How to Get Ideas for Songwriting

Get inspired by your life. You experience your own life, and you get to experience the feelings first-hand. If you're going through some tough times, you can always write a song about it. You'll find that your song will include your emotions in it. When there's emotions in a song, it comes to life. It is a good practice to keep a journal or have a blog to record down your daily experiences. Not only do you practice writing, you reflect on the day and it'll come back to you when you need inspiration.

Be inspired by love. This is one of the most common song-writing themes. Many songs we hear these days revolve around love. It can be either a happy song or a sad song. If you were to talk about your love leaving your side for another person, then it would be a sad love song. Maybe you can write about how magical the feeling is like to fall in love. Remember, include your emotions if you can.

Write something that raises your confidence or self-esteem. Write a song about how you are able to conquer the odds. Whenever you feel low, just think about how you are able to come all the way here. Think about positive things that can raise your confidence and boost your mood. Your song will sound very positive and not only will you feel better after that, other people, whom you have shared your song with, might feel good as well.

Let it come to you. Just play the piano or strum a few chords on the guitar. After doing so for awhile, just start singing. There may be some of time where you'll just be singing "hmm..." but no worries, the words will eventually come to you. Let inspiration strike you. That's how some songs came about.

Tell a story. If you have recently read a nice book or watched an interesting movie, you can always write a song about the story in it. Allow your song to tell the story. Bring in the melody to raise or lower the tension in the song. Perhaps, you may want to point out the climax and put it where you wish the suspense to be in your song (for example, the bridge). Every listener looks forward to listening to a story.

Think of metaphors. One of the more sensitive topics that you may want to write about include life and death. However, life and death definitely have a lot of metaphors that can be used. If you use a dying tree to represent death and a seedling to represent life, then you can always write about the death of a certain person or the birth of a child with metaphors instead. Metaphors will make your song more interesting.

Listen to music. Perhaps, while you are listening to songs by other artistes, you may find the inspiration to write about certain issues (e.g. racism, happiness, love). Allow the music to spark off something in you. However, you might end up 'blending' a bit of the songs you heard into your own songs, so try not to write songs while listening to songs by other artistes. You don't want to get into trouble with the law.