Lyrics with Ben | Three Prong Writing (Patreon)

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Hi Everyone!

This lesson is a little different. It's a conversation with my friend and bandmate, Ben Carson. This is hopefully the first of many conversations. Let me know if you'd like me to continue this conversation and get more specific about each of these lyric writing prongs. Next time we'll be able to capture better audio as well - something didn't work right this time!

Ben and I wrote all the songs for our band, Hot Bodies in Motion. I wrote mostly music - bringing sketches of verse and chorus and sometimes more - and Ben wrote the lyrics (and massaged, changed, or rewrote my melodies to fit his voice.)

This video is hopefully the first of many videos about writing lyrics. Even if you are not interested in writing lyrics, this still might be useful if you'd like to be a good bandmate in the future. Also, this discussion might help you start thinking about how to start building writing habits around music as well.

Ben Recommends three books in this discussion:
Atomic Habits
The Artist's Way
Writing Better Lyrics 

Ben's three prongs are:
Read
Write
Listen

Ben also mentioned genuis.com, song exploder, dissected, and behind the song.

Essentially, the goal here is to create a system where you're regularly listening and pursuing and looking into the lyrics you like - writing down what you like about them, keeping track of the methods, techniques, and concepts implemented by the artists you like. That also means reading things that are interesting to you and keeping a digital prompt sheet of phrases, situations, words, and feelings that you want to bookmark and dig deeper into when you write your own lyrics. That also means practicing writing more than you need for a song so that you have options and choices.

Again, if you like this lesson and you'd like to get into more details with Ben, let me know in the comments!

If you'd like to discuss this lyric writing foundation or compare this one to what you're already doing OR talk about your lyric writing progress after you've adopted this strategy, let's do it on the community forum!

Also, we haven't recorded another conversation yet, so if you have specific lyric writing questions, feel free to fire those off as well and we'll loop those into our next conversation.