The Songwriter's Idea Book

If you need a book to teach you chord structures etc. forget it. If you need to examine your personality type and apply it to lyric writing, go for it. This is not a traditional approach to songwriting, but it is interesting reading.

Unlike some books on songwriting, this one provides a songwriting method that will apply for ANY kind of songwriting, whether it be for a traditional stage musical or hardcore rap or anywhere in between. While it is big on grammatical tricks, and never fails to come up with technical wizardry you won't have learned in high school English class (synecdoche anybody?), these are often things that you know you are doing without realising they had a name (synecdoche? U use it wen U txt. Or write songs called "Sk8er Boi", "2 Become 1" or "Nothing Compares 2 U").

The book recommends that you start with a good title, explains fully how to come up with one, then goes on with how to expand the title into a fully fledged song.

Basic lyric writing principles, including song structure, are covered in the first section, but the real meat of this book is in part 2, entitled "Personality Type, Brain Dominance, and the Creative Process". This section posits that in order to write good lyrics, you have to know yourself and, importantly, your thinking style. Every person has strengths and weaknesses, and these will be reflected in the first draft of any lyrics you write. If you know your weaknesses, you'll be able to identify and compensate for them in future drafts of the lyrics.

This approach is so radically different from any other songwriting book I have read - the usual method is to list music genres and give the authors opinion of how that genre works - that it takes several readings to fully understand the approach, but once grasped, it is well worth the effort.

Despite the title, the book is about lyric writing rather than songwriting as a whole - creating memorable music can be as elusive as creating memorable lyrics, and a song is not a song without both these elements. The remaining chapters focus on strategies for writing different types of lyrics, (for example, is it a love song, a hate song, a social comment or whatever), linguistic tricks, framing devices, amd so on.

The book does what it sets out to do, and does so extremely well. Worth every penny.

This book and Sheila's Successful Lyric Writing should be in every songwriter's personal collection. An excellent reference book to turn to whenever you feel that songwriter's block coming on! It never fails to inspire your next song.

Sure, there are loads of books on this topic, but after having read and enjoyed many of them, I still feel somewhat cheated that I didn't get as much out of them as I did with this book. Only two other books came close: Sheila's Lyric Writing book and Jason Blume's 6 Steps. If you've read other books on lyric writing you'll be amazed at how there's so much Sheila explains in a thorough and analytical approach that doesn't come through with those others. When followed by a gradually more demanding 'now you have a go' it really does give you a great learning opportunity. Buy this book and make the most of it! Get the other's later.