Jen de la Osa and Henry Beguiristain have been writing, singing, and playing guitar together since they were young. Today they are the core of Boston-based Aloud. The songs on their sophomore album Fan the Fury are an engaging collection of observations, each expressed with urgency and true emotion.

In part 2 of exploring what makes a badly written song, we’ll look a bit deeper into some of the most common faults of a novice songwriter. Forgive the references to mostly old songs but I wanted to be sure that everyone has heard them before.

For artists the battle has always raged between the desire for complete artistic freedom and the need to work within a limiting set of rules. Some people insist that creativity and limits are mutually exclusive. I would argue the opposite: people are never more creative than when forced to work within limitations. Limits generate their own kind of creative freedom. Don’t believe me?

I first heard this phrase – the despair of infinity – when I was staring a wall of detergents in a grocery store and my wife, Catherine, said it to me with a bemused look on her face. The phrase has stuck with me ever since, and whenever I am faced with a seeming bounty of choice, I think of it.

We all know it when we hear a great song because we can’t get enough of it. It makes us move, it makes us listen and it draws us in. But it’s a lot harder to write a great, or even good, song than it seems, as anyone who’s ever tried to write one knows. We can analyze great songs all day long to see what makes them tick, but sometimes can learn just as much by analyzing the ones that aren’t that great as well.

It’s shocking but true: at its genesis creativity is simply copying something you like. Artists usually express it with words like “inspiration” and “influence”, but it means the same thing. True artistry, however, is taking those germs of borrowed “inspiration” and turning them into something only you could have created. Inside you there are thoughts and ideas garnered from your life experiences that are completely unique and interesting. Learning to recall those things and express them in ways that are both understandable and widely relatable is what developing your creativity is all about.

Like anything, songwriting improves as one practices one’s craft. Practicing songwriting can often be a daunting task not only because it seems odd as a concept, but also because it requires admitting that your own songwriting needs improvement. Here are some tips on deconstructing songs to improve your own writing.

Now that we’ve covered a songwriter’s most important tool - the notebook - let’s talk about some others: the rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, dictionary, computer, and more. First up: the rhyming dictionary. Writing lyrics is hard work. Why waste time looking for rhymes when someone else has already done it for you? Remember, however, that rhyming dictionaries are not fool-proof.