10 Songwriting Tips for Beginners Who Want to Know How to Write a Song

To be honest, you have to not be able to stop yourself from writing songs. Writing a song—and most importantly, finishing a song—can be a very scary and brutal process. You have to want to do it. You have to have a love for it and be excited about it.

When you get a really good idea or something you’re excited about pursuing, that’s nice. But when you get into the work, it can get very hard and you’ll want to stop. If you really want to do anything in life and you want to do it well, you have to understand that it’s not always going to be fun.

What’s fun is when you’ve finished something and you love it. You feel proud about it before anyone else in the world hears it. I find that to write and finish a song that you like when it’s still just yours, and no one else has heard it, is a beautiful moment of self-validation. And it’s an earned validation. It only comes because you did the work.

I don’t mean for it to sound scary in terms of the work. What I mean to say is, you have to love something to want to try it—whether it’s writing a song, playing a musical instrument, painting, or acting. There has to be some bravery involved. I would say it starts with a desire. It starts with you hearing songs and loving songs and wanting to try to write a song you’ve loved.

In more mechanical terms, I would say if you love songs, figure out why you love them. What are your favorite parts of the song? What is it about that part of the song? Is it the melody? Is it what the words are saying? Do you play a musical instrument?

If so, can you figure out the chords? Most contemporary songs have chord changes. With some pieces, you can adapt those chords and write different songs out of them. There are all kinds of ways operationally to start writing a song, but my overall answer is you just have to do it. And you have to want to do it.

I would say mindset is the second thing. The first thing is the interest and the passion. You have to convince yourself to do it and tell yourself that it’s important to do it. It has to be “this is the thing I have to do.” It’s hard to keep appointments with yourself. Or you might be writing with somebody else and you’re collaborating. You’ll call that person up and say that you want to write a song together and make time to do it.

Your whole life? One song? Somewhere in between? I was writing songs when I was eleven or twelve. I thought they were great. I always thought I was a good Songwriter. I think the more important question is, how long until you believe you want to be a Songwriter? That shouldn’t take long at all.

It’s an unquantifiable skill. You can be a magically brilliant Songwriter and never have a break, a hit song, or make a lot of money. I’m thinking of two of the greatest Songwriters I’ve ever known in my life, and they’ve never made a lot of money doing it. I don’t know how important that is to them, but they scare me with how good they are. They own their part and their love of it.

Also, you never know when something might happen. Could be decades down the road. A good thing to go by is if you want to be as successful as someone like Ed Sheeran, read his story. Learn about what he went through. He started putting out EPs when he was fourteen and pretty much homeless and he slept on people’s couches for years.

Someone asked him, “How is it that you stayed with it through all of that rejection and silence?” He said it was because he had no plan B. It was this or death for him. A song like “The A Team,” that was the song that got him going and established here. “The A Team” was on a few of his earlier EPs long before anything happened for him. It was popular in England for a while before his label in the states decided to try it here.

When they tried it as a single here, it took a long time to catch on in radio. The only reason they kept trying was that they knew it had been a hit in the UK. They stayed with it, spent more money, and eventually, it started to happen; it became a massive hit.

To most people, they’re like, “Ed Sheeran wrote this amazing song, it became a big hit, and he became a star.” That’s not the way it works. He wouldn’t have had that kind of dedication from the label here if it hadn’t been a hit in another country. It wouldn’t have been a hit in another country if he’d given up on the song two EPs back and stopped thinking about that song and playing it for people. Staying with it was the only reason he became successful.

I think both are true. There are people that have a great innate ability to do things, and then there are people that have the love for it and just want to do it. That goes for anything at all. In many cases, I’d put my money on the people that weren’t born with as much innate ability to succeed over the people that were.

When you’re born with a gift, generally what happens is you grow up and people notice you have this gift. People tell you that you’re amazing at this, you’ll be a star, you’ll be incredible, it’ll be easy for you, etc. I know that comes from the right place, but it’s fairly destructive. What happens is when you grow up and get out there in the world, you find out it’s really, really hard to be successful no matter what you’re doing and how good you are.

And you may fail a lot. You may fail for years without a single break. When someone has been groomed to think that they’re the best and that it will be easy for them, they’re not prepared for that kind of rejection. They feel like all the eyes of everyone they grew up with are on them, and they’re going to feel bad so they won’t work as hard. If they start to fail, they’ll become depressed and self-medicated. All sorts of crazy things happen to talented people.

I’ll give you an example. When you ask who the greatest inventors of the last 150 years were, the first two names that come up are Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison is known for inventing the lightbulb. The truth about Thomas Edison is that he didn’t really invent the lightbulb and he really wasn’t a super brilliant guy. He was, by all accounts, a guy that would work ten times harder than everybody else, loved science, and loved the world he got into, more than anybody.

His Teachers said he wasn’t their best student but he outworked everybody. He loved the press and self-promotion. He worked with about thirty other scientists, and a series of things were developed that eventually became the lightbulb, through trial and error, and he got himself a lot of press for it. He’s seen as a great genius, but really what his genius was was his desire and his love of what he did.

The most successful Songwriters and Singer-Songwriters, when you peek behind the curtain, these are also people that are terminators in terms of their work ethic, fearlessness, and their ability to navigate and narrate their story and their brand. You didn’t used to have to be that way. You could be a Joni Mitchell, or a Donovan, or a Laura Nyro and become a hugely successful talent. It was purely based on how good you were.

Today, you also have to have a very canny sense of the age that we live in and how to navigate it. So people like a Shawn Mendes, a Taylor Swift, or a Justin Bieber, these are talented people for sure, but they’re smart and not afraid of anything. They’ve worked harder than most people put together because it’s what they want. Maybe there are more talented people out there who haven’t gotten where they’ve gotten and that’s because of the work ethic and the fearlessness.

There’s a theme I keep coming back to here and it’s fearlessness. You really have to not be afraid. When you read the story of anybody or anything that’s super successful, the backstory is always: nobody liked it, everybody rejected it, they went years without getting anything, and there were all these setbacks. But we only hear about them when they become successful; it looks as if they suddenly appear fully formed.

The reality is that’s not how it works. I think the more you know about how much goes into it, the less afraid you should be. If you love it, great! Keep finishing and showing songs to people. Keep connecting with people. Don’t be afraid of people not liking what you do.

Sometimes you shouldn’t listen if people say something like, “You’re too folky for today,” or, “You’re a girl and doing rock. Girls shouldn’t do rock,”—that was an Avril Lavigne concern. I even said that to her. I saw her as an acoustic kind of thing, not a Blink-182 thing. To me, she was a five-foot tall, boy-crazy, super-sensitive little puppy dog with a beautiful voice. She didn’t care. That’s what she wanted to be and she really had a degree of “fuck you” in her DNA and that’s why girls went crazy for her and followed her and loved that defiance.

Listen to the consistent criticism you keep getting. You have to pay attention when you hear a lot of the same thing, like, “I couldn’t follow the melodies and they were too busy.” Compare it to songs you really love and use it to learn and grow. Don’t be afraid of that.

I think my short version is that, if you’re interested in writing songs, it doesn’t matter whether you have innate ability or not. You just have to love it. Really, really love it. Don’t be afraid of stumbling and falling. I think it should start with feeling inspired to do it and then not being afraid.

This applies to anything you want to try and take seriously. This isn’t just songwriting. If you’re going to be afraid of the walls and challenges you need to make a way around, then you’re going to let that fear dictate decisions you make and you’re not going to make the right decisions in your life. Whether it’s people you date, the jobs you accept, or places you choose to go.

There are types of fear you have to recognize that are healthy and types that are based on your own self-doubt and your own feeling of overwhelm.

If you’re starting a song and it feels like it’s too scary or overwhelming or you get stuck, give yourself permission to put it down and get back to it. Make a plan to work on one part of it. Come back the next day. Do that every day. In a handful of days, you’ll probably have the whole song.

When you look at the parts you haven’t done, it can feel overwhelming because there’s so much unknown. You’ll hear songs that come on the radio that are finished and polished and you’ll think, “Fuck this, I don’t want to do it,” and you don’t know what they went through to get that song there. It’s gonna be hard.

Honestly, if you don’t want it to be difficult and you want writing songs to be easy, don’t bother. It’s not easy. I don’t care what anybody says. I hate when I read articles that say, “Oh, we wrote the whole thing in about fifteen minutes,” and I think, “Why are you saying that? It’s intimidating and discouraging to people.”

I, for one, have questions about it. I’ve been writing songs for more than thirty years and I’ve never once, alone or in collaboration, written a complete song that fast. You might do most of one, or enough where all that’s left is, say, the second verse lyric or whether or not it needs a bridge; it could be an awesome, fun session. But it’s hyperbolic. I wish these A-list Songwriters would instead talk about the struggle, how hard it was.

Everybody struggles. You have to walk into a room and there’s nothing in existence and create something from nothing that is valuable to other people. How are you going to tell me that’s not hard? It just is. But the beautiful thing is, the song is in the ether, and if you’re willing to keep courting it, it can be yours—and just possibly the world’s—forever. That’s what keeps me coming back.