Will you please explain how you approach writing a song? Does the music come first or the words?
We’ve been writing songs together for 13 years and very few have been written exactly the same way.
Most of the time the words will come first. One of us will have a line or a title idea and we will bring it to the other one. Jill will grab the guitar and start playing until we find a melody or chord progression that works with the lyric.
But sometimes we will have a musical idea and try to write lyrics to that. It all just depends on the day. There are so many ways to write a song . . . which is partly what keeps it interesting.
In a story, there is a beginning, a middle and an end. Your songs sound like stories, with conflict and resolution. How do you structure your songs? I found this structure on the internet: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, ending.
That is the most common structure for the songs we write. It’s sort of the natural flow of a “pop” song.
We like to always bring some sort of resolution if we can. We believe there is hope in everything . . . that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel, even in the darkest of places. So, resolution is definitely something we try to tie in to our songs.
Every once in a while it’s fun to break the typical mold and write a different structured song too. We have a song called “From Somewhere In The Bottle” that is basically just 3 different verse sections and no chorus.
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