Song analysis for songwriters.

At the end of this section, you’ll find a series of posts analyzing songs from the perspective of songwriting craft and technique.

One of the best ways to expand your songwriting vocabulary is to learn as many songs as you can. Just playing and internalizing songs you enjoy will teach you a lot about how to achieve different effects in your own writing.

But you can go beyond this by studying a wide variety of songs more closely. On one end, you can just listen carefully, paying close attention to the parts that really stand out to you.

On the other end, you can dig deep into the song, analyzing the chord progressions and melodies to better understand how they work.

Analysis doesn’t always have the best reputation among musicians. For example, John Lennon once said that “intellectuals have the problem of having to understand [songs]. They can’t feel anything.”

But analysis doesn’t have to turn songwriting into a math problem!

The concepts of music theory can be helpful to give names to patterns and techniques. Once you can name something, it’s easier to recognize it and use it.

And once you have a technique under your belt, you can draw on it intuitively to express whatever you’re hearing in your head (or heart).

In this series, we’re going to take a deep dive into how songs work. Sometimes it will be more intuitive, and sometimes it will get technical.

You can take what’s useful and leave the rest.

The point isn’t to understand every last detail of a song. It’s to give you new perspectives, and new ways of thinking about what’s possible.

In this spirit, each post will end with a few practical songwriting exercises you can try out right away. This will help demonstrate how quickly you can take music theory concepts and actually use them.

No deep expertise required!