Songwriting Workflow: What A Month Of Daily Releases Taught Me

Guest post by Martin Fowler. This article originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper

Every year, the shortest month comes around, and at the forefront of my mind is the plethora of songwriting challenges which permeate the internet at large. Some of my favorite artists have famously committed their time in this dreary month (at least here in New York) to hunker down and dedicate serious hours to composing new material.

Every year I think of how outlandish an undertaking that month must be for each of these artists, taking tens or hundreds of hours to build a whole new world, and create the kind of consistency in their day-to-day life, even in the shortest month of the year, to get it done. And every year I’m shocked at how many actually come out the other side with a whole new body of work!

Click to read more ...

Songwriting And Building A Sustainable Career

1. As a songwriter, what type of environment do you find you write the best in? What sorts of things or tools do you need around to be in the right headspace to write?

I have a home studio I work from, which can be both convenient and distracting. You basically never have to change out of your pj’s, although extremely comfortable, it can slow the process down. I actually love to write in new locations, i.e other people’s studios, writing spaces, in nature, etc. As far as tools go, another person is usually preferred  in the process for me. I thrive off of collaboration and other artists’ energy. Having a piano and guitars laying around is great too, as I write differently depending which instrument I have in hand. I used to rely on being inspired to write, but when you are trying to make it your path, you really have to become consistent and productive.

Click to read more ...

The Three-And-A-Half-Minute Song

Caught in a daze, I found myself staring at my computer screen at a large list of music titles from my “Indie Chillout” Spotify playlist when I had a keen observation. Song number one, length = 3:21, song two, length = 3:25, song three, length = 3:43, so on and so forth. A similarity among all the track titles, a majority of them ranging roughly from approximately 3 minutes and 15 seconds to 4 minutes and an average song length of all 100 tracks of 3 minutes and 50 seconds (a minimum length of 2:24 and a maximum length of 6:10). It isn’t just happenstance that this is around the average song length time for almost all major genres of music. In fact, there are several reasons why most songs fall within this time range as explained below.

Click to read more ...