Q: I teach singer/songwriters and I get a lot of the beginner songwriters coming to me and saying stuff like "I just don't know how to get the pieces of the song together. I don't know how it's supposed to sound. Why doesn't my song have a longer chorus? My phrases are too short! Blah blah blah" and they make these statements about the entirety of their work as if their songs need to be XYZ kind of way. It's like they want me to tell them that there's a RIGHT and a WRONG way to make a song good. And when I tell them that it sounds like they're asking for an acceptable formula, their eyes kind of glaze over. They say "I don't want my songs to be formulaic! I just want to know the right way to write a song" but in my mind those are the same thing. What I've told them is this - make up your own formula for an individual song. However you want the patterns to be and then fit your segments into the formula YOU create. I'm hoping at a minimum this will make t
 hem focu
 s more on their own instincts and less on right and wrong. But I can't tell. What do you think I should tell them?
A: reverse psychology can go a long way. Tell them to try to write it wrong. it's amazing how quickly it becomes very right