Exploring what defines a song as meaningful can be an extensive journey. It depends on who is doing the defining and by what measuring stick.

You may envision your music turning on a light bulb inside of your head, illuminating profound and resounding messages. But you sense that your music hasn’t yet latched onto the right chord and seek to uncover the way your music can become more meaningful.

Let me uncover every note in that chord to help you dig deeper into your songwriting process to create meaningful songs.

Define “meaningful”

You first want to ask yourself two questions:

What is meaningful to me?

Why is it meaningful?

These are questions that I think about very often. I do believe everyone should consider defining this and make it part of regular practice to explore our key values, and what is meaningful to us.

You also want to think about how we go about expressing our values to ourselves, our friends, out into the world, in society - and our music.

Expressing what is meaningful to you leads to a greater sense of fulfillment and is a fantastic way to boost creative satisfaction.

I know that I have to set a weekly practice to remind myself of my values and what I find meaningful in life. Otherwise, I’ll get too distracted with short-term payoffs. It helps with my decision-making processes day-to-day, and most certainly in my songwriting.

Finding out what is meaningful for you is the start of learning how to write meaningful songs.

Consume, consume, consume

Remember why you delved into songwriting in the first place - you fell in love with other people’s music first!

Go back to your roots and let yourself be saturated with the music that you love - whether that’s your retro catalog or music you’ve found at the record shop.

Go deep into the songs that you already like - listen to them and enjoy them. Most importantly, start playing the songs that you love and that are deeply meaningful to you. You should be practicing your instrument anyway, so make this a regular practice, too!

Let the notes you play and the sounds you hear settle into your brain as earworms and become part of your musical vocabulary.

Yep, you’re already playing music that’s meaningful to you.

Now you want to make it a habit of practicing the types of sounds, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies that resonate with you. Study the sonorities.

Make note of why you like those sounds. Be curious and very mindful in your explorations of music and songwriting.

The goal is to get yourself fluent in music that’s meaningful to you until it seeps out naturally with your own independent creativity. You want the translation from musical ideas to your songwriting and recording software to become very fluid.

Refine your lyrics

When you’ve decided what your key values are in life and the experiences that are most meaningful to you, it’s time to polish up your lyric writing.

For some indie songwriters, this could mean enriching their lyrics with rich and vivid language. For others, something more minimal is what will strike the right chord.

The aim is to best translate your values in the most organic means possible. This organicism and authenticity cannot be faked - listeners, producers, friends, and fellow songwriters will be able to sense the authenticity.

When it comes to translating the experiences of others, you’ll need to practice some sort of empathy. Go ahead and practice putting yourself in the other person’s shoes and write out a story about what this person is experiencing from the moment they wake up until they are asleep and dreaming, and every feeling they might be experiencing when going through their journeys.

When it comes to your own experiences, identify the key most valuable thing in your life right now and how it’s always on your mind. Start by just writing about it - even for five minutes.

Recently, I’ve been trying to understand how a relationship with my colleague became toxic over the past year, remembering actions that hurt me and thinking about if I was overreacting.

I was really down and lost my creative spark.

But I forced myself to write out my daily experiences and found that this toxic experience was consuming my thoughts. Lyrics popped into my head and I found myself scribbling down lyrics in the top corners of my notebook.

Take note - the lyrics just flowed out. I didn’t intend on writing a song about my meaningful experience; it just came out naturally.

Those lyrics ended up growing into a fully-fledged chorus that I would repeat in my head as a mantra and around two verses over a few weeks.

Write in a way that works for you

So, you’ve come up with lyrics. Now it’s time to match the words up with music.

This is where exploring and practicing with sounds that move you comes into play. Tap back into those sounds - perhaps it’s a synth patch or a chord sequence.

Or maybe it’s a sweet beat made up of sounds you’ve designed together from field recordings that you created when you were at your favorite location.

This isn’t a set and stone pathway into writing a song, and the process of songwriting more meaningful songs can change for each song that you write out in these next few writing sessions.

You may find yourself humming the chorus over your new chord sequence after constructing an opening riff from the beats that you designed. It’s up to you how you begin the songwriting process - you can be confident that you’ve upgraded your songwriting palette with lyrics and sounds that are most meaningful to you.

 Whether before or after your songwriting process, you want to ask yourself why you may be feeling that your songs aren’t meeting the mark of being meaningful. That means moving away from questioning your art, to questioning your sense of self-assurance. If you are confident about your values and what you find meaningful, then let that guide you and your art form.

Decide on what’s meaningful to YOU and enhance the means you use to express your values. This is key for all indie songwriters.

How to Write BETTER LYRICS // CREATIVE Songwriting Tips 2021