360 Songwriting:

Catching Song Seeds From Any Direction

Mark SimosSongwriter
Associate Professor, Songwriting Department
Berklee College of Music
msimos@berklee.edu

Berklee Summer Songwriting Workshop

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 Preliminary Fall 2011 Edition
2011 Mark Simos. All Rights Reserved.

Mark Simos is an innovative songwriter for progressive Americana artists such as Alison Krauss and Union
Station, and a versatile co-writer who has worked with artists ranging from American singer-songwriter Catie
Curtis to Australian Jimmy Barnes. 360 Songwriting synthesizes Marks working philosophy as a songwriter
and co-writer, distilled through many decades of teaching experience at clinics and summer workshops, as a
technical trainer and method developer, and as a professor in the Songwriting Department at Bostons Berklee
College of Music.

Acknowledgements. This is a preliminary field test excerpt from an upcoming Berklee Press book
on 360 Songwriting, Songwriting Strategies: a comprehensive set of exercises and practices to
expand your range and process flexibility as a songwriter. Many exercises and suggested practices
described here have been presented in past years to students in songwriting workshops at summer
music camps including Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, NewSongs Festival, California Coast Music
Camp; in classes at Passim School of Music; and in classes and summer workshops at Berklee
College of Music. They also incorporate insights from reading, talking to and observing the teaching
of many great songwriters and teachers of songwriting.

In particular, the author would like to thank:

All great songwriters past, present, and future, famous and obscure, timeless and timely;
Pat Pattison, whose seminal work on lyric writing has profoundly shaped the direction of
the Songwriting Department at Berklee;
Jimmy Kachulis (author of Songwriters Workshop: Melody; and Songwriters
Workshop: Harmony Berklee Press), master teacher and a pioneer in using progressive
exercises to build independent skills in melody, rhythm and harmony;
Jack Perricone (author of Melody in Songwriting Berklee Press), for endless
enlightening conversations about the essence of melody;
The late Henry Gaffney, a beloved teacher of songwriting at Berklee who always
respected the creative spirit of his students;
John Stevens (author of The Songs of John LennonBerklee Press), whose love of and
insight into the canon of the Beatles immense and deep catalog is a constant inspiration;
Many other Berklee faculty colleagues including: Susan Cattaneo, Mick Goodrick,
Scarlet Keys, Steve Kirby, Allen LeVines, Scott McCormick, and Matthew Nicholl, and
Michael Wartofsky;
The many great songwriters I have collaborated with and learned from over the years,
including: Lisa Aschmann, Jon Weisberger, John Pennell, and Catie Curtis;
The many great songwriters and teachers of songwriting Ive been privileged to learn
from and observe, including: Steve Seskin, Beth Neilsen Chapman, Ferron, Janis Ian,
Roseanne Cash, Susan Werner, Melissa Ferrick, and many others; and
Last but the key to it all, the many brave, talented and dedicated students who have
helped me to develop and refine these ideas over the years.

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Song Seeds. The first strategy we will explore in depth is the art of catching song seeds.
By song seed I mean a first starting point for a given song that comes to your awareness.
The starting point may be a title, a lyric hook or just a great line, an interesting phrase or
even a cool-sounding and unusual word; it might be a snippet of melody, an intriguing
way of moving between chords your hands never found before, a starting riff on guitar.
It might be a story a friend tells you or that you hear on the news; a sudden memory of a
past experience, a visual image that strikes you on the street. For a hip-hop producer it
might be a found sound from a classic recording or a sampled industrial sound.

In my experience writing songs and listening to others songs, Ive come to believe that
most strong songs begin with song seedsa single distinct inspiration, idea or moment of
conception. In this chapter well explore some key distinctions in this universe of ideas
for songs; and well learn techniques for working more skillfully with song seeds as we
turn them into finished songs.

Why Song Seeds? Songwriters (and teachers) love metaphors; we use metaphors, not
only in our songs, but also to conceptualize how we write songs. Any metaphor or
analogy highlights some aspects of its topic, places other aspects in the background.
(Metaphor as spotlight) And pushed too hard, any metaphor will break down.
(Metaphor as car engine?) The image that inspires my metaphor for starting inspirations
is that of seedpods blowing in the wind; catching song seeds means grabbing them out
of the air. This metaphor implies the following about song seeds:

They are small but full of potential.

They are alive and potent.
They have their own nature, but you dont know with certainty what that is until
they germinate and start to grow.
We (songwriters) do not make them; they blow whither they will, land in different
types of soil, thrive or wither depending on many accidents of sun, wind and rain.
(You may be reminded of Jesus story of the mustard seeds.)

I hope the seeds metaphor is useful or evocative to you; but I encourage you to find
your own metaphors as well. Different writers name their starting inspirations in
varied ways. At a recent Berklee clinic James Taylor talked about the many little
melodic and chordal ideas he gets on the guitar as wheels. The poet Richard Hugo
discusses triggers as his term for starting points. Another delightful expression
Ive heard, more of a photographers metaphor, is Roids. My wife Pam even
coined the great word epiphanettes for little epiphanies. Find a metaphor or
name that works for you; but keep in mind that your metaphor suggests imagery for
not just starting ideas but the whole process of writing songs.

Songwriters are song seed collectors. If you read interviews with songwriters for
the general public, Id say that anecdotes about song seeds are the most prevalent
story youll hear. These make great stories: the Beatles grabbing inspirations for
songs from circus posters, cab driver turns of phrase (eight days a week) or quips
from the inexhaustible malapropmeister Ringo Starr; the latest pop diva talking

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about what her boyfriend said on the phone. Im not sure why fans delight in these
stories, unless the implied subtext is: See, Im just an ordinary guy/gal like you
with an ordinary lifeexcept Im also an insightful genius

What can get lost in these individual accounts of where songs came from is a clear
picture of the daily working process of the most productive writers. The studiedly
casual stories dont tell you that for every cool idea that led to a great song, that
songwriter most likely caught, and scribbled down in some way, dozens of other
ideasideas that either didnt make it into songs or made it into drafts still sitting in
a journal or on a work tape.

Great songwriters practice having great ideas over and over again, just as they
practice developing those ideas into songs over and over again. They do this by
making a regular creative habit of being alert for and catching song seeds.

I once had the chance to meet and hear a renowned Songwriter Who Shall
Remain Nameless, instigator of a long-running song circle. Curious about
the ways that songwriters in this group critiqued each others songs, I
asked him about it when we met before his show. In my experience, he
confided, writers are really not that interested in getting feedback on their
songs, no matter what they say. At the end of the day, the most important
thing is just to writewrite all the time. After writing a few hundred songs,
youll start to be a better writer. After this conversation, I sat with my
wife (who has unerring taste) as he began his set, eagerly anticipating
scintillating gems of songwriting artistry. To our surprise and dismay, we
were disappointed by the quality of a number of songs from this writer. I
was reminded of a great saying from my previous career in the technology
field: Some people have twenty years of experiencesome have one year
of experience twenty times.

The Nameless Songwriter was only partly right: it is vitally important to practice the
activities of songwriting, but the point is not simply how many songs you write. Practice
makes perfect is a dangerous saying. We do learn what we practicefor better or worse.
If you practice a less than optimal strategy over and over again you may be ingraining
habits that will prove both unhelpful and hard to break. But long before we are capable of
completing the great songs we want to write, we are capable of recognizing a great idea
for a song. Thus, one really useful thing to practice is finding great ideas for songs.

Great ideas for songs do not come every day; when they do arrive they are surprisingly
fragile visitations. If were not alert for them and skilled at recognizing them, framing
them, pulling them out of context, and capturing them, they can vanish in an ear-blink.
Sure, a great idea for a song does not instantly bestow on you all the skills needed to
write the great songbut its a good first step! Nor are ideas for songs are just out there
in the world. Out of our human encounter with lifes experiences, we make meaning and
pattern through the activity of minds pre-disposed and primed to notice songwriterly
stuffthe melodies and rhythms of speech, the harmonies of images. As Louis Pasteur
famously wrote, "In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind."
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This is why I consider the skill of working with song seeds a foundation strategy. Calling
it a strategy, something one can be deliberate about, may seem odd. In fact, its a
common practice of just about every experienced songwriter I know.

I had the pleasure of co-teaching at a songwriting retreat in British

Columbia with the wonderful songwriter Bonnie Hayes (she wrote Have
a Heart and Love Letter recorded by Bonnie Raitt, among other great
songs). One afternoon after a talk I gave about song seeds, she came over
to me in great excitement: Ive never heard anyone talk about song
seeds before, and Ive been gathering them practically my whole life!

I was pleased but also a bit bemused. Sorry to be dense, I said, but
if this is something you already do, why is it useful to you to hear me talk
about it? Because, she said, I never heard it named; I never realized
it is a real skill that can be practiced and honed. I just thought I was
weird! In fact Ive always been a little embarrassed about it

Naming and formalizing the skill of song seed gathering helps us understand that there
are ways our minds and ears work, essential to our craft, different from the experience of
many others (even those who love music and are familiar with a lot of music). We can
train and discipline these different capacities and perceptions, so that we are not left at
their mercy, mastered by our whims and impulses, but rather can use them to advance our
mastery as songwriters. (Hmm Im starting to sound like Charles XavierDoctor X
from the X-Men... songwriters as mutants?)

Other Sources. When writers about songwriting do talk about song seeds, they have
mostly provided suggestions for where to find ideas, seeds for seeds as it were. The
creative writing field has produced many excellent books of exercises to get you started
on ideas for creative work of all kinds. These exercises, developed by teachers and
workshop leaders, are passed around almost the same ways as songs themselves. (As any
teacher knows, exercises and games are creative forms in their own right, like songs,
stories and poems.)

For songwriters in particular, there are several useful source books for song ideas. Sheila
Davis followed up her seminal books on lyric writing with The Songwriters Idea Book, a
compendium of strategies (cautionher use of the term is different from mine) or
starting ideas, basic themes and plots for songs. For example, she suggests starting a song
title with the word Anda technique Ive used with some intriguing results. My friend
Lisa Aschmanns more recent 1000 Songwriting Ideas (Hal Leonard) is a treasure trove
of ways to get started with songs. Along with general references like books of quotations,
proverbs, phrase books, etc., there is no limit to the help you can get in starting a song.

With all of these resources available, it is easy to lose sight of a central point: Those
constitutionally predisposed to be songwriters are already people who continually get
ideas for songs. It never hurts to have additional strategies to get you unstuck or to tackle
a particular type of project.

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But the most potent and distinctive ideas for songs you will get are those unique to your
personal experience and your lyrical and musical aesthetic. To help you make song seeds
a more conscious strategy, then, I wont provide long lists of source material for seeds
as I noted, there are plenty of these resources available. Instead, Ill look in almost
microscopic detail at activities of song seed gathering.

Good song seeds. Suppose youre talking with a friend at Starbucks about their ever-
tempestuous relationship, and they say: Last night we broke up for the last timeagain!
The ever-watchful songwriter in you hears the line, pulls it out of the conversation and
says, Hmmm. The final song you write might have something to do with the
particulars of the story your friend was telling you; or it might not. It is the way the spoken
line combines meaning and sound, what it says and how it says it, that catches your
attention. (By the way, after writing this paragraph, I wrote this songso now its mine!)

What made this particular phrase leap out and attract your attention as a potential title for
a song? In my experience a good song seed has these attributes:

Serendipity: a song seed is an idea or observation that strikes us when were not
specifically on the hunt for an idea. Its hard to pay attention to the moment when a
song seed catches your attention; its like trying to catch a glimpse of an elf out of the
corner of your eye. But the serendipity attribute is important; it means the seed had
enough energy to draw your attention out of the stream of everyday activity. Once
you learn to catch seeds this way, youll have better intuition about what makes a
strong seed, and so youll get more skilled at other seed-capturing strategies.

Interest/Potency/Life: Something about the idea, the motive, the line must attract our
attention. This depends on our preferences as listeners and as writers; one writer will
notice and respond to a line or phrase that breezes right by another. We can learn a lot
about our writing by paying attention to the particular kinds of song seeds that interest
us. These are ideas with potency for our creative work. A seed should feel as if it has
its own life, its own motive forceas if it catches us as much as we catch it.

Novelty/Surprise/Unexpectedness: Songwriters are always on the lookout for freshness

and originality of some kind in their seeds. It can mean bringing a background idea to
the foreground; breaking off a fragment of a familiar idea to get something fresh and
unexpected; or juxtaposing two unexpected elements together; or flipping and
rearranging words, notes. Not every seed that catches our interest has this quality of
novelty, but the strongest seeds have some a unique aspect in their expression

Compactness and unity: A song seed is the shortest, most concise possible way to
capture the essence, the germ of the idea that has caught our attention. (In Indian
music the term rasa conveys this sense; it means juice, sweetness, and essence.
True musical connoisseurs are known as rasikas.) By virtue of the ideas unity,
cohesiveness and compactness, it plays a focusing role when developing the song
whether the seed is a title, hook or a melodic fragment, and even if the original seed
recedes from the foreground or vanishes completely in the completed song.

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 Re-contextable: When we notice a song seed, we lift it out of the original
context where we encounter it. A potential lyric line may arise from a chance
phrase uttered about in an everday context, which, it suddenly strikes you, could
apply to a relationship as well. A visual image might take on a metaphorical
aspect. Generally, the act of noticing something as a seed involves conceiving it
and giving it meaning outside its original setting.

This re-contexting does not mean being vaguely universal. Concreteness and
small details engage the listener. She brushed the hair back from her face
may work as a lyrical seed because it conjures a specific, believable picture. The
story you build into the song may have nothing to do with the girl who sparks
the seed idea for you. (Luckily for us songwriters; otherwise wed get slapped
upside the head for staring moonily at that unwitting muse in the caf.)

Emotional Resonance: Since songs are not creative non-fiction or philosophical

essays, seed ideas that hold potential for songwriting need to touch our hearts or
guts as well as our minds. But I wouldnt try to pre-judge this too quickly at
first: you need to practice seed-catching enough to get good at it, and that might
mean just enjoying its clever and playful aspects for awhile. But the strongest
seeds matter, reveal a story it is worth our while to tell in song.

Shiny thingness. This last attribute is hard to describe, because it depends on

you doing some research about the kinds of song seeds you particularly most
delight in gathering. Songwriters looking for ideas are like magpies, who like to
collect shiny things. But whereas all magpies like shiny things, each individual
songwriter is like a previously undocumented species of magpie. We each
respond strongly to certain kinds of song ideasour own private shiny. Some
delight in melodic ideas that tumble downward in Dorian moans, others hunt for
scraps of dialogue that make good double entendres. The more you discover
what interests you as a writer, the better youll be at recognizing strong song
seeds for your work. Such self-reflection also provides a basis for stretching
your capacity for catching song seeds in less familiar modalities.

Attributes of Great Song Seeds. Each of the seven general attributes listed above (yes, Im a
fan of lists with satisfying numbers like three and seven!) could apply in principle to seed
ideas for any creative medium: story lines, stand-up comedy routines, paintings.

But since songwriting is about the marriage of words and music, particular kinds of seeds
make ideal ideas for potential songs:

Engaging sound: Strong musical song seeds must first and foremost delight
the ear. This is as true of lyric seeds as musical seeds. Sonic qualities in
specific combinations of words engage the ear: internal rhyme, rhythmic
effects, assonance, consonance and alliteration, interplay of word sounds.

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 Engaging meaning or sense: A great song seed captures an important or
insightful thought. This is as true of musical seeds as lyric seeds; a melody
or chord progression can mean just as a great title or line can.

Collisions of sound and sense: It is great to identify a story idea for a song
without having a clear title or lyric line in mind; you can work with that. It is
great to stumble on a great line for a song even when you have no idea what
it means; you can work with that too.

But the crown jewels of song seeds are when we stumble on a harmonious
collision of sound and meaning; a single, unified idea that generates the
lightning and thunderclap of two clouds rubbing together: sound and sense.
We know what a Hard Days Night is instantly, though we dont know the
specific frame the songwriters will choose to set context around the theme.
But we also know we are hearing it in an absolutely fresh way, in a lyrical
phrase that rolls off the tongue and onto the ear in a compelling way. (Sorry
about that implied metaphor.) A surprising rhyme must also connect words
that connect on a meaningful level as well. Song seed discoveries like this
where both the meaning and the specific sound of the words matterare
worth their weight in gold. (Hmm since an idea weighs nothing, shall we
say worth the songwriters weight in gold?). As Alexander Pope says in
his Essay on Criticism:

Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Ambiguity of meaning: This attribute can be hard to get a handle on, in part
because of the work of well-meaning songwriting teachers and coaches like
me. Because in teaching we see many badly focused, murkily written songs,
we may feel our main task is to urge writers to write clearly, keep the songs
focus in mind, not mix metaphors, etc. But the reality is that some song
seeds that inspire us most as writers are precisely the imprecise onesthose
where we initially have no idea what they mean or what the final song will
be about. We discover or design that meaning through writing the song. The
tools and craft of coherency must still kick in before we declare ourselves
done with the song; but we may travel some foggy roads to get to that tidy
little town. Smart songwriters are always on the lookout for those cool,
mysterious, vague lines that may lead to our greatest, most meaningful
songs. And for another thing, working on those ideas is a lot of fun!

Pattern vs. Narrative. Show vs. tell has become a bit of a bromide in
creative writing. People do respond to concrete details, imagery and sense
descriptions, and the stories of real people. From this we might conclude
these are the best kinds of seeds to gather. But songwriters dont always
work that way.

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 We are playerswith music and with words. Part of playing is just messing
about with stufftaking familiar elements and juggling them around until
something interesting happens. That is not inherently an activity focused on
narrative or story-telling; it is about patterns and how they delight us. (This
is likely why so many songwriters are inveterate punsters.)

My sense is that pattern and narrative are end-points on a continuumone

of the key polarities I describe in this book as a way to structure the many
strategies we have to choose from. This polarity applies at every level and to
every song element: themes, lyrics, melodies, chord progressions, rhythms.
Be open to and alert for song seeds from any part of this continuum.

Unexpected Juxtapositions. Ill be arguing for the power of isolating song

seed materialdistinguishing, say, melodic from lyrical ideas. But there are
seeds where the essential coolness lies in the juxtaposition of elements not
intrinsically interesting in and of themselves. Here I mean not only the
happy collision of sense and sound in lyrics discussed above, but something
like a simple melody and a simple chord sequence that work off each other
in an intriguing way. This allows for seed ideas that depend on a kind of
counterpoint or ironic tension between elements. Such seeds cannot be
reduced further without losing the essence of their interest.

The Skills of Seed Catching. There are no black and white, hard and fast criteria for
determining exactly where the desire to write a song leaves off and a song seed begins; or
where capturing the seed ends and the working the seed into a song begins. But given what
we want song seeds to do for us, we can identify specific skills and strategies for working
with them. A useful way of grouping these skills is by looking at some key distinctions or
boundaries around seedsdifferences that make a difference in song seed catching:

Seeds vs. everyday life: catching seeds via serendipity, in relation to other
generative strategies for songwriting;

Idea vs. song seed: what distinguishes a song seed in particular from other
creative ideas or triggers for songwriting;

Seed vs. song: how to catch the crossover moment or threshold when
capturing the seed, the essence of the idea, moves into working the seed
into a songand why capturing just the seed greatly increases its potency
and flexibility as a starting point.

Seed vs. context: how lifting source material out of its original context is an
essential part of the process of seed-catching;

Seed vs. husk: distinguishing the primary sensory modality of the seed
from less interesting material placed around it (what I call filler material).

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We can identify specific tools and techniques, as well as challenges and potential
pitfalls, in negotiating each of these boundaries or borderlines.

Seeds and Serendipity. Where and when do we catch song seeds? Everywhere and
everywhen! Experienced songwriters are alert for little gifts from the universe all the
time. You catch song seeds from chance phrases spoken in conversation, a bit of news, a
thought that pops in your mind on the street, a memory, something you read, a movie you
see. Songwriters always takes time to jot down that magical idea.

The Secret Society of Songwriters Who Have Almost Crashed Their Cars
(SSSWHACC). There are three moments when a true songwriter should
court near-death on the highway. The first has to do with song seeds. At
least prior to cell-phones, dictation apps and the like, I remember, more
times than I care to remember, nearly driving off the road because I was
scribbling down a line for a song on a scrap of paper on my knee. Though I
hope, Dear Writer, that youre constitutionally already a member, I implore
youdo not join this club via the Honorary Posthumous Membership route!

Once I had written a complete songthree verses and a chorusin my head

and finally pulled off the road to write it down, sitting at a diner counter
over a cup of coffee. A friendly local sat down next to me and tried to start a
polite conversation several times, until I finally growled at him: Sorry,
man, but Im a songwriter and Ive got about three minutes left to write
down these lines before I forget them!

What are the other two moments for the SSSWHACCed of this world? The
second is one shared by all who love musicwhen you hear a song on the
radio (wait, remember radio?) that absolutely slays you, so much you have
to pull over to the side of the road and catch your breath, sob, or consider
calling that old girlfriend. (No, its still a bad idea.) The third moment is one
I hope, Dear Writer, you have experienced or will some day: that first time
you hear your own song playing on the radio (and its not your own
Pandora station playing from your iPod!).

Discrimination. Most songwriters do catch seeds already; the idea is to become more
aware of your seed-catching habits, then transform them into intentional practice. By
catching song-seeds throughout the day youre practicing paying attention, staying alert
for those little inspirations.

In our modern, media-rich, memory and digital-artifact engorged culture, collecting

ephemera and fragmentary bits of mundane life has become second nature (or 2nd Life) to
us. We blog, tweet, friend and event, snap cell-phone pictures of ourselves eating
pancakes and post them on Facebook. Yet seed-catching as a songwriters skill is not at all
the same thing as indiscriminate recording of minutiae.

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As a songwriter, your daily life is the one and only chance to catch great seeds, sift and
winnow them. If you could keep a virtual digital movie camera rolling twenty-four hours a
day behind your eyes and ears, it would avail you nothing. The true creative seeds, where
the potential for artistic imagination lies, would be buried in that morass of information. In
order to sift them out, youd have to project the movie and watch your day all over again.
Theres no short cut; youre just pushing off the problem. You must practice being alert
for the good stuff, the real seeds blown from nowhere; they are infinite, but still rare.
Discrimination, selection, judgment and taste, are an inherent part of that process.

Listen for song-able fragments. Not just sing-ableit might be a theme, a bit of
dialogue, a chord progression that sounds freshbut song-able as in: this belongs in a
song yet to be written. The more you practice grabbing song seeds, the better at it youll
get, the more song seeds youll catch, and the stronger those seeds will be. The very act of
noticing them, extracting them from the continuous rush of everyday life, framing them by
writing them down, sharpens your ear, your sense of what has potential to become a song.

Legend? Maybe A dour fellow walks into a bar in Nashville and asks the
bartender for a shot of whiskey. Hows it going? asks the bartender, and the
fellow says, I dont know, Joe. Tonight the bottle let me down Twenty patrons
grab their notebooks and start running out the door to go home to their guitars

Version 2: As the songwriter-patrons rush out the door, the grizzled old songwriter
at the bar raises his hand: Sorry boysalready wrote that one! Crestfallen, they
sit back down to their beers.

Version 3: The grizzled old songwriter goes home that nightand writes the song.

Immediate Capture. If youre serious about developing song seed catching skills,
you absolutely must develop a regular practice of catching song seeds where and
when you find them and capturing them, in some wayquickly! (Quickly means
within three to five minutes topscall this the songwriters version of the five-
second rule.)

This is a necessity driven by basic facts of human cognition and neurology.

Someone recently told me (I cant find the quote on Google no matter how hard I
try!) that Buckminster Fuller once said: The lifespan of an idea can be only ten
seconds. When it comes to keeping track of the myriad ideas that drift through our
minds throughout the day, none of us are that much better off than the unutterably
sad protagonist of the movie Memento. And when novel, unfamiliar information
in particular (one of the very characteristics of worthy song seeds) is presented to
us, it lodges very ephemerally in short-term memory. You get that great idea for a
song walking down the street. You cant wait to get home to your guitar and try to
do something with it. Ten seconds later, perhaps, the idea is a little more blurry.
Five minutes later you remember about that cool idea, but cant remember what it
was. A half an hour later you have forgotten that you have forgotten.

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Catching, Forgetting, Hunting. So one of the primary skills of the Highly Effective
Seed-Catcher is readiness: being alert, primed, prepared, expectant. But I can tell
you, from many years of seed catching and coaching songwriters in seed catching:
there is an art to this. Like the balance required to ride a bicycle, the right state of
mind for catching song seeds lies between the Scylla and Charybdis of
obliviousness and acquisitiveness.

When you first develop the practice, youll simply forget about seed catching for
periods of your day. Youre caught up in the stream of daily life; the ideas do come,
but you notice fleetingly then let them go. Eventually youll remember you forgot;
then youll remember you forgot something; then youll remember to remember.

As you learn the skill, you will move from obliviousness and forgetting to be alert,
to a kind of hyper-alertness; being on the hunt for song seeds. This can make you
an unpleasant person to be around at time: Im sssooo sorry you broke up with
your boyfriend; guess Mr. Rights gone Mr. Wrong againhey, scuze me, Ive got
to go jot something down

Walking through your day too aware of looking for ideas for songs misses the point
of what serendipity means: to catch what drifts into your head spontaneously, yet
engages your interest. A true seed comes to you; its not something you try to grab
or go looking for. You catch them when youre not trying to catch them; just after
your unconscious mind fastens on it. Often the seed comes when youre relaxed,
absorbed in something else, zoned out, en route somewhere (and usually in a
hurry). The skill involved is to recognize the fragment that constitutes the seed in
the midst of that context, grab it quickly, then move on. You capture the absolute
minimum you need to come back to it later and remember what was cool about it
with maybe a supporting phrase or two. If you set aside time to look for seeds
youre doing a different activity than seed-catching propersomething we might
call seed gathering or even seed hunting. These activities have their uses and their
place in the process, but they require a different kind of energy and focus; and they
depend for their effectiveness on skills you develop from seed-catching in the strict
sense I mean here.

Once song-catching is a regular habit for you, youll need to give yourself time off
now and then, days I like to call Song Seed Sabbaths, when you decide to just be
a Civilian for awhile. You might notice seeds and just decide to catch and release
that day (wait, my seeds just turned into fish!).

Song Idea vs. Song Seed. Go back to the initial exercises with which we began this
chapter, particularly your blow-by-blow account of writing a song. Recall the
circumstances that led to your song. Youll likely first remember the stimulus for
the songan experience in your life, a situation you hear about in the news or from
a friend, or just a musing about life that comes in a reflective moment: Hmmm
ever notice how people talking on hands-free cell-phones all look just like paranoid
schizophrenics?

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This is what we might simply call a creative idea. In casual usage, the idea of an idea
implies something fairly abstract. What I mean by idea here could be an image, an
emotion triggered by a situation, a memory of a specific person or an imagined character.
An old photograph that suggests a story to you, which you then begin to turn into a song,
is not what most people would call an idea; but it might be a starting point for a song.

Such ideas as starting points for creative work are not unique to songwriters. Any creative
artiststandup comedian, short story writer, poet, playwright, choreographer,
photographercollects ideas for their artistic work. And since songwriters can be active
in other art forms as well, we might get an idea and not be sure at first whether the idea is
asking to be turned into a song, a poem, a short story, or a blog post. The hands-free cell
phone idea above, for example, might work best as a short story about a man released
from prison after decades, walking through a busy mall panicking at all the crazy people
walking by; or maybe a science fiction story about a cell-phone wielding CEO transported
back to the 50s and locked up in an asylum.

Because of our cultural bias about language, the idea of an idea usually implies a
language-based expression. Yet songwriters can start songs from sensory modes with no
associated language at the outset. True, since were concerned here with songs and not
instrumental compositions, eventually song lyrics will get associated with this material.
But this association can unfold in many ways; for many writers and for many songs,
lyrical material will not be, or need not be, the first step in the process.

To begin turning an idea into a song, you generate a bit of song stuffsuch as a lyrical
phrase that sounds like a title or a good line, or a bit of melody, or a chord riff. This is the
actual song seed, which can respond to the starting idea (or may actually precede it). If the
idea comes first, this bit of musical stuff may be in response and resonance to that idea.
How do I know these are distinct stages in creative work? Because it is possible to have
the idea, yet be completely stuck in getting to an actual song seed. This is often the case
when doing task-based writing, such as writing a song to pitch to a particular artist or
project. It can also occur when you are motivated to write about a real-life situation, but
dont yet know how to turn it into a song. Often writers stumble at just this point,
especially if they allow the boundary between their writing work and personal life to blur.
I believe that if you approach a song only as a form of personal memoir, or a kind of
letter in disguise to a specific person in your life, you short-circuit an important step in
the writing processthat of discovering a potent song seed, one that can encapsulate the
emotion of that experience or connection, not only for you but for the listener. Moving
from the idea or situation that motivatestriggers the desire to write a songto a true
song seed is where heart begins to make room for art.

Just as often, the song seed itself is the starting point. When it is, you often wont know
what the seed is about. This can be both wonderful and frustrating. A line catches your
attention, but the context from which you pluck it may not be the interesting thing about
the line. Rather, what makes it interesting is realizing that the line can potentially be lifted
out of that original context and reinterpreted. (We will see later that this distinction allows
us to work in powerful ways, for example, with lyrical song seeds.)

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As we learn to capture starting material for songs, its useful to capture seeds that are not
tied to a specific pre-conceived idea, story, or theme. We need to be at ease with not yet
knowing what the seed means or its emotional content. Conversely, we can write down
ideas for songs before our minds have leaped to generate a true song seed in response.

Common Pitfalls. However you choose to record ideas for songs and true song seeds
(later well look at strategies for notating song seeds), its essential to know the
difference between idea and seedespecially when you capture the idea in textual form.
Why does this matter so much? There are complementary mis-steps writers often make
that involve discerning and distinguishing ideas for songs and song seeds:

Not capturing the idea for the song directly, but trying to turn it on the spot
into a lyrical seed in order to record it.

Using words to describe an idea for a song, then mistaking these words later
for an actuallyricalsong seed.

Example. I see an old woman on the bus with too many bags to carry. The image or scene
takes on song idea status as I sense a metaphorical aspect: my life feels like Im trying
to carry too many bags, not willing to put any down I might record this idea by writing:
saw an old woman on the bus with too many bags to carry. Like life (Or, in this day
and age, I might just snap a photo with my iPhone.1) So far, this is an idea for a song.

Mistake #1. Nowif the songwriter part of my brain (or rather the I want to feel like a
songwriter part of my brain) takes over, I may be tempted to reach for a lyric about the
image or situation on the spot: Old woman on the train / Stumbles in out of the rain
If I write this rhymed couplet down, instead of a simple description and reminder of the
starting image and idea, Ive actually made twono, three!process mistakes:

The rhymed couplet is not the seed idea; it was an off-the-cuff response.
Had the couplet popped into my head without the triggering image, it likely
would not have caught my attention enough to warrant writing it down.

Whats more important, the couplet loses the key insight of the original song
idea: the irony of the woman having too many bags to carry, and all that
could mean. That is the essence of the observation; thats the important
thing to capture to work with later. If I lose this, Ill wind up with a weaker,
unfocused song; or Ill look at my seed-catching note later and say: Why
on earth did I think that was worth writing down? and move on.

1
New multi-media note-taking apps allow you to partition off photos intended as
potential starting ideas for songs rather than just family snapshots; to group photos with
text and audio, etc.

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 The problem is not just that I jumped to the lyric too quickly. In order to
develop this idea, the lyric might not be the right next step. When the
starting point for a song is an idea in this broad sensea story someone tells
you, a character you want to write about, a situationthe lyrical expression
of this idea may not be your most productive next step.

Mistake #2. Okay, so I faithfully record the idea: Old woman gets on the bus, carrying
too many shopping bags. Ive written down the idea for a song, using words to remind
myself of and perhaps refine the idea later. So far so good. The problem lies when I come
back to this jotted-down phrase two weeks later. At that point I may mistake the reminder
words for a lyric song seedan actual line for the song, even a title or hookand start
working it in that form. Later, as the lyric hangs there awkward and clumsy, Ill need to
painstakinglypainfullywrestle that baldly stated idea into an actual line, after having
built musical phrasing, rhyme scheme, form around it.

It might seem a bit unlikely that Id wind up with a heart-wrenching chorus like : Old
woman on the bus / Just carrying way too many shopping bags but this basic mistake
happens all the time in songwriting. Its the culprit error that can produce those lyrics that
tell rather than show so maligned by lyric-writing and creative writing teachers. When
we capture an idea seed and recognize it as such, well be more likely to later do the work
of rhythmically massaging the idea into a lyrical line or section: old woman on the bus /
has too many bags / too many bags to carry

Notice that avoiding these pitfalls in capturing song seeds is not directly correlated with
your skills as a rhymester or musician. In fact, theres almost a reverse correlation. The
more skilled we are as songwriters, the more were primed to rapidly generate song
material: when we see an image our immediate response is to make up and sing a line on
the spot. We skip effortlessly, almost instantaneously, to lyrical and/or musical seeds, and
thats what we write down to work from later; in fact we pride ourselves on our speed.
This facility can actually work against usif were too quick to chase the rhyme and
forget to focus on the real seed idea, especially a thematic or idea seed.

Slower, less experienced writers may be more inclined to make the second type of
mistake. Theyll write down a prose sentence or phrase as a mnemonic device, a reminder
of the image or story. A writer gets an idea in mind, and then mistakes their reminder
words for actual lyrics. We wind up with clich titles like You Hurt Me So Bad or
Dont Leave Methe bald idea of the song but an artless lyrical expression of it: lyrics
that dont sound cool, sing well, or create a sensory experience for the listener. Such sins
are endlessly beaten up in critique sessions, and require painful rounds of revision. If
theyd only remembered they were starting from an idea, not a lyrical seed, they could
have waited and worked the clay of the line when they first began working the seed.

To avoid this pitfall, you must grasp the distinction between a stimulating idea or trigger
from the outside world, and a musical or lyrical fragment, a compositional starting point.
The lightning flash from idea to true seed may happen in literally five secondsbut the
distinction is there, and important.

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Recognizing the simple process problem at workthat of mistaking idea for lyric
seedcan accomplish more than repairing one song with too tell-y a hook line; it
can transform your effectiveness in turning all your ideas into songs. When you can
accurately distinguish an idea seed from a true lyric seed, your power to work
effectively with the idea increases immeasurably. You can still use words to write
down the idea to work later; you just need some notational convention to remind
yourself at that later time that the words point to but are not the seed. Since idea
doesnt have to mean language or lyric, we can work from song idea directly to
any songwriting modality in just as direct a fashion.

Catching vs. Working the Seed. If there are skills involved in noticing when an idea
becomes a song seed, it is just as tricky attending to the moment when you leave off
simply capturing the seed and begin working it into a song. (I could stay faithful to my
central metaphor here and talk about growing your song from a song seed, or even
germinating and sprouting your seed, but Ill stick with the more prosaic language of
working the seed into the song, like a farmer works the land.)

One of the biggest obstacles to capturing seeds in their most potent, durable form is the
natural desire to keep working on the song at the time you write down the seed.

Dont.

Catch just the seed. When you catch a song seed, capture just the kernel of the
inspiration; then stop. Dont automatically start working the song on the spot. Your first
instinct will be to sit down in the hallway where the idea caught you, pull out your
notebook, and finish the song even if it takes 3 hours while missing your doctors
appointment. Let your day be disrupted a few times like this, and your wiser self will
soon stop your seed-catching forays. You get good at seed-catching when you learn to
not follow this impulse: catch just the seed, the part you wont remember later, and save
working the song for later. This modifies Lewis Carrolls famous quote in the voice of
Alice in Wonderland: Begin at the beginning, and continue till the endthen stop! For
song seed catching, I am advising rather: Begin at the beginningthen stop!

Of course, there are magical moments where inspiration strikes and you wind up writing
a whole song in a rush and a flow. When you are lucky enough to feel this momentum, by
all means go for it. But dont expect this of yourself as a primary way of working, or
youll wind up writing ten uninspired, formulaic songs for each truly inspired one; and at
the kernel of each of those uninspired songs may be a strong song seed that might have
flourished had you granted it the right gestation time.

It is incredibly useful to have a song seed in its natural, fragmentary form to work with
later. Suppose your song seed is a single line that needs to be stretched into a four-line
verse. How you do that stretching requires a different kind of energy and attention than
capturing the original seed idea itself. It may be that your seed line is the first line of the
verse; but maybe it is destined to be the last, or the middle line. The time to decide that is
not the moment you capture the line.

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Or your next step in developing the line may be pivoting directly to a melodic setting for
the line. That may mean groping for the melody for a while, trying a variety of
experiments to find one that fits. Again, seed-catching time is not the time to do this
work. In this case, your mind is more likely in lyric mode than melodic mode anyway.

Overall, its far more effective to work your song seed during time set aside to be
working on your songs. With that more relaxed time, youre more likely to try
alternatives to see which is truest to the impulse behind the seed. Or, you may be writing
for a particular artist or project opportunity. You read through your seed catalogue and
find a particular seed that resonates with the opportunity youre writing toward. Now you
are in a focused session context that can help you take the seed in the most fruitful
direction. In these and other scenarios, you are better off having access to and working
from the original seed idea in its most concise form, rather than having to peel away
layers of half-bakedpossible weakerideas youve added on top.

Stoppinga commiserating note. Full disclosure here: I am attention-challenged. I dont

want to say ADD or ADHD, because the acronym will have changed again three times
before this book is in print, and the diagnosis process is long and tedious. But I have
struggled my whole life with issues of attention, hyper-focus, distraction and all the
accompanying rabbit holes and rats nests. It turns out that the skill of stopping seed
catching activity at the right point is particularly challenging for attention-challenged
people like me.

It takes effort to wrench yourself away from the flow of your everyday activity, notice an
idea worth grabbing, and get set up to set it down. For me, once Ive overcome the inertia
and Ive switched into write down my inspiration mode, the part of me that wants to
keep going compulsively switches its loyalty to the inspiration-transcribing task.
(Sometimes I call this part of myself lazy; but in the throes of the activity itself it feels
like Im being focused, disciplined andoh, did I mention? Brilliant)

Soif youre at all like meonce you have that great idea, it will be very tempting to
keep writing. But beware: if you do keep working ideas past the point of critical capture,
youll eventually find youre spending way too much time on these inspiration
transcription interruptions; and youll start beating yourself up for taking the time for
them. As the stakes go up, youll get reluctant the next time to take that quick moment to
capture that fleeting thought. Your panicking meta-executive will tell you: If I dont
have half an hour to zone out writing in my journal, I better not start So: follow the
chain of ideas if they keep coming to you, if you truly feel you could not recreate the
same flow of ideas later on; but then put the pen down!

Ones battery of techniques is proof against inspiration. When I find

myself inspired, I enjoy itbut, I try to lay the pencil down, for, if I
continue, I know that I shall have to use the eraser in the morning.
Lou Harrison (composer)

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Seed vs. Context. We now understand the nature of song seeds a bit better, and have a
picture of how we grab them out of the flow of everyday activity. The question naturally
arises: how much do we need to capture about that everyday context? If our seed is a
chance phrase spoken by a friend telling us about their latest romance, do we need to
record who gave us the seed, or specifics of their personal circumstances? This question
provides an opportunity to discuss some nuts and bolts pragmatic issues in seed-catching.

Song seed protocol. First off, lets be clear that in a legal and professional sense, a song
seed almost by definition is not a piece of intellectual property protectable by copyright.
You cannot copyright an idea, a fact, an equation; you cant copyright a popular
idiomatic expression youve decided to turn into a song title (its probably already in
Urban Dictionary anyway). And although you can copyright a first draft of a work, most
writers dont bother, because theyd need to copyright the final version again if they want
it protected. But in any case you cant copyright something that by design is a mere
fragment of an intended complete work.

As a result, from a professional standpoint, keeping track of the date and place where a
song seed occurred to you is not a necessity. This is not true of actual working drafts of
songs, by the way. In my personal songwriting practice, I keep chronologically ordered,
bound journals (I have well over 100 of these now) for song drafts, material from co-
writing sessions, etc. I use journals with archival-quality acid-free paper and hand-write
in ink, not pencil (black, not blue, so I can make safety photocopies). I number each page,
date each entry, and leave room at the front of the journal for a table of contents that I fill
out as the journal is filled.2 I do all this for a variety of reasons: documentation for legal
purposes; as a way of tracking my progress and productivity, locating drafts from past co-
writing sessions, etc.; and frankly, just for the satisfaction and focus of the ritual.

But where do I keep song seeds? These I keep in the back pages of the journal, running
pages back to front (and more recently, upside down!). Each seed gets its own line or
two. In the few months it takes me, on average, to fill a @120 page song journal I usually
accumulate 10-12 pages of song seeds; so about 100-200 seeds for a period where Ive
written perhaps 40-50 songs. With a few exceptions, I dont date the seeds. Since I often
transcribe seeds into my journal from hand-held pocket-sized logs and notebooks, they
dont go into the journal pages in strict chronological sequence. They are self-contained
starting points for songs.

This scheme works for me because for the most part, my later work on a song seed
doesnt depend on the specific context in which I caught it. But this can make it sound as
if capturing the minimum contextual material is a matter of practical convenience only.

2
Not all songwriters like this approach: some co-writers I work with, writers I highly
respect, work entirely with loose-leaf pages on which they generate multiple drafts of
song ideas in a session. They keep these loose pages organized by having folders for each
song project they are working on. There are advantages and disadvantages to both the
chronological and the project-based way of organizing your song drafts. The most
important principle is to pick a protocol, stick to it, and refine it for yourself over time.
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Its more than that. Lifting the seed out of its original context is, in fact, part of the true
creative work of catching the seed. The best time to do this creative work, if possible, is
when you capture the seed in the first place. (Thats in contrast to working the seed,
which as weve seen is creative work ideally deferred to a different time than seed-
catching time.) Of course, the trick to this creative work is actually doing less not more.

Anything about the original context essential to whats cool about the seed must be
captured with the seed itself. Anything else will only distract you from the essence of what
made the seed interesting to you.

Seed vs. Filler. Weve seen, in distinguishing ideas from seeds, that its very easy to
encumber a strong song idea with a weak lyrical expression of it; also, that its easy to
obscure a strong lyrical seed idea by continuing on at the time the seed occurs to you,
trying to write the whole songor the whole chorus, or even that clever rhymed
coupletif the rhyme wasnt the seed itself. In short, Ive been teaching you to be
ruthless in recording your seeds in stripped-down form. But weve just been warming
upnow things get really brutal.

Lets say you become aware that you are hearing a lyric line in your mind, sung with a
particular rhythm and to a particular melody. Chances are that idea started first as either a
lyrical or a musical inspiration; that is, the initial energy came from one or the other
modality. So how did it get elaborated with the other material, especially without your
conscious effort?

Once we have a song seed, sometimes even before we notice that weve caught it (or its
caught us), our songwriter minds go to work to provide a kind of scaffolding for the idea.
If it is a lyric line, we may need rhythm and melody to remember it; and were likely to
grab for a melody that is easy for us to access and remember. Since were using the
melody to help us remember a fresh, unexpected lyrical idea, we dont need or even want
that melody to be a distraction, as interesting (initially) as the lyric; it is playing a
supporting role, a clothes hanger for our spiffy new outfit.

If its not the challenge of remembering that spurs us to grab for a supporting melody, it
may be the pressure and even panic we impose on ourselves to make something that feels
more like a complete song or at least a piece of one. So we grab quickly for musical ideas
to prop up our lyric seed. Similarly, we might take a cool melody seed and start chanting
words to fill up musical space and help ourselves write the song.

Five minutes later, weve forgotten which aspect came first, the lyric or the melody.

This other stuffthe first, hastily grabbed melodic or lyric material we attach to the
seedis filler. This mildly pejorative term suggests the problem: filler lives on, usually
into the final version of our song. When we listen back later to our seed and begin to
work on it, in an idealized creative process we would simply discard the filler and go
back to the original seed.

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But in reality, almost always one of two things happens:

We accept the lyric + hastily-thrown-together music as a seamless whole; since

were enamored of the lyric, we decide we must like the music too.

We have enough discretion to listen to the music and, realizing it is clichd and
predictable, reject the whole song idea, throwing the lyrical baby out with the
musical bathwater.

To avoid this, skillful seed catchers know to capture just the seed idea, not the filler.

To be clear: Im talking here about the moment in your creative work when the idea first
catches your ear. Once youre working on a song in earnest, filler is not bad stuff; its
part of the natural way we write songs. Experienced writers intentionally use dummy
lyrics while getting the shape of the music and phrasing put together; or, though less
talked about, dummy melodies or chord progressions, even dummy rhythmic phrasing
whatever element is not the current focus of compositional effort. You can even use
individual dummy or placeholder syllables to keep track of missing syllables in a still-
emerging line. In co-writing especially, forward progress often depends on using dummy
lines or, a little trickier to negotiate, things like good enough lines we still hope to beat.

In fact sometimes without using such placeholders you literally cant get there from
here. Creative work is non-linear and at times circular: you wont find the right last line
for the 1st verse till youve written the 2nd verse; so if you wont let yourself move on to
the 2nd verse till the 1st verse is done, you are proverbial toast. So your choices may be to
chase endlessly in dissatisfied circles, or to use placeholders as a way of pulling yourself
up by the bootstraps. Thus an ability to tolerate, keep track of, and clean up such tentative
commitments is part of the essential process skillset of good writers and co-writers.

The problem is adding the filler in at the start, when the seed is first recorded. If we dont
first capture the seed in its original ragged, fragmentary state, its too easy to lose sight of
(or lose sound of) what was the real seed, the cool idea, the juiceand what was filler
added to fluff it out or prop it up. Youre working not with a seed but a sapling.
Accepting the whole uncritically results, too often, in songs with insipid lyrics of only
first-draft quality, or evocative words sung to trite and banal chord progressions; in either
case revealing to the listener (well, to me anyway!) that the songwriter just didnt pay
attention to that neglected aspect of the song. Or, as I mentioned above, a slightly more
discerning ear (yours, or the publisher who turns down the weak material) might reject
the whole song because of the low quality of the filler material, or lack of coherence in
the piece as a whole. The seed is lost.

Remember our overall goal of integrity: that every aspect of the songlyric, melody,
rhythm, chords, form and structureis worthy of our attention as writers, to earn the
listeners attention in turn. These aspects dont all have to be innovative and complex, but
they need to do their job for the song as a while; so we should be intentional about them.

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Isolation of seed from filler frees you up, when later working the seed, to find supporting
material that truly matches the seed, for greater integrity of the song. Soin your writing
as a whole, but particularly in your song seed catching, become a ruthless filler killer!
Benefits. Though catching song seeds, as a distinct activity, is only one of many
possible ways to generate material for songs, I truly believe seed-catching skills are
the foundation of great songwriting. I say this because these skills are used
throughout the entire process of songwriting. More than that, they play a dual role
in writing and learning: they are how we get the work done of coming up with
songs; they are also essential in how we continually learn to be better songwriters.

As you transform song seed catching into a more purposeful practice, you should
notice first of all that you start getting more ideas for songs on a regular basis.
Actually at first you may realize youve been making the seed discoveries all along:
you just werent writing many of them down. But also, as with most skills, the more
you practice catching song seeds, the better you get at it.

More importantly, you get better at catching the kinds of ideas that interest you as a
songwriter; you learn more about the individual point of view towards life, the
perspective about the world, the experiences and attitude, that you uniquely bring to
your writing. You can accelerate this process by periodic reflection on your seeds
and your seed-catching activity.

Like other aspects of creative work, seed-catching is an activity you simply must do
over and over again to get good at it. Imagine you are learning to be an expert
butterfly collector. A kid with a butterfly net in hand might catch the most beautiful
butterfly in the world. But there is still a lot to learn about collecting butterflies.
And there is a lot to learn about the butterflies you want to collect.

[ FOR THE COMPLETE VERSION OF THIS CHAPTER, WATCH FOR

Songwriting Strategies Berklee Press, Summer 2013 (or thenabouts!) ]

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