A Song is Born...

Some of you have been asking us to share how we come up with our music. We'll take you through the three most common ways that we write songs.

1. Music first, then Lyrics.
2. Lyrics first, then Music.
3. An Idea or Theme that becomes a song in less than ten minutes.


Music first...
This is usually how Sean starts a song. He'll hear a sound in his head and turn it into chord progressions or melody lines. He hears entire songs right in his head before they ever come out...every instrument, every harmony. The lyrics come afterward. We'll often sit together as Sean is playing a new wordless song, and the feeling of the song will remind me (Becky) of some lyrics I've written recently. We'll blend them together, and have a song. Other times, we'll start to feel something (probably directly related to something going on in or around our life at the time) as he's playing new music, and the lyrics will start pouring out. "Blessed Be," "Free," and "So Many Voices" happened like this. I call Sean the "King of Bridges," because no matter how a song starts, he can always come up with the most amazing sound for a bridge to fill it out. Check out the bridges to "Lullaby," and "Step One" and you'll see what I mean.

Lyrics first...
This is my "go-to" place in songwriting. I'm constantly writing down lyrics, sometimes just in little pieces when I have a thought, and other times in phrases and complete songs. My life just kind of happens in songs. While I was growing up, my mom was constantly turning our lives into hilarious parodies of songs, so I come by it honestly. Our two-year-old is already doing the same thing. Sean is great at taking lyrics and putting them to music. "Out of the Valley" started out as a letter I wrote to Sean during a hard time he was experiencing, and we turned it into a song. "All I Am," "No Excuses," and "Lesser" are some other examples of this kind of songwriting.

An Idea that becomes a song in less than ten minutes...
Some of our best songs are the ones that come to us the fastest, because they come from such raw and present places in our individual hearts. Some examples of this are "Bleach," "Lullaby," "Step One," and "Not Alone." One or both of us will sit down at a piano or with a guitar, and the whole song--music and lyrics--just happens. Sean is particularly gifted at writing ten-minute songs...I'm always in awe of what he can come up with so quickly.


So, there they are...our top three songwriting methods. If you who also write or compose, how do these methods resonate with you? What are your "go-to" ways of songwriting?