Glen Everhart Entertainment

Of all the questions people have asked me over the years, none has been more common than “how do you write a song?” To non-musicians I’m sure it can seem like a mysterious process. If you were to ask a hundred songwriters you would find that each has honed their own unique process. This article will explain what works for me.

Before I ever pick up a guitar or start writing a lyric, the concept of the song has begun to form in my head. I’ll use a song from my new www.thegiftofsong.net website as an example…it’s called “Life Is Good”. My brother’s birthday was coming up and I wanted to surprise him with a song on his facebook page. He ends the majority of his facebook status entries with that simple phrase…”Life Is Good”. I thought it was a great title. My brother is a big fan of U2, so I thought I’d try and create some signature intro that borrowed from The Edge’s distinct guitar style. I began in my studio by plugging in my electric guitar and playing some string harmonics with an eighth note delay. A few hours later I had recorded something I liked, and it became the intro and signature lick of the song.

Then a wild card came into the equation. Listening to the Cities 97, I heard a song I had not heard in many years, something I’d loved when it came out in the 80′s but had fallen off my radar. It was the rhythm that grabbed me. I decided to transplant the groove into the song using a standard drum kit instead of the congas and shakers in “Take A Picture”. My Addictive Drums software is an amazing tool for the home recording artist, and after creating the drum track, a half day writing and playing the bass line to match, and a 12 string rhythm guitar track, I had succeeded in creating the feel I had originally envisioned.

Now for the lyrics. Since this was a song about a person, they spilled out easily. Biographical and story telling lyrics are easy for me as there are no ambiguous, hard to describe feelings to convey. I went to his facebook profile and looked at the hundreds of great photos for ideas. Since I was writing this song to accompany a slideshow of photos from his life, the words came easily. Each photo suggested a feeling…”Loving, giving, longing, living now…Sighing, crying, laughing, learning how”. “This is your dream…lived as it should…this is your life…and life is good”.

Once I had put the finishing touches on the recording itself and created the slideshow to fit with the song and lyrics, the best part was yet to come…”giving” it to my brother on his facebook page on his 56th birthday. As I read the comments of his friends after they’d heard and seen my work, I knew I had succeeded in fulfilling my original vision for the song. But the best moment was yet to come.

Weeks later, as I was working on my website update, the opening riff played on laptop. My wife was sitting nearby, and she said, quite simply, “I love that song”.  A standing ovation at the Grammy’s could not have made me feel better. It’s moments like that that make me want to  start recording my next song!