Six Songwriter Resources

Sometimes as an artist, you can get stuck and need inspiration. This is especially hard if you work by yourself on your music. Having another musician as a sounding board for your ideas can help you gain a difference in perspective. Whether you work alone or as part of a collaboration, here are some good resources for your work as a songwriter.

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

The Artist’s Way is a great book on the subject of creativity itself. It is an international bestseller with millions of copies sold. That means numerous artists around the world have found it to be useful for their lives as artists.

Songwriting Without Boundaries: Lyric Writing Exercises for Finding Your Voice by Pat Pattison

Pat Pattison is a well-recognized professor at Berklee College of Music. Not only does he teach classes at the school but also created online courses for Berklee. This book is filled with exercises to help you develop your voice as a songwriter and to build songwriting into a regular habit.

Songwriters On Songwriting: Revised and Expanded by Paul Zollo

Sometimes the best way to get inspiration and learn how to do something is to learn from others who are successful at it. Songwriters On Songwriting has interviews with 62 artists such as Lenny Kravitz and others. There are songwriters from every genre of popular music in this book.

The War of Art: Break Through The Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield

It is usually the case that an artist’s worst critic is himself or herself. No matter how supportive family, friends, and fans are, the artist’s own negativity can be their undoing. This book is a great guide to getting past that negativity and fear of failure.

Songwriter’s Pad – Mac\PC and iOS

Maybe you full of song ideas but still struggle to create songs. Perhaps you just have an issue of structuring your ideas into a final arrangement. Apps like Songwriter’s Pad are meant to help with that. With features like word and phrase generators, rhyming dictionaries, and its organizational elements, this app can help you keep your ideas put together.

Evernote

Maybe you don’t need something like Songwriter’s Pad and instead just want a way to track and organize your ideas without any extra fuss. Here’s Evernote to the rescue. There is no end to the ways you can use Evernote to track and store information. Plus with the ability to have it on virtually any phone, tablet, or computer you own, you can always have access to your ideas.

Update 03/18/13:

Thanks to Matt Blick of Beatles Songwriting Academy for these additional resources.

• Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
• The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
• The Beatles Songwriting Academy