Songwriting is one of those odd things, I can never explain quite how I do it. I think it often starts with a riff. When I have a guitar in my hands and I do the audio equivalent of doodling on a notepad with a ball point pen, while day dreaming about something irrelevant.

Sometimes it starts with a thought, a sole line or lyric that might occur to me while driving, cooking, talking, thinking, walking the dog. If I have a pen and paper it may eventually become a song. If I don’t, it’s lost forever. My memory is terrible.

But where ideas for songs don’t happen for me, is when I’m trying to write something. When I sit there and try to write a riff, or come up with a lyric. Just doesn’t work. They have to surprise me.

The next thing I do, is sit down with a couple of pre established ideas and jam them out with my computer, or just with my guitar. I have to do this on my own, I can’t do it when anyone’s watching… isn’t that odd? I sing the the words different ways, play the riffs different speeds, and over different chords (with the help of my computer…). I sing a lyric then see what comes out next – it’s usually something cheesy and rhyming. I write everything down, then try and cut most of the cheese out later on.

Chorus’s seem to come together easiest, verses are hard. If a verse sounds too good on it’s own it usually becomes the chorus of another song for some reason. I don’t know why, it’s never a process of logic. The only logical process that occurs is when I sometimes deliberately force myself not to automatically structure songs ‘Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge Chorus Chorus‘. Oh, and when I think to myself… “Not another one in E! Change the key dagnabbit!”

When I’ve got something I don’t entirely hate, I like to record a rough version of it. (The song “secret” on the music page of this site is an example of this) occasionally I record several rough versions of a song (“Bittersweet Love” is about rough version 5 or 6). These rough versions, once upon a time, would be handed over to “the band” to be learnt, adapted, improved, whinged about, cut or whatever. These days I’m accumulating a pile of rough versions that will eventually be recorded to the very best possible quality that my home studio in the corner of my bedroom will give me, and then I’m going to choose my favourites and call it an album. It will be awesomely indie – I deliberatly moved my studio into the bedroom for that extra bit of indie-cool factor. If I had have had a basement to move it into that would have been even better for that whole ‘underground’ thing eh?

I often think about what makes a good song. I think perhaps – memorability. It’s no use writing a boring song that blends into a thousand other boring songs. If you use this criteria then the best song I’ve ever written in one I wrote many many years ago called Flying Cars. I hate it personally. But it’s the song that most people seem to remember from my former band. The recording of it was the second ever session we’d spent in a studio. The timing is awful, the singing un-tuneful, the entire band is loose as hell. But for some reason, no one forgets that song. I think it may have been the simplicity or just the stupidity of it. “Where is my flying car? I want my flying car… I need my flying car… Where the hell is my Flying car?”

I much prefer my more complicated songs with weird timings and odd bits and pieces, but I’ve slowly realised that I need simple catchy songs too. If I’m going to make an album, even an indie-home-made album, I’ll need the simple songs to draw people in, and just a few of the more interesting songs – to keep me entertained