Hey Reader, One of the prompts inside our current Songwriting Sprint is called "Listen Like an Anthropologist." The exercise is simple. Choose the current #1 song in your genre (or any genre you're curious about), then listen with one question in mind: "Why does this work?" As you listen, jot down every technique you notice—not whether you like the song, but what it's actually doing. Maybe it's the way the chorus melody stays on a single high note. Maybe the drums don't arrive until halfway...

Hey Reader, Benny here from How To Write Songs 👋 A few minutes before filming a recent tutorial, I sat down and asked myself a simple question: What's really on my mind? Not ‘writing from a title’. Nothing clever. No wordplay, or fancy chords. I wrote about the things that had been quietly sitting in the background of my life: worries about the future, family changes, the strange weight of getting older, and watching my children reflect back uncomfortable truths about myself. None of those...

Hey Reader, Keppie here from How To Write Songs 👋 I just finished reading the new Arundhati Roy memoir (with a delightful music reference in the title). She wrote something that really struck a chord with me. In describing her complicated and surprising reaction to her mother's death (and an intersecting meditation on why people revere their persecutors), she said this: There is something knotty here, something puzzling about the human condition in all of this...I’m weary of endless theories...