rusty bridges and a saint can't survive in a city epitomise the possibly affected world-weariness of the writer at this stage of his career, as well as the presence of Cohen and Eliot! Donovan had his influence too in early songs. The album 'Wear Your Love Like Heaven' might well have had a bit to do with lines like Fairytale tracery, delicate lacery/ Spring rain is sprinkling the glass… in a fragment of an unfinished song. Dylan Thomas and the ever-inspiring Cohen probably helped conjure up images for the early song 'Impressions', with lines like boys of summer in their ruin now, and the trees they just ignore us/ As they dress and undress for us… But all this 'juvenilia', with the exception of the Vietnam song, I place in the experimental/tyro/apprenticeship phase of my songwriting. They are all valuable as exercises, but are not songs I perform today or regard as strong and worthwhile for wider presentation. In the early 70s, I was getting to hear and see a few singer-songwriters around town, and these all had their part to play in developing my own stuff. At various venues - places like The Cave and The Saint coffee-lounges at Glenelg, not to mention the famous Catacombs at Hackney Cellars, I saw people like Mike Quarmby, Andy Armstrong, early Terry Bradford, Steve Foster and several more I've forgotten. At the Flinders Uni Theatre I remember catching the young Ross Ryan, fresh out then with the 'Chevrolet' song and 'Blood on the Microphone'. Not to forget, just a few years later when I'd begin my teaching high school, being among the devotees at Don McLean's concert in the Centennial Hall, and seeing Cat Stevens at the good ol' Apollo Stadium. An absolute highlight of this time was attending Joan Baez' superb outdoors concert at Wayville Showground in the mid 70s, on a balmy and perfect summer evening. She was in relaxed, communicative and generous form that night, and gave us so many wonderful songs - and of course some Dylan covers to make everyone VERY happy…! It might be worth commenting on the fact that aspects of PERFORMANCE come into the picture with these exemplars, and I think this must have been so for me. The first little impulses to encourage actual presentation of my efforts would have come from such concerts, I think. This may well be worth relating for any aspiring songwriters who have had the desire to get onto a platform of some sort and SING TO THE WORLD! Go and see others in the field as models and inspirers…. Of course, the radio was and probably will remain a major avenue for catching current tunes and songs. I remember the wonderful songs of Roy Orbison, The Seekers, Simon and Garfunkel, Del Shannon, Gene Pitney, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, The Who…. Sadly, I gave away most of my single collection when we moved to the country with teaching, but there were scores of the 45rpms in the box. The Beatles, on the scene for most of the 60s and hence in my formative songwriting years, I do not regard as major influences. Yes, McCartney's tunes were catchy, Lennon's lyrics (especially as he went on) were powerful, but I just never seemed to 'dig' them as exemplars. The closest I have got is to the later Lennon and his more or less solo songs like 'Working Class Hero'. But all this time, up to the present day, I was 'one too many late nights and a coupla miles behind' Robert Zimmerman and his multifarious musical/lyrical pathways. I can recall, going back to pre-guitar days, playing air guitar to his songs and 'attitudinizing' myself to Dylan's approach to the world as I then saw it. This may well be a major factor in making my lyrics pretty direct and even 'in your face' rather than subtle and allusive. My songs generally carry a minimum of imagery and figurative language - I am NO Leonard Cohen, though I love his lyrics and many of his melodies. A SCALA friend has said that if [prime minister] John Howard died tomorrow, I'd have little to write about! He was, of course, referring to the marked political/social comment content in many of my lyrics. I'm not sure how accurate this is, as there have been many diverse influences on my writing apart from the political, finger-pointing songs of Bobby D. I can cite Dylan's many beautiful love songs, the highly personal ruminations of Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens' words (his 'Where Do the Children Play?' being almost his only 'protest' type song!), Neil Young's often quirky visions of the world (apart from his political statements), John Prine's idiosyncratic takes on the universe - all have had their affect on my words and tunes, I think. As far as Aussie songwriters go, The Dingoes, Kevin Johnson, Mike McClellan, Judy Small, John Schumann, John Williamson, Paul Kelly, Sean Mangan, Andrew Bunney and Jim Lesses have given me a host of ideas and ways into a song… It would be remiss to leave out several SCALA folk, some of whom I've had the pleasure of writing with over the years - thank you Clayton, Gary, Mark, Ghita. They have all made their impressions on me. The venerable 'El Presidente's' songs I have listened to time and again - I know that they too have helped. I like to think, for example, that Robert's words in songs like 'Happy Birthday, Matilda' and 'The Prime Minister is Dead' helped with my 'Afternoon Light' written a few years ago about John Howard. But there - I'm getting back into political songs again! I DO write personal songs though, with that element of 'heart on one's sleeve' and 'letting things out of the woodwork' with them. It is just that I do not often perform them. Such songs have been composed under the influence of people like Cohen, a master of the HIGHLY PERSONAL lyric, Jackson Browne, Young, Prine et al. Yes, I have been 'jotting down notes' for many years, mentally, and it eventually comes out in song. One example, very much in the Jackson Browne mode, might be 'Steppin' Out', written for a friend to tell her There seem to be few moments left alone now/ No avenues to search the secret heart/ And the tiny truths you try to make your own now/ Evaporate and flutter far apart… Such lines are very much in the style of songs on 'Late for the Sky' or 'Everyman', by Browne. A major area of personal influences in my songs is religion. Being a Christian - in a fairly pantheistic sense, I fear - I have injected contemplative and religious questioning into several songs. Dylan again has been a model, as he has ALWAYS been exploring religious/life-death/heaven-hell themes in his work. But then look at Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, Gordon Lightfoot, Prine, Don McLean…. My songs 'The Plan', The Children and the Orchard' and 'A Long Way Home' about the Good Samaritan parable are all very much in the religious genre. My job as a teacher has given me several songs, some written for students themselves - others for adults, such as 'The Teaching Song'. With lines like So go on, you're not done, there's a chance to make it yet/ Even though a part of you is dyin'…. it is meant for grown up listeners, I think! Books and writers have provided several songs, which - given my opening - might not be that surprising! I have a song based on 'Lord of the Flies', a song based on 'Catcher in the Rye', a song about 'Animal Farm' and one biographical number on Ernest Hemingway…. There is even one rather weird early song based on an incident in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, where a war goes in reverse and all the weapons are turned back into the minerals and mines they came from, and dead victims come back to life….! Love and relationships and the deaths of loved ones have given many special, personal songs to me. My hobbies like drama and sports like gliding gave several good songs. Views on conservation and nature have also been put down in song form. So one's OWN LIFE and one's feelings about it provide lots of material. This is as much a mentor, perhaps, as any actual singer/songwriter - as long as you take the time to reflect on life's experiences and transmute that reflection into song. So - to conclude where I began, we ARE, I believe, a part of all we see and of all we hear and touch and taste and feel and encounter. It is simply how we respond to all that stimulus and 'incoming data' that decide what sort of songs we make. I have here tried - albeit briefly - to illustrate just what influences, mentors and forces have assisted me making songs over 30 or more years. May I end with a little anecdote? It's a true one, about the recently deceased English novelist/philosopher Iris Murdoch. When she was in her final days, suffering from advanced Alzheimer's and virtually non-speaking and non-communicating, she was being bathed by a close friend. Iris suddenly sat bolt upright in the bath and called out: I wrote! Never a more accurate self-assessment. If as songwriters we too can say the same in reflective, later years, our life experience will have been well used. We will have, as Tennyson put it so beautifully, lived life to the lees… in our own songwriting and singing. All the best to you in that! Copyright © Geoff Hastwell 2005 
Geoff Hastwell is a multi-award winning songwriter and lyricist and a long term SCALA member. Many performers know him as the person who organises them to appear on Radio Adelaide on Saturday mornings. More recently he and Clayton Werner have commenced the popular Lyrical Highlights series in SCALA News.
Abridged from Mentors, Models and Influences on My Songwriting by Geoff Hastwell - first presented as a workshop for SCALA on 17th May 2005 then printed in SCALA News # 102, April/May/June 2005.
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