You Are Reading the First 6 FREE Chapters (470 pages)
Intro.2 This Book is Mainly About How to Write Songs—Emotionally Powerful Songs
The main part of this book focuses on techniques you can use to write accessible, memorable, emotionally powerful songs. The biological connection between music and emotion in the human species goes back hundreds of thousands of years, as you’ll see in Chapters 1 and 9. Music evolved as an emotional communication system. And 99.9% of songwriters have no idea how it works or how to exploit it. It’s the essential skill they most need, and most lack. That’s why, for example, the companion to this book, the Gold Standard Song List (GoldStandardSongList.com) has only 5,000 songs on it (from a full 100 years of songwriting), instead of 5,000,000 or 500,000,000 songs.
You have but one instrument at your disposal that you can use to create emotionally powerful songs: the 100,000-year-old neural organ inside your skull. If you don’t understand how it works musically, you have no advantage over a million other aspiring songwriters and performers. If you don’t know how to manipulate certain elements of music and lyrics to evoke emotion, you will fail in the marketplace as a songwriter and as a performer of your original songs. Potential audiences do not want to hear emotionally anaemic songs, no matter how well performed
Technology will not save you. All the digital hardware and software in the world can’t come remotely close to emulating what your brain can do when it comes to creating emotionally evocative music and lyrics.
In short, if you want to break away from the masses of struggling musicians, you have to learn how to use your brain’s evolved musical and linguistic modules to create accessible, memorable, emotionally powerful music and lyrics.