Got a, Want a, Need a, Get a, Have a

So I stole that from Bojangles. I don't care because I like it. But for me I don't got a want a need a get a have a Bojangles.

I got a want a need a get a have a songwriting.

I LOVE songwriting. It's something God has blessed me with the ability to do, and He has blessed me greatly through it. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. I just thought I'd share a little of the advice that was given to me about songwriting. This really applies for Christian and worship music.

I figured I'd start the number one best piece of advice ever given to me about songwriting, since that's we always want any ways. So here it is.

Songwriting starts with Scripture.

My favorite and in my opinion most powerful worship songs are based directly on a piece of Scripture. How Great is Our God. His Love Endures Forever. Anything Shane Barnard. There's a ton of reasons to do this. First, it is a true reflection of what God is doing in your life. You read The Word and get inspired by it. Or changes something and you have to get it out. Or it affects your life in some way. Another reason is that it's really hard to make a song doctrinally wrong if it is based straight off of Scripture. Not that it's impossible. Lord knows there's plenty of people misinterpreting His Word out there. But it's easy to jack God's Word if you completely make it up yourself.

The next advice on songwriting is a bit of an odd one.

Listen to other peoples songs for musical inspiration.

That's right. Listen to what has already been done for inspiration. Get out your favorite CD and listen to it over and over to get ideas. Obviously I'm not saying you should do this to copy what they did. That's totally unoriginal and totally dishonoring to God. You heard me right. It is dishonoring to God to simply copy what someone else already did. We'll get into that another day. Back to inspiration. Everyone does this. Seriously, all the big wigs out there. And I'm not talking only about Christian music here. Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Rihanna, Beyonce, The Killers, all of them. They all listen to other artists music for musical inspiration. They say it all the time. Kanye West got a lot of inspiration for his album "Late Registration" from The Jackson 5. So don't copy it. Listen to it. Make it better. Improve it. Make it new.

The last piece of advice I'll give is this...

Co-write as much as possible.

Co-writing is a very very difficult process. But end result is amazing. I've done a whole lot of co-writing in my life. One of the worship songs that I'm most proud of is a song that my good friend Robby Hurd and I wrote together called "Waters of Witness". I love that song. It took us a long time to get it done, but it got done. We would sit down with this song over and over and just look at eachother and say, "What do you think?" Like I said, it wasn't easy. The best part of co-writing is having anothe creative mind there. Two minds are always better than one right? It's always exciting to see two people read one scripture, interpret it differently, and then come out with a cohesive song with one song. Plus, if you get stuck, the other person might have their brilliant moment, and vice versa.

So that's my advice on songwriting. I've really tried to put these 3 ideas into practice as much as I possibly can. I'm always writing songs, always jotting down ideas for songs, always looking for new music to inspire me. This obviously is no gaurantee to succesfull songwriting. I'm certainly not any type of super succesfull songwriter. But I have been blessed through that avenue.