Songwriting - How to Generate Ideas From Other Songs

One way to come up with new ideas for a song is to change the perspective of an existing song. I took a lyric writing class with Berklee Collge of Music professor, Pat Pattison and he mentioned there are three questions to ask yourself before writing a song:

Who's talking?Who is he talking to?Why?

Asking yourself those three questions before you start a new song is a great approach in itself. However, you can also apply these questions to changing the perspective of a song you want to draw inspiration from. Let's look at "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles as an example.

By answering those three questions we get:

Who's talking? A guyWho is he talking to? His girlWhy? He wants to hold her hand

Simplistic enough, right? Well, now we can start to manipulate these answer to generate our own ideas. You can change any combination of the three answers. In this case I'm going to change the answers to all three, while only leaving the "big idea" of handholding intact. So I'll do this:

Who's talking? A friend of a boyfriend/girlfriend couple.Who is he talking to? Another friend of the same boyfriend/girlfriend couple.Why? He's noticing that his friend wants to hold his girlfriend's hand, but the friend is too nervous because he doesn't know if that's what his girlfriend wants. He also sees that the girlfriend clearly wants her hand to be held. It's in her body language. But both of them are too afraid to make a move, even though they both want the same thing. They fear that the other one doesn't want it. It's interesting to witness as a third party.

You can see that by changing the perspective of the first two questions, we are given a whole new idea about handholding in the third question. If we wanted to keep going and reanswering these questions to get new ideas, of course we could. We could come up with a bunch of ideas from "I Want to Hold Your Hand" alone, and then we could move on to more songs for even more ideas.

When you start thinking about potential other perspectives, you'll get ideas flowing for all the potential options for what your song could be about.

To learn more, download my free EBook here: http://www.SuccessForYourSongs.com/freeoffer/

Anthony Ceseri is the owner of http://www.successforyoursongs.com/, a website dedicated to the growth and development of songwriters of all skill levels. Anthony's writings appear as examples in the book "Songwriting Without Boundaries: Lyric Writing Exercises For Finding Your Voice" by Pat Pattison, an acclaimed lyric writing professor at Berklee College of Music.

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