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Tag Archives: songwriting

Immersion Songwriting Weekend

Bore Place, Kent

Bore Place, Kent. Photo by Swami Baracus.

Last weekend I was heading to Bore Place with my guitar and, arguably, an ambitious number of notebooks.

I had been invited down to a songwriting weekend in an old manor house in Kent by the unbelievably generous Tom Robinson. The idea is that 12 people gather in a place for a weekend, cut off from the outside world, and try and write 20 songs. As soon as I was invited I spent the next week wondering what exactly to expect. Tom and Sue (Tom’s partner) had provided plenty of information, but my being unsure was more about what it would be like working in an environment like that.

Collaborative work when it comes to music is something pretty new to me. I’ve done some here and there, but generally it has been done more remotely via email or messages on Facebook or something, adding parts and gradually building something. This is a totally different kind of collaboration to sitting in a room with someone and just writing. Read the rest of this entry

8 Songwriting Tips (That Seem To Work For Me, At Least)

This is a culmination of a bunch of stuff I’ve been thinking about when it comes to how I seem to write songs, some of which ended up in this ridiculously long blog post about rhythm and things. A lot of this is stuff I just do, rather than being stuff I think about the whole time.

I’ve gone for 8 main ‘tips’. There will be, of course, plenty of other tips that plenty of other people might have. And some of my tips may not make sense or work for you, but this is just some stuff that’s worked for me so far. I’d love to hear how you go about writing songs (or fiction or poems or anything else for that matter) so that I can steal your process from you.

Read the rest of this entry

Day 120 – My Birthday Song

Posted on

A year ago today I posted this song for the 365 project I seemed to be doing. I’m hoping that my past-self was feeling particularly facetious that day, otherwise he’s a bit of an idiot. Then again, these may not be mutually exclusive.

I don’t really know why I wanted to post this again. Two years ago I may have just acknowledged a little landmark like this with a quiet nod to no one, but now I seem to shout things about myself at people on the internet.

On my 23rd birthday this was the song I managed to churn out to then become associated with the day, and now I can look back and be all pleased because at that stage I had no idea that I’d actually finish the thing.

Not to be too unnecessarily contemplative, but some of the things I associate with being 23 were pretty good. These were mainly getting my debut novel published and finishing the 365 project. Which has made me think about what I want to do with this whole being 24 business, and I hope there’ll be things I manage to make that I’ll be just as pleased with. I reckon I’ve peaked, though. Yeah. Probably peaked.

Lyrics and poetry and rhythm and subheadings.

Word-cloud of the complete Cooper365 lyrics.

Word-cloud of the complete Cooper365 lyrics.

This has been lingering about in my mind-tank for a while and I wanted to solidify some of it by writing it out. So I thought maybe I could write one of those blog posts I say I sometimes write. This could be considered a kind of advice post, but it really would be in the loosest sense of the word. If you’re interested in my take on putting lyrics together, however, then you’ve come to the right place. There’s even subheadings, guys. Subheadings.

So if you’re the sort of person that can’t stand context or long introductory justifications for why a blog post should be allowed to exist then the following jumpy links might be of interest to you.

Subheading 1: Why does this post you’re showing me even exist?
Subheading 2: Please patronise me by pretending you understand poetry.
Subheading 3: Are you finally going to talk about writing lyrics now?
Subheading 4: Can I go now?

Subheading 1: Why does this post you’re showing me even exist?

So there were a few things that prompted all of this mulch which is about to spew out in the form of a blog post. The first is a series of videos by Jonathan Mann that I was watching back when he was uploading them on a more regular basis where he was offering advice to people about how he writes a song a day. And he’s now been writing a song a day for over 1,200 days, so he’s pretty dedicated and in a good position to be dishing out this advice, I think. The second was a video by Alan Lastufka about how he writes lyrics. He was dealing more with the meaning behind lyrics and the basic use of similies and metaphors and that kind of thing. This post isn’t so much about that, it’s more about the actual process of getting lyrics down on paper. Read the rest of this entry

Some Cooper365 Highlights

I made a video that was intended for the promotion of the ‘Perpetual Noise’ mix and in the description I started putting in some highlights. It got a little out of control and so I thought I’d also put them here as a kind of ‘link-dump’ post.

So I did plenty of other stuff this year, but these are some things that I’d consider to be some direct offshoots of this project of mine. I decided to write ‘Oh, hey remember…’ at the start of them all because I’m hilarious and nonchalant. Read the rest of this entry

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