Tag: songwriting

In 2017, I wrote a song as a response to many of my female friends sharing their "Me Too" stories on social media, in the wake of powerful men in Hollywood and elsewhere behaving abhorrently. The song was called The Countless Few, and I recorded and released it on my Soundcloud page. The emotional content [...]

Why Do You Cry by Neel Modi Download the lyric / chord sheet. For the last three years on Song Talk Radio, we've taken on a songwriting challenge. This is a great way to jump start your creative juices and lend some focus to your songwriting process. For this year, we opted to write a [...]

I met Chad through the cross-pollination of our respective Meetup groups, Song Talk Meetup, and Chad's own group, At Home Songwriting. I highly recommend Chad's online workshops, he's a fantastic teacher with a great presentation style and knows how to engage his participants in a meaningful and effective way. He's also the Education Director at [...]

I released an EP of progressive electro-pop songs in September 2020. Ace Symmetry features odd time signatures, nonsensical lyrics, inventive beats, and catchy synth solos. It was an interesting and fun challenge to work on a focused project like this. I talked about the project and featured some of the songs twice on Song Talk [...]

I recently finished reading a great book by Marc Myers entitled Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits that Changed Rock, R&B, and Pop. Myers interviewed the people involved in historically significant songs from the 1940s to the 1990s. He ended his examination in 1991 because, as he explains it, you [...]

I first discovered Rush towards the end of high school, after borrowing a tape of Presto from the public library on a whim. I expected to hear heavy metal that I wasn't fond of, but instead I was pleasantly surprised to hear a fusion of rock, jazz, progressive, and extraordinarily well composed and performed music; [...]

Liar is the third song I've worked on with dance-pop music singer-songwriter Dokter Nomi. I first met Nomi at the Song Talk Meetup group in Toronto. He has a unique approach to songwriting, compared to myself and most of the singer-songwriters I know. Nomi comes up with melodies and lyrics, but doesn't play any instruments. [...]

I didn't have an idea for my 2019 holiday song until early November. The catalyst was watching two movies in two days: Joker, and then The Big Short. Both movies focused on the 1% vs the 99%; the have's vs the have-not's. There was also a lot of news at the time about youth climate [...]

Sometimes, the hardest part of the songwriting process is getting started. Once I’ve got an idea, I can hash out lyrics and music fairly easily. Getting past songwriter’s block usually involves coming up with a title and a hook to the song (Thank you, Nashville). More often than not, I’ll get blocked by wanting to [...]