Getting stuck

[Restless]

Hi, I'm new here
Just joined Taxi a couple of days ago.

Well, I wanted to get your suggestions of a well known problem in songwriting - getting stuck. There isn't anything more frustrating than this!
I have a couple of songs where I can't seem to write (by write, I mean writing melodies only...) choruses for. I just have some great verses and that's it. Everything I try to write turns out mediocre and predictable. I even have some chords to the chorus but I can't find an accompanying melody.

All this turns into a "magic circle" of me starting to believe I'm not good enough, losing confident in my writing skills and then - to the infamous writer's block.

Do you have any suggestions/advice on how to overcome this? Has this ever happened to you as well?
Thanks!

[bobmelanson]

Let it go and come back to it. I started concentrating on vocal tunes a few months back. If I get stuck I leave it and move on to another song until I get stuck again. Some songs take years while just blurt themselves out faster than I can get them down. I always have my iPhone ready when I sit down with a guitar and record any idea I think may turn into something. When I hit a block I listen to these ideas.

I'm still learning the art, and in no way a pro at it, but I find doing it this way I generally have a few songs on the go at the same time.

[Len911]

Perhaps you need to change song form for these particular songs, and use one that doesn't have a chorus. Verse, verse, bridge, verse, or verse, verse, verse, verse, etc., etc. Most of my favorite songs use a bridge instead of a chorus.

[Nick2012]

Well first, let me suggest you find a copy of Glen Campbell singing "It's Only Make Believe". That song has no chorus or bridge (a brief intro though), yet I've always considered it to be one of the best tracks ever recorded in pop music. The key to that track is how he modulates up for each verse to build tension, and how the hook line has longer notes and a melody that ends on a low note. Classic use of tension and release, yet with no chorus.

So that's one technique you might try. Modulate higher for each verse.

Another technique is to experiment with harmonic inversion to come up with new chord changes and melody lines that are based on your verse. It might spark ideas for a chorus. Fortunately for me (not being a music major) I have MIDI software which can harmonically invert a track. You basically take all the chord intervals and note intervals of a verse and flip them into an upside-down mirror image. I've rarely used the exact harmonic inversion of a verse as the chorus, but doing it has definitely sparked ideas.

I hope this gives you food for thought.

Nick

[Restless]

Thanks for all those tips! I'll try them.
I'll take a break from writing for a day, just to clean my mind a little bit.

[Len911]

Glen Campbell? I thought Conway Twitty's original version was the best,lol, though I am in agreement about it being one of my favorite, if not the favorite! I've never heard Glen Campbell's version, I'll have to youtube it and see if I can find it.

[Nick2012]

I don't know which GC album it was originally on, but the studio cut I have is on a Glenn Campbell's Greatest Hits CD. Back in the day his voice was phenomenal! His cover of that song was a great showcase for his range and abilities, not to mention a great showcase for the song itself.

A side bar story to this is the song never would have existed had it not been for a 20 minute collaboration between Jack Nance and Conway Twitty. Jack came up with a chord progression that Conway Twitty would have never come up with on his own. And Conway came up with words that Nance would have never written.

So another possible weapon against writer's block is collaboration. I know it's human nature sometimes to want to own 100% of our creative work. But if you've hit a dead end and a song's going nowhere, perhaps it's time to play it for a peer and ask, "You got any ideas for a chorus?" You just might come up with something that's far better than either of you would have created on your own.

[Restless]

lol you're pretty accurate about wanting to own 100% of your song. The fear of collaborating is pretty irrational (since a huge amount of songs are written by more than one person), but it takes time to get used to this idea. I guess that's a lesson I'll have to learn with time.

Fortunately, I came up with a good chorus for one of those songs today, so I'm pretty happy (fragements of it actually came up while I was asleep ). Now I'll spend some time arranging it and producing it.

BTW, listened to that song you recommended about - the structure is indeed pretty interesting! You don't hear a lot of it on today's music. I think I'll try to incorprate this structure into one of my next songs.

[mojobone]

Glen Campbell? I thought Conway Twitty's original version was the best,lol, though I am in agreement about it being one of my favorite, if not the favorite! I've never heard Glen Campbell's version, I'll have to youtube it and see if I can find it.

One of the better examples of a circular chord progression, where you really don't mind that it's the same thing over and over; the dynamics and the singer's conviction make it sound "right".

[nick.moxsom]

Think I mentioned this on another forum recently, but I'll reiterate here, since it's relevant.

I've been reading Jason Blume's book "6 Steps to Songwriting Success" and while it's full of the stuff we've all read a thousand times, there are a few tidbits in it that are new and invaluable to me. One of which is that Blume cannot play an instrument, so he works from melody lines and gets other people to put the chords down later (where those alternative, sexier chords are easier to work in). He believes the biggest mistake most writers make is to pick up a guitar or sit at a piano while writing, and find chords, thereby limiting their potential for newness. Food for thought, imo. I've never heard anybody walking down the street singing a chord sequence, but I do hear many people singing melodies.

Nick