Start with one true line. Not a good line, a true one. "I didn't know what to sing" is a complete opening. The song's job is to keep that line company.
Hum before words. Melody first, mouth full of la. Most words that arrive before the tune exists end up fired anyway. The la-la version is not the placeholder; it is the skeleton.
Three chords are a career. C, F, and G7 have carried more joy than every conservatory combined. Add a fourth chord only when the song complains.
Repetition is not cheating. Repetition is the song teaching itself to the room. If a line is worth singing, it is worth singing four times, and by the third time everyone else is singing it, which was the goal.
Steal structures, not songs. Verse, refrain, verse, refrain, bridge, refrain: that shape is public property, polished by everyone who ever used it. Pour your own thing into it. (A tune you already know is also a legal mold: see the beans song below.)
Write call-and-answer when you want company. If the room echoes the ends of your lines, the room cannot simultaneously judge you. This is engineering, not luck.
Let one hard thing in. A campfire song can hold a line about dying, and the song gets stronger, not sadder, provided you keep strumming.
Finish it badly. A finished bad song teaches more than an unfinished good one, and can be repaired later, and sometimes turns out not to need it.
Sing it to one person soon. A song does not fully exist until it has been aimed at somebody. Pick a safe somebody.
My experience with songwriting
I'm quite new to it.
It started at a camp as a kid, Engineering Science Quest at the University of Waterloo. There was a session on the computers where you could put beats together, and the loop package was Fruity Loops. I remember being so proud.
Then, maybe three or four years ago, an evening with my friend Caleb: they played the ukulele and I sang lyrics, and then I played the ukulele and they sang lyrics.
Later I wrote lyrics for a song in Suno that I didn't have the vocal experience to sing myself. It was a Spanish song, from when I was learning Spanish, about a pigeon named Wings. That was fun. (The song itself lives in Suno; if I dig up the link it goes here.) And my first real one, past the throwaway test, was just the words we didn't have a song, on loop. I liked it.
A friend asked me to speak at a conference, and I jokingly said sure, but only if it could be a sing-along. So I ended up writing a little sing-along, to the tune of She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain.
And not so much songwriting, but I've had the experience of listening to a tune and just freestyling lyrics over it, and it being an enjoyable experience.
I know I might die this afternoon. But it feels like a medium to explore in the next few decades.
The songs so far
Oh Dear Baby (Did You Know You Can Sing?) · original, 2026, written on a forest walk. A call-and-answer campfire song in C. Lyrics, chords, and fingerings live on ukulele.withwarmth.org and piano.withwarmth.org.
The conference sing-along · to the tune of She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain, written for the Animal Law and Advocacy conference. Opening verse:
We'll be cooking up some beans to share the love (yum yum)
We'll be cooking up some beans to share the love (yum yum)
From the garden, what a treat,
These beans can't be beat,
We'll be cooking up some beans to share the love (yum yum)
'til every cage is empty we'll be here (cheer cheer)...
we didn't have a song · the first one: those words, on loop. Still true, less true every year.