Kevin Thomas:
... and I would often say, "Well, let's go through your lyric one phrase at a time, and just as an exercise, maybe we can plug in one noun or some kind of image of something that people, as soon as they hear the word, they can see something in their mind and do that one thing for each line and see what comes out of that," and often it helps a lot.

Michael Walker:
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Michael Walker:
All right. I'm excited to be here today sitting with Kevin Thomas. Kevin is the founder and CEO of Songwriting Planet which provides video courses and training that helps aspiring songwriters to reach their musical goals. He's author of a book called Melody Madness which explores in meticulous detail the ways that songwriters can master melody writing. And his songs personally have had national and international radio airplay and he's toward all over the United States and Southern Europe. And he's composed and arranged compositions for orchestras. And so I'm really excited to talk to him today about the topic of songwriting because I think that for musicians, really the core of the value they provide, the core of your business is your product and your music is so ...

Michael Walker:
It's like one of the most important leverage points you could focus on. So it's always great to be learning about how can you improve as a songwriter and telling better stories and improving your craft. Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Kevin Thomas:
Great, thank you. It was great to be here.

Michael Walker:
So Kevin, I would love to start off with just hearing a little bit more about yourself and your story and how did you found Songwriting Planet.

Kevin Thomas:
Sure, I was writing songs and I was playing guitar and singing and playing other instruments. And I'll tell you this story. One time, I would always live in these apartments where neighbors would bang on the wall when I'm playing music and it became really hard to practice and I found myself going out in my car and driving off to weird places and being able to practice right there. And I remember I was out one night in this parking lot, it was like 11:00 at night doing this and the security guard, he would come by and he would ... After a while, he started waving hi to me because he got so used to seeing me there. It was really comical. And I realized that I really must have a lot of passion for this to be doing something that ridiculous in the middle of the night on a regular basis.

Kevin Thomas:
But I also had some confusion. I could write good songs, but I couldn't do it consistently all the time. Sometimes, they would come out through inspiration, and other times, I'd get stuck and I thought there's got to be some kind of method to this. It's more than just inspiration and passion. There's got to be some technique or some way to do this more consistently. And I started thinking about it and I thought about other arts. I thought, well, with painting, people can draw sometimes really good. They're naturally gifted at drawing things or doing graffiti art or something like that, but then they often go to art college and become really good. It was way better.

Kevin Thomas:
And then people who cook, they cook for their family and they learn their family recipes and they get really good at that, but then they go to France and become a chef, go to school for chefs and they become master chefs. And I thought, "Why is that not the case with songwriting?" Even piano players, typically it would be expected that you take seven or eight years of piano lessons before you become a professional. But for some reason, with songwriting and a guitar, it seems to be the case with guitar as well, but that people expect we either have it or you don't. And I thought, every other art out there, it's expected that you have some kind of training before you get really good at it.

Kevin Thomas:
Even if you're a novelist, like the lady who wrote the Harry Potter novels, right? She was very talented, but she also had a college degree and she's been studying English. All of us study English from the time we're little kids, right? We go to grade school and we learn how to read and write, and then later, we can write. People who want to be good at it can be really creative with the way that weave words together and others not so much, but we have all that training behind us. And with songwriting, people don't. It's like, "Well, you either have it or you don't. It either comes to you from God or it doesn't." And I thought that really started to sound more and more ridiculous to me and odd.

Kevin Thomas:
And so I started looking around for solutions and I found that Berkeley College of Music had a major in songwriting and they were the only college in the world that did and they're also were the best college in the world for a contemporary music. And so I started looking into it more and I ended up going there and getting accepted and I was just going to go for maybe a semester and see if I liked it. I ended up staying there, getting a dual major for five-year degree. I did it really quickly because I hated the winters and it was freezing up there in Boston in the winter. And I stayed over the summer, took extra classes, got out in a few years, but they put together a really great program. And the cool thing about it was they taught technique.

Kevin Thomas:
Up until then, I would look at some books about songwriting and a lot of them were just lyric writing. Nothing about the music. It was all about lyrics mostly. And the technique that they taught, techniques were seemed to be very few and far between. It was very vague. And at Berkeley, they really broke it down into techniques. So I got a lot out of that and then also I looked at some of the other really famous songwriters out there and I thought, "Well, they didn't do this. How did they get so good?" And then I realized that, "Well, they might not have gone to school for songwriting or for music, but they often had access to the best producers in the world who did."

Kevin Thomas:
Like The Beatles, for instance, the most successful band of all times, their producer was a classical composer who had a college degree in music and he was sometimes referred to as the fifth Beatle. He helped them a lot with bringing their songs out. And so that's a little bit of how I got started and I would record songs as well and I would learn from the producers that I work with. And then I started looking into what's going on in Nashville. They had a bunch of workshops there. I study from everybody I could. I try and really learn. And what little information there was in books out there, I buy them and read them. And then I learned from the best, if anybody was ever giving a workshop. And I started putting all this stuff together and I thought, "Wow, this is really what songwriters need, but a lot of them have the means to go or the desire to go back to college for music or maybe they don't have access to good producers," and all that stuff is really expensive too.

Kevin Thomas:
And so I thought, "Let me put together something." At the time, I was also studying a little bit about internet marketing to help me with my own music career and with other things related to business. And I thought, "Let me put together a course or a book or something that can help songwriters." And one thing led to another and I ended up creating Songwriting Planet. And it's a company that has affordable programs for songwriters to help them learn the techniques that they're not learning any place else. And I also made it accessible in the sense that, you go to Berkeley College of Music, you have to know how to read and write music first before you can get accepted. There's all these requirements.

Kevin Thomas:
And I thought songwriters really don't need a lot of those things. They don't necessarily need to have advanced ability in those areas. So I try to make it accessible for only what songwriters need without all the extra stuff that they may attain if they go a college for music or something. But maybe it's a little bit of a sidetrack if they're just focusing on becoming better songwriters. So I try to tailor it strictly to songwriters and Songwriting Planet was born over 10 years ago now. I think it's been 12 years at this point. And we helped thousands of songwriters with techniques to help them write better songs.

Michael Walker:
Super cool. Yeah, and it definitely makes a lot of sense as you're telling the story and sharing your journey. I think hopefully a lot of people here can relate with that because we've experienced something similar. So now that you have been doing this for about 12 years now, I know that you've worked with a lot of different songwriters, different types of musicians and you've literally written the book on songwriting. What are some of the biggest, most common challenges or mistakes that you see songwriters making when they first come to you?

Kevin Thomas:
That's a great question. Mainly, they're just guessing. They're guessing at what they need to do. Often, I'll get songwriters would come, they'll say, "I wrote this verse and I want to write a chorus," or vice versa, "I wrote this chorus and I want to write a verse. I want to write another section and I'm not sure. Maybe I'll use this chord or that chord. I'm not sure where to go next." And I would ask things like, "Well, do you know what key you're in?" And often they would say, "Well what's a key? What do you mean by that?" And then I would explain, "Well, if you're in a key, you're in the key of C or the key of G, there are certain chords that go along with that key. And if you know what they are, that would be your first place to pick and choose chords for the next part of your song."

Kevin Thomas:
Then I would explain, "How the system works and how a key is basically a tonal center that comes from a scale and scale has seven notes in it." And I can give them a quick reference, so they can know what those notes, "Are and it also comes with seven chords that go along, one for each note. Some are major and some are minor and they go in a certain order. And if you know what they are, you can pick and choose those to start with and you can put them in different orders or you can use what's referred to as functional harmony where each chord has a certain function and does a certain thing.

Kevin Thomas:
The one chord in the key of C is a C major chord and that feels like you're at rest at home in that tonal center. And the five chord feels like you are far away from home and wanting to draw back and the four chord feels like you're traveling. And so each chord and the key has some kind of different function and so you can look at it that way, that gives you some basic understanding. And then from there, you can get into more advanced chords, bringing in chords from outside of the key. But if you do it, it's often not just done randomly. There's chord families where you can draw from that's commonly used. There's modal interchange chords and there's secondary dominant chords. And these are chord families that you can borrow chords from, mix it in from outside of the key to give more character to your song."

Kevin Thomas:
And a lot of songs in popular music, it either has all the chords are from one key or there may be one or may be two chords mixed in from outside of the key, but that's usually it for like 95% of the songs that we hear in popular music. Because any more than that, you start getting into things that sound avant garde and really out there. And very more things you might find in jazz that become so complex that unless you really put it together well, you're getting into some things that can easily sound like you're playing wrong chords or wrong notes. And then of course, you can take chords within the key and you can modify them with other notes in them and so forth.

Kevin Thomas:
So that that's just chords, but that's a common question I get is, "What do I do next with my song?" And I would ask something related to, "Do you know what you're doing now?" And the answer would often be, "No, I have no idea what I'm doing now. Just this just came to me and I have no training and I have very little musical background." And so that's one area, but there are other areas as well. There's melody writing. There's song structure. There's different song structures that you can use. There's the hook of the song. There's the arrangement of the song with what type of instrumentation and what type of rhythm you've got. So there's a lot of different categories. You can break it down and look at each one at a time when you're developing a song.

Kevin Thomas:
And if you know certain techniques for each category, you have a checklist to go through to help you improve your song, develop it and make it closer and closer to a hit song, but if you don't know what you're doing at all, you're just guessing. And that's what I see songwriters do as mistakes all the time, is they're guessing and they don't realize that there is anything possible in the realm of training. They feel like you either have it or you don't and they really hurt themselves with that misconception we have so commonly in our society. And so I try and help them break out of that and just get some fundamentals down. And counterintuitively, the fundamentals that I'm talking about, these are not usually taught in music colleges because writing music, if you get into that at all in music colleges, typically it would be music composition, writing for instruments.

Kevin Thomas:
And it's a different approach, writing, composing like you might find in classical compositions. It's a different approach than what songwriters typically use and would need. So there is a different way to approach songwriting that's more practical than you might approach things as a composer.

Michael Walker:
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Michael Walker:
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On top of all that, you'll get access to our private music mentor community. And this is definitely one of my favorite parts of music mentoring and maybe the most valuable is that you're going to have this community where you can network with other artists and link up, collaborate, ask questions, get support and discuss everything related to your music career. So if you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then go click on the link in the show notes right now and sign up for free. From there, you can check out all of the amazing contents, connect with the community and sign up for the live masterclasses that happen every week. This is a gift for listening to our podcast, supporting the show, so don't miss it out. Go sign up for free now and let's get back to our interview.

Michael Walker:
That makes a ton of sense. And next follow-up question, that's teed up from that is, what are some of those fundamental things that you really feel like probably should be taught in music college for songwriting, but that you found as fundamentals that artists should really be aware of when it comes to songwriting?

Kevin Thomas:
Well, here's a really interesting one, melody writing. I remember I had one teacher when I was at college, he said, "It's interesting that melody is not taught in music college. Melody writing is not really taught." And I started thinking about that and I was like, "Wow. In a way, you're right. A lot is taught about block chords and other aspects of music, but for some reason melody is neglected. And I remember this idea came to me when I was writing a classical piece. I was writing a string quartet. And I had a teacher, he had a PhD from Julliard at School of Music, one of the best schools of music in the world for classical music.

Kevin Thomas:
And I would bring it to him, I said, "Well here's what I got and I'm not sure what to do next with this melody, where to go, what I should do," questions I get from my students these days. And he thought about it for a second because he'd been doing it so long. It's like second nature to him and he doesn't really have to think about it much, but he thought about it and said, "Well, you just use your basic melodic development techniques like fragmentation and retrograde and inversion and you just use those and you take what you've got and you develop it from there using those techniques." And I thought about that too and I thought, "Yeah, I learned that stuff."

Kevin Thomas:
But there was a page and a half of information on it out of this 300 or 400-page book that I was studying music theory and that's all they had on melody writing. And so I went back to that and I looked at those techniques and I memorized them and I started thinking, "Well, there's probably other techniques too." And I looked around or I thought about it, I forget exactly how I put this together, but I ended up coming at over 50 different melodic development techniques to develop a melody. And I put it together in a book and ended up creating a book on melody writing because there seemed to be just not enough information on this at all in any music college and there's actually still isn't. I don't know any ... Well, I haven't looked into this recently, but I haven't seen any music college curriculum where there's a class in melody writing. It's a real missing piece.

Kevin Thomas:
And songwriters, what do songwriters do? What do you copyright when you have a song? You copyright the lyric and the melody. That's what's copyrightable with the Copyright office. That's what you can send in. And the other stuff, the chords that that's not copyrightable, the song structure's not, the different instruments, the arrangement, none of that is. It's really the melody and the lyric because those are the two most memorable parts of the song that really define a song. You can take a melody and change the chord progression completely, you can harmonize it with different chords and it'll still sound like the same song with the melody and lyric intact. But if you take a chord progression, put a different melody or put different words to it, it's a different song altogether it.

Kevin Thomas:
And so it's really important. It's not like a little thing to be good at melody writing. A lot of songwriters, they will think of the melody and the lyric as the same thing. They're part of each other. And I'm like, "Well, they're not. You could look at them differently. You can look at the lyrics and you can work on developing them as a thing by itself. And then you can look at the melody and work on your pitch content, your rhythms, the different aspects of your melodic phrasing. And you could work on that independently and they're separate things and you should work on them as separate things and then put them together or go back and forth between them.

Kevin Thomas:
And so that's a really important thing that should be taught. That's tip, that's really not any place that I've looked into. It's one of those things that's really neglected.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, that is interesting. The melody is such an important part of a song. It's what people remember. It's what they come along to is what they ... So it is interesting that there's not more emphasis on it, although at the same time melody, in some cases seems like one of those things that it's like, "Where the heck does this come from?" We're channeling this, create this, but everything you're describing. There's patterns and there's training and there's practices that there's things you can do to improve it. So that's awesome that you wrote the book. It's called what? Melody Madness?

Kevin Thomas:
Melody Madness, yes.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, cool.

Kevin Thomas:
And it's available on our website.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. So one question for you around, yeah, I think this is a pretty common question is around finding inspiration or getting back into a groove of writing songs regularly. And when it comes to ... Maybe we could even focus this just on lyrics. So let's say that someone has a progression, they have some music or a melody and maybe they even have a hook or an idea for a title of a song or like the chorus, but now they need to develop the lyrics for it. Do you have any specific exercises or tools when it comes to developing their lyric skillset?

Kevin Thomas:
Yeah, so if they're working on their lyrics and they're trying to develop it, well, one thing in general about songwriting, whether it's lyrics or something else of about, getting started or getting inspiration or keeping things going, a lot of people feel like inspiration comes to them and then other times it doesn't and then they get writers' block and feel like, "How do I get more inspiration to come to me?" And I had one person say to me once, mentor of mine, he said, "Inspiration comes to you more often when you're working on songwriting, when you're writing. It comes to you more often when you're writing than when you're not. So rather than just wait for inspiration, you should start writing anything." Just as exercises, you could just do an exercise or do a daily routine. So a couple of the things that people do in terms of lyrics to keep going with that is journal writing, where at night before you go to bed or first thing in the morning, you spend a certain amount of time writing in a journal. And some of it's to put down your daily experiences, but it's also designed to get the words flowing and to get better at weaving words together.

Kevin Thomas:
And what you can do is eliminate some of the rules you typically have with English grammar when you're doing this just so you can keep the flow of creative ideas coming more quickly. So forget about proper punctuation, allow yourself to have run on sentences. Don't worry about if everything totally makes sense, just write and get your ideas out there. What you want to do is have your pen not leave the page. You could do it, of course, with a laptop and type things in or an iPad or something, but you want to keep the words flowing and not just stop trying to be too analytical about your ideas. So you want to get the analytical mind out of the way. And so let go of all the rules. This is more like a creative writing exercise where you just write and you want to keep in mind that you're going to be ...

Kevin Thomas:
If you're going to use any of that for anything with your songwriting, you will have a chance to edit it later. And so often, you want to have more information than you need and you want the ideas to keep flowing. So just writing and making it a routine is really good. Another thing is to read. A lot of the great lyricists out there, they were English majors. A lot of the great songwriters who were really good with words, who were known for that, they had a literary background. They studied English and poetry and different aspects of writing in school. And so they would read a lot. And so reading things that have a little bit more color in the way they word things, I would say in one sense the classics in terms of poetry novels, but at the same time, you might want to stay a little bit away from things that are too old because it's just that you stumble over trying to understand the archaic English.

Kevin Thomas:
And so things that are a little more ... It's you don't have to keep looking up words to figure out what is being said or try to make sense of things from over 150 years ago. It tends to be a lot of words in there that you have to figure out what they mean because people don't talk that way anymore. It's interesting when you look at Shakespeare, as brilliant as he was, you can realize in just like 400 years, the English language has changed dramatically because people probably used to speak that way back then. And now that stuff is really hard to understand and you got to look up a lot of words and it's all these words that have fallen out of use and they call it archaic language in just a few hundred years. So language changes all the time.

Kevin Thomas:
Modern poetry, there's lots of great poets out there that write good stuff. Allowing yourself to read enough to get a sense for the imagery being used. There's lots of techniques I could talk about too in terms of actual poetic techniques that you might want to plug into your lyric writing. One of the things that I see commonly as what I would think of as a mistake usually is when people write things that's very matter of fact without any imagery at all. No specific things that you can visualize.

Michael Walker:
Wow.

Kevin Thomas:
And I would often say, "Well, let's go through your lyric one phrase at a time, and just as an exercise, maybe we can plug in one noun or some kind of image of something that people, as soon as they hear the word, they can see something in their mind and do that one thing for each line and see what comes out of that," and often it helps a lot. The people who tend to be really good at this in all the different genres of popular music these days, you got rock R&B, country, folk, funk, the different styles, right? The people who are pretty good at this are people who write country music. And the only downside to that or limitation is that country music tends to stick around certain topics, that they limit themselves to the lifestyle of that culture, the pickup trucks and cowboy hats and going to church the next morning after drinking too much the night before.

Kevin Thomas:
The topics, they've almost beaten to death some of these topics in that genre. So it is limited in that way in a sense, but at the same time, the lyric writers, they use a lot of good imagery and you can get lots of ideas from just reading that stuff. As long as you can separate ... You don't have to write about those topics, but you want to learn from the way they're using imagery. It tends to be really good how they're painting a picture with words, telling a story with images. And one of the reasons that they tend to be good at it in that genre is because it's one of the few remaining genres where the songwriter is usually a professional songwriter and the artist is usually a professional performer and they don't typically blend the two together like they do in a lot of other styles and that's the way songwriting used to be.

Kevin Thomas:
Prior to bands like The Beatles and The Beach Boys, when they came out in the 1960s, they were both bands that were really good at writing and performing, but prior to that, that was typically not done. It was there'd be a professional songwriter and then there'd be a professional performer and the two would be matched together by the record company. And you still find that in country music today where you look on an album of a famous country artist and you'll find almost every song is written by a different songwriter. And the songwriters now is usually not the artist. And so they have professional songwriters in that genre. So they get pretty good at certain aspects of songwriting. And in that style, in that genre, it's often very lyric based, so they tend to be pretty good at ... In some ways, they say they're storytellers. They talk about themselves that way as storytellers. So those are a couple things about lyric writing.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, that's super helpful. Yeah, that idea of going through the lyrics line by line and asking yourself, "Can I actually visualize and see what's happening in this line or is there an actual image or a symbol or something in my mind I can see?" It reminds me of a concept from digital marketing which is the idea of landing the plane and the idea meaning, if you're talking about all these ideas and abstract, sometimes it's okay to be up in the plane, but if all you're doing is talking about these abstract ideas and there's nothing that people can actually grab onto, then it's like you're up in the clouds. And it's just too vague, it's too abstract. You can't necessarily visualize or understand it.

Michael Walker:
But if you can imagine or ask yourself, someone's following you around with a video camera and they wanted to actually capture what you're trying to communicate, would it make sense? How would they communicate it visually? And if you guys are like, "Okay, if in the song someone was carrying a video camera and they wanted to showcase what I'm saying here, what would be on the screen? What would be on the camera?" That's an interesting practice.

Kevin Thomas:
That's a great idea, yeah. And there are lots of things from other pursuits like business for like you just mentioned, where you can apply those concepts to art.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. And the one thing that you'd mentioned that I think is a really important topic or a big question that a lot of songwriters have is around the idea of ... You just mentioned how a lot of the most popular, most successful musicians nowadays, they have a team or they have a lot of people they're collaborating with and especially when it comes to songwriting. So much of the game now, it seems like is about co-writing and about finding the right people to collaborate with. And in some cases, an artist or a songwriter who's pretty early on, who doesn't really have many chops or doesn't really have the chops to be successful on their own, they are able to collaborate with a room of a few different songwriters and make an amazing song out of it.

Michael Walker:
So I guess the question is, what would you recommend in terms of, if someone's interested in finding collaborators or co-writing, how can they go about finding the right people to be able to co-write with?

Kevin Thomas:
Well, that's a great question. Well, often the collaborations that you're referring to, I see that a lot with people who have record deals. And they're often signed to a record deal because they got something marketable about their persona. Maybe they're very young, youthful looking and they're very attract ... Got a great voice, things like that, that have nothing to do with songwriting. And so people like that, they may have those things going for them, but maybe songwriting is the part that they need help with. And if they have a record deal with the good record company, there's often a lot of contacts and they can be put in touch with and there's funding for it and they can be put in touch with people to help them. And often people will be hired to help them.

Kevin Thomas:
And so the people that help them usually, in terms of songwriting, would be professionals who are already good at co-writing, who already know how to do that. They've worked with a lot of people, maybe producers, maybe other songwriters. And so that's advantageous for those people at that level, but I think what we're talking about here is we have both have companies related to helping independent artists, people who don't have record deals and may not even want a record deal because there's some downsides to that. And so how do they start collaborating?

Kevin Thomas:
That can be a little trickier because you can get four people in a room trying to write music together and one is less talented than the other. All of them have such little ability. Are they really helping each other? Now sometimes that works. I heard, I think, Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, he said that the key is really getting together in a house with your band and living together. That was what he thought the key for the success was for a band. And I thought, "Yeah, that could work, but it also could be a disaster and you might end up hating each other." And I've seen that more often than the other. I've seen where it just falls apart. It's really rare where that type of situation works where you have this brotherhood, where you're helping each other and it all flows well and you develop well. That can work if you're lucky.

Kevin Thomas:
And a lot of people look for that when they're looking at the typical band scenario like a rock band. They want to have this brotherhood. And I did too when I started out. I found it was really hard to find and often things didn't work well and I found it was better ... At one point, I'm like, "I'm just going to hire professionals. It's going to work better and it'll save me a ton of time." But in general though, for what you're asking, trying to co-write with other people, Craigslist and other places like that where you look for musicians and you can easily put up advertisements, "I'm a songwriter looking for another songwriter to work with and co-write with," that's the good bulletin boards of music stores. Often they have music stores. You can put up a flyer with what you're looking for. Different places online.

Kevin Thomas:
There's some other place online where you can look for people to collaborate with on things, but keep in mind that some people are better at it than others. And if you're new to it, there's a lot of skills you get comfortable with just from doing it. So you got to try different people to work with and see how it goes. And you'll learn things about basically how to interact with people. One of the things that can be really helpful is learning how to be diplomatic. If somebody says, "Here's an idea. What do you think?" You don't say, "No, I don't like it," or you don't say, "It sucks." That's going to hurt the other person's feelings. And they're going to become less likely to present their ideas moving ahead and they're going more guarded.

Kevin Thomas:
So you don't want people around you to start becoming guarded as you're trying to co-write with them. You want to be accepting and positive about everything. So instead of saying you don't like it, you say, "Well, okay, let's keep going. Let's keep with that. What else? Where can that lead to? What's the next idea that can come out of that? How can we improve that and make it even better?" That's a good approach. And if somebody else that you're working with starts being negative, you can coach them and say, "It doesn't help when you tell me that this is no good. It would be more helpful if we stay positive, when we look for, 'What can you tell me that you're looking for that could be better?'"

Kevin Thomas:
And be more specific. When somebody says, "I don't like that," it's like, "Well, what don't you like? It's not just one thing. I presented part of a song. It's got a melody. Do you not like that? It's got lyrics. Is there something about the words? What about the words? Is it the topic, the story or is it the way I'm weaving words together? Is it the rhyming? What is it specifically?" and get the other person to think about what they don't like. And if they have little training in this area, they may have to really rack their brain to understand what to say. I had to do this one time where I was co-writing with somebody and he had never written before with anybody. And he also wasn't really the most intelligent guy in the world either. And he said, "Oh, I don't like it." And I said, "Well, what about it?"

Kevin Thomas:
I drilled him with questions and presented all these different aspects of the song, and finally, he figured it out. He's like, "Wow, I really had to think about that, but that's the thing I don't like about it." I forget what it was at this point. I think it was maybe something about the lyric, certain images I used or the way I was presenting certain ideas. He didn't like them. Once we finally nailed it down like, "Okay, I could change that and keep the rest of it. I don't have to throw out everything. I could just throw out the part that you feel is not working now that I know what it is, now that you told me what it is." So we were able to keep ... He was ready to toss out this whole song that I thought was pretty well developed, had verse, pre-chorus, chorus. It had a bridge. All the sections were pretty complete.

Kevin Thomas:
And he's like, "I just don't like it." And it turned out to be something really minor that he didn't like. And once it changed, it's like, "Oh, now the whole song's good." I'm like, "Well, the whole song was already good. It was just one thing that stood out for you so much that you couldn't see beyond that." So that's something to keep in mind with co-writing, to be specific in terms of what you do or don't think is working with the song. Don't say negative things like you don't like it or, "It sucks." Just point out the thing that you think needs to be changed. I say I think this aspect of it could be changed. And give ideas, give options, "What if you took that idea and change it like this? What if you took this, the rhythm guitar part, what if you made it arpeggios instead of chords? You're picking one note at a time instead of strumming chords. What if ..."

Kevin Thomas:
Give specifics, and if you don't know specifically what it is you don't like that's not working, think about it before you say anything. Try and figure it out. It's usually not everything. It's usually not the whole idea. It's usually some particular component about the idea. And if you can point that out, that can be changed and the rest of it can be kept, you don't have to throw it all out.

Michael Walker:
Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And as you're describing that, one thing that popped up is that it reminded me of the improvisation. One of their lessons is that in comedy they talk about, "Yes, and," rather than saying, so if you don't something that someone else did and being like, "That sucks," or, "I don't like that," or it was essentially like, "No, I don't like that," how that kills the creative flow. And it's almost like what you were talking about earlier with having those two different mindsets. At the beginning, it's just brainstorming, let everything out, don't filter, don't edit it because that's going to get in the way of you generating your ideas, their creativity. There's a time and a place for the editing, right? But at the beginning, when you're writing, it's not necessarily that, the main focus of it.

Michael Walker:
So if you say no, if you say, "I don't like that," or, "That sucks," it's almost like you're turning that off and instead saying, "Yes, and," it's always welcoming or saying like, "Oh yeah, that is a cool idea. And what if this is another option as well? We also could do this right as a way, right? As a way to jujitsu, redirect the flow but keep the energy going the right direction.

Kevin Thomas:
That that's a good point, yeah, "Yes, and," I've heard that before. I've heard that said before. Don't say, "No," say, "Yes, and," like a question, "What else can we do with it?" And editing, editing is super important, but there's a time and place for it. There's a time to not edit and that's when the creative ideas are first. Editing is not a good idea at that point because it stops the flow of creativity and you get in more of analytical mode. I remember a student one time, he presented this melody, it was one phrase, a couple different notes and he says, "I don't know if that's a good melody or not. What do you think?" I said, "I don't know either." I said, "It depends on what you do next. You don't have enough ideas there yet. It's too early to edit your melody. You gave me like five or six notes and it could be good or could not, depending on what you have before and after it"

Kevin Thomas:
So maybe if you string together a few more melodic phrases, then we might be able to look at it and say, 'Is that good or not?' and not even if it's good or not, but how can we make them work together so that they work in a way that sounds balanced, but it's too soon to edit." But editing though, it's one of the things that songwriters tend to be missing a lot of where people will write a song, put a lot of work into it because they're inspired and say, "Look, I've wrote a song." And I'd be like, No, you didn't write a song. You wrote a rough draft." And if you look at it that way with everything you write, the first emergence of your song idea, even if it's a whole complete song, if you say, "My song is a rough draft," with the intention of coming back and looking over it more thoroughly, not just once, but in multiple occasions and refining it over time, it's super important.

Kevin Thomas:
And a lot of songwriters just don't do this. And the reason they don't is because they don't know what to edit. They often don't know what components of their song can be changed, what techniques they can use to edit their song, how to develop it further and so learning the basics. In poetry, there's what they call literature in general, is what they call literary devices that you can use, things like, well, rhyming, of course, but a personification where you make an object seem like it's got human characteristics and alliteration where you have the beginnings of words have to start with the same sound.

Kevin Thomas:
And then there's all these poetic devices that are commonly known for people who study literature and poetry. They learn these things. And if you know some of them, you can start to see how they show up in other people's lyrics and how you can use them in your own and start to get some categories that you can have when it comes to editing where you can start to use them. When you edit your song, "Do I use any of these things? Am I rhyming? Or maybe I don't want to rhyme," and that's okay too. You don't have to rhyme in your songwriting, but you can choose not to. You have to realize it just creates a certain effect. When you don't rhyme anything, you get a little more unstable effect. There's less of a pattern there.

Kevin Thomas:
And maybe you need that because if you're talking about the war that's going on in Europe right now, maybe rhyming is not the best thing. It creates two balanced of a mood if you're going to throw in rhymes for a song about that, maybe you might not want rhyme to fit the mood. But if you're talking about somebody you really love and you leave out rhymes altogether, maybe rhyming would enhance that because it brings it more into balance. And then there's not just rhymes as a giant category. There's types of rhyme. There's perfect rhymes, there's imperfect rhymes and there's family rhymes. There's all these different kinds of rhymes that you can use for different effects and then there's your rhyme scheme.

Kevin Thomas:
You can rhyme the first line with the second line and then the second line with, or sorry, the third line with the fourth line and then you have an A-A, B-B rhyme scheme or you can have line one rhyme with line three and line two with four and then you have an A-B, A-B rhyme scheme. And there's all these different rhyme schemes you can play around with. They all create different effects. And there's just a ton of these literary devices you can use with your lyric writing if you become familiar with them.

Michael Walker:
That's super interesting. Yeah, I'm guessing you probably already have put together a resource. Maybe that's even something that was a chapter in the book, but as you were describing this, I'm like, "Man, that would be a really cool checklist or of cheat sheet or something," is just all of those literary devices like personification and literation and rhyming, but just like, "Here's the seven best literary devices that you can use as a cheat sheet when you're writing your songs," could be interesting.

Kevin Thomas:
Yeah, well, actually I put together exactly what you're describing, but not just for lyric writing, for all aspects of songs. I put together the 21 Ways to Write Better Songs. And it covers these in pretty clear detail. It covers what I thought were the most important things to know. And I think I've got about seven of them for lyrics and then some melody and some for chords and some for the hook of the song and some for song structure and it's free. For people who sign up for my email list at Songwriting Planet, they can get this for free. And it's really helpful. I've had a lot of people who reply, "Thanks, this is super helpful," because they can look at it like a checklist. Because I thought like, "What's the biggest categories? What's the most important things that people should know, but they commonly don't when it comes to writing better songs?" And I put them all together in a free eBook.

Michael Walker:
That sounds super helpful. Yeah. So that's probably a good way to wrap up our interview today. So first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to come on here and to share the lessons that you've learned over the past 12 years teaching this. And for anyone who is listening or watching this right now who would love to connect more or dive deeper, can you tell them where can they go to one, find that awesome resource with the cheat sheet and how would you recommend ... What's the next step for them to be able to connect more with you?

Kevin Thomas:
Sure. So you can go to songwritingplanet.com and there's a form on the website where you can get this free eBook that I mentioned, 21 Ways to Write Better Songs. So you can go there and put in your name and email address. It'll be sent to you. And you'll also be connected with us, so you'll be on our email list. So you'll get free tips about songwriting periodically and we also have courses where you can ... If you really want to learn things more in depth, we have video courses on different aspects of songwriting. And I do some one-on-one coaching that's available too on a limited basis, and yeah, it's all at songwritingplanet.com. Check it out. And yeah, definitely get on our email list, because if you like the things we've been talking about, it sounds like something that could help.

Kevin Thomas:
You want to at least pick up this free eBook. It's helped a lot of people where they see things just explain very clearly about how to have a checklist for the different aspects of their song and to help refine it and do in the editing process.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. Awesome. So like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes, easy access to go grab the cheat sheet and join the tips and tricks list. So like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes, so you guys can go check them out. And again, thank you so much Kevin, for taking the time to come on here and share some of the lessons that you've learned. I think that songwriting is such a core part of what it takes to be successful musician. So I appreciate you, appreciate what you're doing, and until next time. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guests today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take the music careers to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.