International Cinema Festival of India

Have you ever gone through a time when you found yourself humming to a song on the radio until your mind starts filling up with your own lyrics to add to the song? Many songwriters have experienced this hundreds of times. Don’t fear, you are probably not losing your mind, it is your creativity flowing. You are simply channeling your inner writer through a song that another writer created.

Start by listening to songs on the radio and practice coming up with your own words and melodies. You can play a band’s CD and try to change some lines using the melody you hear as a launching point. The good thing about doing this is that you have a structured form to follow as you come with your own musical ideas. You have a melody to start with, and you simply have to use the chord progressions and the rhythm section arrangements of the band’s song to help you develop your own melody and lyrics. It is similar to being the lead singer of that band while tweaking the lyrics as you go along.

You will have to ignore the singer on the recording of course, but you are not looking here to write an entire song with other peoples music. The goal is to utilize top-notch recordings to jump-start your inner melody writer. You will have a chance to focus exclusively on THE MELODY with a completely finished song.

Sometimes I will go about writing lyrics on the back of my grocery receipt or a random piece of paper once ideas for lyrics start to flow after hearing a song on the radio. There are times when I will ask for a pen while having my meal or a few drinks at a restaurant so I won’t forget the words I came up with to a song. Sometimes, I write lyrics that I feel are worth remembering or it could be lines that I will improve later. When I get home, the words I jotted down will remind me of the melody to help me remember the idea.

Even if I spent the entire day in an office without even humming a simple tune, I find the songwriter in me coming up with lyrics once I hear a great song. I just need something to listen to for my creativity to begin to flow. Once you start practicing this, you’ll get used to it and you’ll find yourself flooded with so many ideas that you won’t know what hit you.

Don’t panic and start thinking that this is a form of copying songs. It is not. We hear music everyday around us. Songwriters often admit that they find inspiration in other people’s songs. There is a certain magic in hearing completed songs that inspires us to come up with our own masterpiece. We do not copy the song, but we use it to guide us in coming up with our own lyrics and melody. We are all inextricably influenced by the music of our times. If we were living in sixteenth century Italy, we would not be writing hip-hop or country songs. We might be inspired to write folk songs or renaissance compositions of the times however. But it would be our own unique slant on these styles that would be our creative contribution.

Once you have developed your own melody and used your own words the song transforms into a totally different one. Nobody will ever think you found inspiration in a famous band’s hit song. After developments in the tempo or chords, you will have magically transformed a song into your own unique masterpiece.

You are simply using this method to kick-start the songwriting process with a catchy phrase or melody, which you can then build out with new chords, song sections, and different grooves, and then develop it into your own unique song.

Why not give this a shot? You’ll find it encouraging once you find yourself humming to a song using your own lyrics. It is not copying another musician’s song. It is finding inspiration for you to begin your own. A lot of songwriters have done the same thing to draw inspiration, so you won’t be the first. We hear songs everyday; these are most aptly used as steppingstones to developing our skills as a songwriter.

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