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 song based on a title. We solicited title suggestions from our listeners, and selected Why Do You Cry as the title with the most potential.

I lied about my songwriting process

For years, I’ve told myself and others that I like to start songs with a title. This challenge made me realize that’s not entirely true. In the past, when I’ve written from a title, I had a concept for the song first. A title was compelling because I knew the meaning behind it. In this case, I had the title Why Do You Cry but no idea what that meant.

Once I ruminated and decided on the concept, the process was the same as many other songs I’ve written. I decided that Why Do You Cry might be in the context of someone suffering through depression and being told that it’s not a big deal, or that they’re not really depressed. In other words, “What are you crying about?”

Draft after draft after draft

I started with some notes and quickly drafted some lyrics. You can see the history of my drafts here. I went through several versions of the lyric, mostly based on feedback from fellow songwriters at the Song Talk Meetup.

I actually started the lyric in third person. The main character in the song was “he.” When I got to writing the bridge, I wanted to use the phrase “Believe he” to get the internal rhyme in there. But of course, “Believe he” doesn’t make any sense. So, I decided to change the character to “I.” In retrospect, it was the vulnerability of writing in “I” that persuaded me to write it in “he” but that actually allowed me to work through the emotions of the songs in a slightly detached way before bringing the narrative back to an “I” perspective.

Even after sharing the song on an episode of Song Talk Radio, I continued to get feedback from the meetup members. I decided that the lyric needed to be more direct and clearer about its subject matter. I connected with songwriter Sarah Peterson, who I met during a youTube roundtable discussion I took part in (with two whole episodes), and she helped me pull out more emotional vulnerability and straight forward phrases. I talked about these changes in our “Host songs revisited” episode on the podcast.

Ten Chords and the Truth

I like using lots of chords in my songs. I like to borrow chords from parallel key signatures, also known as modal interchange. Lately, I’ve been writing more with melody leading the way. In my first draft of Why Do You Cry, my chorus melody led me to modulate from E-minor in the verse to C#-major in the chorus; a significant modulation.

Feedback from the meetup members suggested that the crazy key change was, well, crazy. I eventually decided to simplify the transition by going to the relative key of G-major for the chorus. This resulted in a smoother transition and allowed me to get a higher melody jump at the top of the chorus. It also let my more emotionally vulnerable lyrics shine through more. But of course, me being me, I still borrowed a few chords during the chorus for a nice harmonic twist.

Embracing simplicity

Writing this song has allowed me to further embrace simplicity. I was already changing my listening habits to more singer-songwriter and pop artists, a far cry from the less conventional tastes I had in the 90s. I started to appreciate simplicity in writing from others, and now I’ve made the leap to embracing the same in my own writing. Of course, this didn’t stop me from flexing my weird side for my electro-pop EP Ace Symmetry in 2020! It’s nice to know that I’m growing as a songwriter and becoming more flexible in my creative approaches.