The other day, I had coffee with a music educator who is developing a songwriting curriculum for middle school general music students and we were discussing the importance of doing your own work as a songwriter. At SFME, we encourage everyone who wants to teach songwriting to write songs. That doesn...

For whatever reason, lyrics seem to be both the easiest way into songwriting as well as the most challenging. Easy because they access language that we already have - no need for harmonic or melodic vocabulary - but hard because there just isn't a lot of real estate to say everything you want to ...