A Method To Help You Write Better Songs

Songwriting can sometimes be a hassle to start, and even then, it’s hard to keep everything unified. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes it only takes seconds to get an idea for a song you need to write. Once you get the idea, the challenge of keeping everything together arises in multiple forms; the mood, the base feeling, the lyrics you had in mind from the beginning. This article will discuss a method to simplify the process, speed up the time it takes to write a song, and to hold it to a higher standard; it's called the Top-Down Songwriting Pyramid.

Photo by Joshua Michaels on Unsplash

What Comes First

When writing a song, what’s the top priority that needs to be embedded into the song? I personally think it’s the mood/feeling you’re trying to portray.

After all, music is supposed to make you feel something emotionally right? So let’s write everything that supports this fact: it needs to make you feel something and/or put you in a certain state of mind.

Let’s take a look at a prime example of this: Let It Go by James Bay.

Every element of this song contributes to the mood. From the inflections in James’ voice to the guitar tone, they all contribute to how you feel when you’re looking to break out of an intimate relationship, the point of the song.

The instrumentation is very sparse, mostly just guitar and vocals, which help you feel like it’s you that’s talking to your partner. The guitar doesn’t have some heavy distorted tone, it’s quite clean and dynamic that helps push emotion; generally the more compressed a sound is (which can happen from distortion) the less “feel” you can portray; and it was all done on purpose to make you feel emotionally connected to the song.

The Support

So now that we have our goal in mind, we need EVERYTHING in the song to support it. No ifs, ands, buts, or excuses. The stronger you can connect to the mood of the song, the better chance you’ll have with connecting with people, and on a deeper level.

The theme, style, and tempo is next in the hierarchy. The theme should support the mood, the style should support the theme and the mood, and the tempo should support all of the above.

Once you set a theme, then you can select a style. If the theme is a horror show theme song, maybe an upbeat disco song isn’t the best idea. Something like a dissonant orchestral song might be a better fit!

Next in line is the lyrics; they need to support all of the above; whether they're there or not. The lyrics need to support the tempo, because sometimes the lyrics can sound too rushed and out of place. You may need to do some fancy rewording to make things flow better to help portray the mood, the overall most important characteristic of the song.

Lyrics can have a pyramid of their own; made up of the chorus, verses, verse 1, and the bridge. Verse 1 is called out separately because it’s mainly used to set up the story; if you have 3 verses, verses 2 and 3 are generally the same in terms of its function in the song.

The chorus is the most important in this lyric pyramid, mainly because it’s a big part of the theme and is repeated throughout the song. The verses are next, because they actually tell the story of the song; it confirms the mood/it’s the reason for the mood. Verse 1 is under that, because it sets up the story, and it supports the meat of it told in the next verse(s). Lastly, the bridge is at the bottom where it supports all of the above for a fresh take on the main point.

Back to the main pyramid, the instrumentation and chords/chord progressions are last. These are the very base of the song; every song has them, and are the foundation. Alone, these chords and instrument choice don’t really mean anything; but in context, when supporting the overall mood, can transform the song into being something people can connect with and feel something when paired with the lyrics. With these, the whole pyramid would fall apart.

Follow The Pyramid Top-Down

Now knowing the hierarchy, you can follow this to ensure you’re staying effective when writing. It’s basically like making a list of priorities, and checking each of them off starting with the most important.

Since you know what needs to be done, and in what order, you can make moves that give you the most bang for your buck. The 80/20 rule applies heavily here; 20 percent of your effort can now make up 80% of your results because you’re following a prioritized list as opposed to doing things in a random, not very effective order.

If you need to visualize this pyramid, I’ve made a graphic along with a more in-depth explanation of each element of the pyramid over here, for free. All you need to do is subscribe to receive email notifications each time a new post is published, and you’ll get this document for free! Don’t worry, you can unsubscribe at any time, but I promise you won’t get any spam or relentless ads/product pitches! If you stick around, you may learn a thing or two :)

-Michael