The Good Lovelies, a folk trio from Canada, are playing at the Salt Lake Community College Taylorsville Redwood Campus at 7 p.m. tonight, April 16, 2012 in the Student Event Center. Tickets are free for students and $5 for everyone else.
- Write everyday
- Learn somebody else’s song
- Listen to all kinds of music
- Document and record ideas
- Share and be open to criticism. “It is the most painful part of songwriting but the most necessary part of it,” says Brooks.
- Collaborate
- Try to say things differently
- Learn some music theory everyday
- Be fearless
- Try different genres
They held a writing workshop for students earlier today in the Student Event Center. The Good Lovelies talked about the process of putting the Christmas song “Hurry Home” together. They rearranged everything: switching verses and chorus and verses with other verses until they found what they liked.
“We Frankensteined that baby,” group member Caroline Brooks said.
The group acknowledged that it can be hard to write lyrics. One way to help make it easier is to write lyrics to someone else’s music. Taking a popular song and writing new lyrics to it allows for practice in fitting words to a structure that has already been created.
“There’s so many different ways to approach songwriting,” group member Sue Passmore said.
The Good Lovelies also suggest starting with a phrase and then coming up with as many different ways possible to say that one phrase. Finding words that mean the same thing as what the songwriter is trying to say is a useful exercise for coming up with new rhyming schemes.
“My songwriting style’s very home-based,” group member Kerri Ough said. She tends to write songs at home in her bedroom with her guitar where no one can hear. Ough once wrote 60 verses to a song to come up with four that worked.
“Hang on to everything that you write,” Passmore proclaimed, noting that you might be able to use those lyrics in the future.
