In late 2020, on the Song Talk Radio podcast, we decided to do another songwriting challenge; this was our second challenge in two years. Songwriting challenges, or prompts, are a great way to jump start a song and give you focus while writing. In fact, songwriters do this all the time; the minute you decide “I’m going to write a song about…,” you’re giving yourself a challenge. The difference here is that we, as the hosts of the podcast, and our listeners, all took on the same challenge. The fun part is hearing how different songwriters arrive at completely different answers to the same prompt.

The year’s challenge was prompted by a theme show episode we did in the spring; songs where the chord progressing doesn’t change. At the time, it was surprising to me to find far more popular songs than I thought where this is the case.

The biggest takeaway for me was the notion that keeping the same chord progression throughout a song imparts a certain degree of tension between the song sections, especially verse to chorus. This is yet another tool in my toolbox to find a subtle middle ground between high contrast and no contrast in a song structure.

In contemporary pop music, where pre-made beats and loops define much of the music bed, following a single chord progression is pretty much a given.

Historically, I have leaned on different chord progressions to shape a song’s journey. For this challenge, I knew I had to lean almost entirely on melody to differentiate sections.

The genesis of the song

One morning I woke up with a lyric in my mind: You’ve seen the other side. I wasn’t sure how that came to me, but it reminded me of a book/movie called The Lovely Bones. It had been about 15 years since I saw the movie, and a few more years since I read the book, but the story always stayed with me. The Lovely Bones is about the murder of a teenage girl, and her journey in a surreal world in the afterlife. As she comes to grips with her murder, she also touches the lives of her grieving family. I thought this was a compelling story to put to song.

Song development

I found the movie version of The Lovely Bones on Amazon Prime, not having seen it in many years. As I re-watched it, I made notes about certain images, emotions of the characters, and themes of the story. The “you” in “You’ve seen the other side” was obviously the murdered girl, and I developed a lyric describing her earthly existence and her afterlife journey. I wrote a chorus lyric first, then a few verses and several lyric fragments.

Afterwards, I sat down at my piano to figure out what the chord progression was going to be. This was the most challenging part of the process, as it took a few tries before I landed on a progression and melody I was truly happy with. The first progression I wrote was too simple and conventional. The second one was too weird and contrived. With my third idea, I had landed on the right balance between haunting, musically complex, and elegant.

I completed the lyrics along with my first chord progression. After landing on the final chord progression, I went back and further refined the lyrics.

Here’s an early worksheet:

Feedback and refinement

After sharing The Other Side with my co-hosts on the podcast, and with fellow songwriters at the Song Talk Meetup, I removed a few of the specific references to the book and made the lyrics more universally appealing. I realized that even though the book was my starting point, the song now had a life of its own and I needed to embrace that and let the book go. This didn’t apply to all the book references, just the ones that confounded listeners who hadn’t read it.

Sometimes a songwriting challenge can act as a springboard for a version 2 of a song; I did this with our first songwriting challenge in 2020, where my version 2 let go of the challenge and no longer met its requirements. This year’s songwriting challenge felt more like an assignment to start with, but I further strove to write a song I was truly happy with and still met the parameters of the challenge.

Final Song

I used the Sonuscore Lo Ki felt piano as the solo instrument, recorded my vocals on an SM57, and used EQ filters and Izotope Vinyl to create a lo-fi sound on the minimal production.

I posted my final song, and the first version of it, to my Bandcamp page. You can also download the lyrics and chord sheet here. Enjoy!