What Is a Bridge Section? Disambiguating the Term If you searched for “job of the bridge section,” you likely hit a wall of articles about bridge engineers or fracture-critical inspections.…
The Fastest Answer to Writing a Strong Pre-Chorus Writing a strong pre chorus means using the rule of 3 and the 80/20 rule to build tension that makes the chorus…
Repetition is absolutely a musical device—in fact, it is the structural glue of nearly every recorded song. When we examine repetition as song device, we mean the intentional reuse of…
What Point of View in a Song Actually Means (And Why It’s Your Silent Co-Writer) Point of view in songwriting is the grammatical lens your lyric uses to tell the…
Concrete Imagery in Songwriting: What It Is and Why It Hits If you’ve ever wondered why some lyrics stick like burrs and others slide off like rain on glass, the…
When I walked into my first professional songwriting session in East Nashville in 2014, my co-writer handed me a verse that read, ‘I am lonely when you go.’ I circled…
Writing a Memorable Hook Starts With Cognitive Engineering Writing a memorable hook isn’t about clever wording—it’s about engineering cognitive stickiness. A hook becomes memorable when…
What “Show, Don’t Tell” Actually Demands in Lyric Writing If you’ve been told to “show don’t tell” in your songs, the core instruction is simple: replace a…
What Does It Mean If a Song Is Through-Composed? If a song is through-composed, it means the music unfolds as one continuous narrative with little to no repeated sections such…
If you want the song form AABA explained in practical terms, here it is: AABA is a 32-bar song structure built from two repeated 8-bar sections (A), one contrasting 8-bar…