Writing a pop song is pretty much the easiest thing anybody can do. You don’t need any tools or devices–as a matter of fact, let’s write a song right now.
Pick a word. I don’t know you, so I don’t know what you would consider easy… maybe you’re the type who’d rather invent a word rather than choose one of the classics.
For our purposes here, let’s go with a nice one-syllable word, like “night.” “Night”s a good word. Lots of shit rhymes with “night.”
Now pick a note and sing that word. Awesome.
Now pick another word. Same as before. We’ll go with “lalala,” which I guess is technically one fake-ass word repeated twice in quick succession.
Here’s the only hard part: you can either pick a DIFFERENT note to sing “lalala,” or you can use the same note you choose for “night.”
Now sing them together. Feel free to change notes, or to hold the notes for different lengths of time.
And you’re done. You wrote a song. You probably realized that, in your lifetime, you’ve written about a thousand songs. Nice work! So what if every last one of them sucks? Have you heard what’s been on the radio for the past forty years? That shit sucks, and people GOT PAID to make us listen to it.
Anyway, we’re going to be writing three occasional songs for the winners of the Gertrude Press silent auction, and over the next few weeks (or months), I’ll take you step by step through the songwriting process. The end result will hopefully be something that sucks much, much less than the song you just wrote… but obviously, that’s not guaranteed.
Oh, yeah–I was going to write about why the Occasional Song is maybe the most awesome genre ever… but then I wrote something totally different. That’ll be for tomorrow’s post, I suppose.
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