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.

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.

Just as with any artist or craftsman, songwriters use a certain set of tools in their trade. Standing head and shoulders above them all in importance is the notebook. Ideas are fleeting. Capturing them before they are gone is crucial, and nothing is faster than a notebook. Even in a world where computers and other electronic gadgets are as ubiquitous as sand at the beach, the notebook still rules - it never has to boot up, never has to wait for an app to load, and never needs to be recharged.

In this guest post from Jake Hawken, we dig into the philosophical side of songwriting, artistic honesty, and lyric writing. Jake breaks down the two general categories of artists: The Healthy-Minded and The Sick Soul, as described by the philosopher, William James. Read on for a fascinating take on the mind of an artist.

What more can I say about Elliott Smith? I consider him to be the best songwriter of our time. It’s an absolute tragedy that we lost such a natural talent. He left behind a remarkable but sadly incomplete body of work that receives constant play in my listening rotation.

So you put the finishing touches on a new tune but it’s missing one key component- the title.

The most popular method of giving your song a name is to use the lyric of the chorus. This is the standard in pop music, which makes for good marketing. Radio listeners who know the hook of a song can find it in iTunes quite easily. But this is not just for the mainstream and there’s nothing wrong with this route.

Sometimes the chorus of the song is an extended phrase of many words. In this case it’s common to use the one or two words that grab the listener the most, or the ones that complete a metaphor.

Many times you might choose not to use any of the song’s lyrics in it’s title. Maybe the song is so mysterious that you want to the title to hint at what it’s about. Or the opposite- use the title to add a curious twist to the story of the song.

Read on to take a closer look at these ideas with lyric samples.

As a recently transplanted songwriter from Nashville to New York City, I’ve had the chance to observe, up close, the approaches to songwriting and the songwriting communities in both cities. While there are of course many similarities, there are also quite a few differences. This article breaks it all down covering finding other songwriters, cowriting, lyrics, and more.