SongWriting Collaboration - Try It

Songwriting collaboration can happen in many ways. My first experience with co-writers was at a REO Rafting songwriting course Pat Pattison was teaching. I highly recommend the course at REO.

We did two trial collaborative songwriting sessions during the five day course and then we were given our marching orders to make something happen with our assigned co writer.

We came up with the lyrics to a first verse of a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus song. Click here for more information on song structure.

We weren’t totally happy with lines in the verse but liked the verse story line so decided to leave them there as markers. We knew we could come back and change them.

Then we moved on to the chorus and that’s when the magic happened. I don’t know if you’re like me, but sometimes a line, verse, chorus or piece of melody just seems to feel inspired. It gives me tingles.

We wrote what felt like a very strong chorus lyric and melody to support the story line in the first verse. We also knew it would work for the second verse and bridge.

We only managed to finish a set of rough lyrics and rough melody for the second verse and bridge during the remaining hour of our songwriting collaboration session. But we were really happy with what we had written and received positive feedback from Pat.

We also had fun working with each other. We discovered our style together meant it would take time to write together. But we decided it was worthwhile so continued to work on the song on the phone, by email and in person.

Each of us were coming up with lines that the other loved that we never would have thought of ourselves. Building on an idea and changing words until the lyric caught what we wanted to say.

I keep all my versions of a song. I recommend you do that to, just make up a file folder. If you write on a computer just number each version.

Turned out we needed a thick folder on this song to hold the 27 versions and several demos of the song it took to get a final product.

The song hasn’t been recorded by anyone yet but I still think it will some day. We had an offer to have it placed in a movie but couldn’t come to terms with the publisher. That’s a whole different story which will be covered in my section on publishers.

If you want to hear the song and see the lyrics, it’s called “Tick Tockin’ Of The Rockin’ Chair check it out at my website jcowell.com.

Pat just didn’t send us off without some discussion of how to work together in a co-write. The guidelines worked for us. Bryan and I still write together. Next let’s move on so you can see some songwriting collaboration guidelines.