How to Write a Song: 9 Steps to a Finished Song

"I've got journals upon journals," one songwriter wrote on r/Songwriting this spring. "Sadly I seem to have this uncanny inability to thread them together into a cohesive song." That's where a lot of first songs die. Not at the blank page. Halfway, with a good chorus and nowhere to go.

Most guides to songwriting for beginners tell you there's no right way to do it, then hand you a list of tips in no particular order. That is true and it doesn't help. Another writer put it more bluntly on Reddit: the usual advice "never helped my process-based brain."

So this guide shows how to write a song in one order. Nine steps, each with a job and a clear point where it's done, and a short example song carried through all nine so you can see what each step produces. Once you've finished one song this way, you can break the order however you like.

What do you need before you write a song?

A way to record your voice and somewhere to write words down. That's it. You don't need an instrument, music theory or a good singing voice to write your first song. You need to be able to hum a tune back roughly in tune, and almost everyone who thinks they can't, can.

The worry about singing is the one that stops the most people, so it's worth the numbers. In a 2017 study of 16,625 people by Isabelle Peretz and Dominique Vuvan, only 1.5% met a strict definition of congenital amusia, real tone deafness. In an older Queen's University survey, nearly 17% of students called themselves tone-deaf. Most of them were wrong about it. We go through this in more detail in how to write music for your lyrics when you don't play.

If you do play guitar or piano, good. It will help with step 6. It can also get in the way, because your hands already know a few chord shapes and they'll pull every song toward them.

What you need more than gear is permission to write a bad one. Jeff Tweedy built a whole book on it, How to Write One Song: "No one writes 'songs' plural. They write one song, and then another."

What order should you write a song in?

For a first song, write in this order: the moment, the title, a one-line plan for each section, the chorus (words and tune together), verse 1, chords, verse 2, a recording, then one round of fixes. The chorus comes early because every other section exists to set it up, so writing it first tells the verses where to go.

Professional writers start everywhere. Slash had a guitar riff for "Sweet Child O' Mine" before anyone had a word. Izzy Stradlin started playing behind it, and then Axl Rose started making up words, as Slash told Total Guitar. Chris Martin had the tune of "Yellow" before the title, which he took from the Yellow Pages lying around the studio, he told Rolling Stone. If you already have a riff or a hummed line, keep it and join the order at whichever step it belongs to.

Step 1: What should your first song be about?

One moment, not a topic. "Heartbreak" is a topic and gives you nothing to write. "The first morning after she moved out, I still took two cups down" is a moment, and it hands you a place, a time, an object and a feeling. Write it down as one sentence before you touch a rhyme.

The easiest moments to write are small, physical and yours. Lorde got the title of "Royals" from a single photograph, a 1976 National Geographic shot of the baseball player George Brett signing balls in a Kansas City Royals shirt. "It was just that word," she told VH1.

If nothing comes, use Pat Pattison's object writing. He teaches it at Berklee and sets it out in Writing Better Lyrics: pick an object, set a timer for ten minutes, and write about it through all seven of his senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, plus your body's insides and its movement). "Set a timer, and stop the second it goes off." Somewhere in those ten minutes there's usually one line that sounds like the start of a song.

Our post on where song ideas come from has five more ways in, with the real stories behind fourteen hits.

Step 2: How do you find the title of a song?

Write ten short phrases that say your moment, then pick the one you'd actually say to a friend. A good first title is under six words, sounds like speech, and could be sung at the start or end of the chorus. That's where most hit titles sit.

It's a convention, not a law, but it's a strong one. Jason Blume, who teaches songwriting for BMI, writes that "in most instances, the title occurs in the first or last line of the chorus." He cites David Penn of Hit Songs Deconstructed, who found the title inside the chorus in 71% of the 147 Billboard top-10 hits of 2022 and 2023. Only 12% left the title out of the lyric entirely.

Spoken phrases make good titles because they already have a rhythm. "A Hard Day's Night" was Ringo Starr's slip of the tongue after a long session. The director took it for the film, and John Lennon "brought in the song" the next morning, Lennon told Playboy in 1980.

Don't worry that someone has used your title before. In the US, titles and short phrases can't be copyrighted, which is why there are dozens of songs called "Hold On". What makes a title land is covered in what a hook is.

Step 3: How do you plan a song before you write it?

Write one sentence for each section saying what it does: verse 1 sets the scene, the chorus says the title and what it means, verse 2 moves time or the story forward. Use verse, chorus, verse, chorus for your first song. Add a bridge only if the song still has something left to say.

This is the step beginners skip, and it's why so many songs stall after the first chorus. If you know before you start that verse 2 is "a month later, and I'm still doing it," you can't run out of things to say there. Marty Dodson, who co-founded SongTown, calls this a blueprint, and his own walkthrough names the failure it prevents: a second verse that just re-writes the first one in other words.

The same walkthrough has the best rule there is for bridges, from Dodson's publisher: "Don't build a bridge unless there's a river to cross." A first song rarely has a river. Two verses and the chorus three times, the last one repeated, is a complete song.

For every other way to lay a song out, see song structure explained.

Step 4: How do you write the chorus?

Say the title out loud ten times, then sing it, exaggerating the way you said it. That rise and fall is the start of your chorus tune. Build four lines around it, with the title as the first line, the last line or both, and keep the tune in the chorus higher or longer-held than you plan the verse to be.

Pattison's line for this is that "a song is simply natural speech, exaggerated." The stressed syllables of the words you say should land on the strong beats of the music. In 4/4 that means beats 1 and 3. Say "i KEEP mak-ing TWO" and you can hear where the beats want to go. When a stress lands on a weak beat, the line sounds wrong to the listener even if they can't say why. Fitting lyrics to a melody covers how to fix it.

You don't have to write the words and the tune at the same speed. Plenty of choruses start as a tune with nonsense on it. Kings of Leon's drummer, Nathan Followill, said the chorus line of "Sex on Fire" started as a placeholder: the words "were just dummy lyrics" that the band never managed to beat. Hum or sing "la" until the tune repeats the same way twice, record it, then fit words to it.

For the chorus to lift, it needs contrast with the verse. That often means a higher note, but not always: what makes a chorus lift walks through five checks.

Step 5: How do you write a verse?

A verse shows the moment, and the chorus says what it means. Fill verse 1 with things you could see, hear or touch in that moment, and leave the feeling unnamed. If the chorus says "I miss you", the verse should never say it, only show the empty hook where the keys used to hang.

Pattison calls this "show before you tell": "Showing makes the telling more powerful." Note that he doesn't say never tell. The chorus is where you tell, and it hits harder because the verse showed first. Blume makes the same split at BMI: showing is mainly a verse tool, and "the chorus lyrics tend to be more general."

Four lines is plenty for a first verse. For rhyme, the easiest pattern is ABCB, where only lines 2 and 4 rhyme. It leaves lines 1 and 3 free to say exactly what you mean. Use near rhymes (slant rhymes) like "out" and "down" when a perfect rhyme would force the wrong word. You'll need them: when we counted the 3,000 commonest English words, 424 of them have no perfect rhyme at all, including music, woman and nothing.

Give the verse tune its own shape, usually lower than the chorus and with more words per bar, so the chorus sounds like an arrival.

What if you can't play an instrument?

Then your voice is the instrument. Sing the chorus and verse into your phone, find the note the tune keeps coming home to, and build chords from that note. The three chords built on the 1st, 4th and 5th notes of that scale contain every note of the major scale between them, so they cover almost any simple tune.

This is the route most beginner guides skip. They say find a beat online, learn guitar for a few months, or ask a friend. All three work. But you can get from a hummed tune to chords yourself:

• Find the home note. Sing the chorus and stop on its last note. If it sounds finished, that's probably home. If it sounds like a question, keep looking.
• Try the three main chords. In the home key, the chords on the 1st, 4th and 5th notes of the scale (I, IV and V) between them contain all seven notes of the major scale. One of the three will usually fit each strong beat of your tune.
• One chord per bar. Don't put a chord under every note. Change chords where the tune leans on a strong beat.

How to harmonize a melody goes through it step by step, including the "home note test."

If you do use a beat from YouTube, remember that someone made it and owns the recording. Read its licence before you put your song anywhere public.

Step 6: How do you add chords to a song?

Put chords under the tune you already sang, not the other way round. Start with the chord that matches the chorus's home note, change chord about once a bar on the strong beats, and stop adding once each bar sounds settled. Simple is normal: four chords cover most of what's in the charts.

The chords are there to hold the tune up. Hooktheory, which has analysed more than 75,000 songs, publishes the share of each chord in its database: the home chord (I) is about 18% of all chords, IV and V about 12% each, and vi about 7.5%. A first song that uses only those is in very good company.

Two things trip beginners up here:

• Key. If you're a guitarist, the key probably came from your hands, not your voice. Sing the highest note of the chorus at full volume. If it strains, move the whole song down. Your song is in the wrong key for your voice shows how far.
• Verse and chorus chords. They can be the same. What changes the feel is usually where each section ends, not which chords it uses. How to write a chord progression explains why.

If you play guitar or piano and want the instrument-specific version, we have one for guitar and one for piano.

Step 7: How do you write the second verse?

Verse 2 has to move. Go forward in time, closer in, or to the other person's side, and add one fact the listener didn't have. When the chorus comes back after it, the same words should mean something slightly different. If verse 2 could swap places with verse 1, rewrite it.

Second verses are where songs get abandoned. A member of the JustinGuitar community forum wrote this year about a song "lying around for more than half a year, which is missing a second verse," and that is a very ordinary story.

The plan from step 3 is what saves you. You already know what verse 2 is for. You're just filling it in. For more on getting it written, see what the second verse should do.

The clearest example of a late verse changing a whole song is "He Stopped Loving Her Today." Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman thought it was finished in 1977. In early 1980, the producer Billy Sherrill asked for one more verse, about the woman coming back for the funeral, and the writers went back and forth to his office "three or four times" with drafts, as Braddock recalled in Ken Burns's Country Music. That verse is what turns the title around.

What does each step look like on a real song?

Here's a short song taken through all nine steps, written for this guide. It's deliberately plain. The point is to see what each step leaves on the page, so you can do the same with your own moment.

Steps 8 and 9 are the recording and the finish test below. Sung top to bottom, this song runs verse, chorus, verse, chorus, chorus, at well under three minutes.

Step 8: How do you record your song?

Sing the whole song into your phone in one take, from the first line to the last chorus, with or without an instrument. Don't stop to fix anything. This recording is how you find out whether it's a song yet: any place you stumble, forget a word or run out of breath is a place that needs work.

It doesn't need to sound good. Taylor Swift put three phone voice memos on the deluxe edition of 1989. On the one for "I Know Places" she explains where she wants the song to go, sitting at a piano with her phone on top of it. Bruce Springsteen recorded the whole of Nebraska alone on a four-track cassette machine in his bedroom, meaning the tapes as demos for the band. The band versions didn't work, so the cassette became the album, as MusicRadar tells it.

Recording also fixes the song in a tangible form, which matters more than people think. In the US, copyright exists "from the moment the original work of authorship is fixed". A song that only exists in your head isn't protected. A voice memo is.

Wait a day before you listen back, then play it once without stopping. When you're ready for someone else to hear it, send this rough version with the lyric on a page, not a produced demo.

What do you do when you get stuck halfway through a song?

Move to a different section, and don't fix the one you're stuck on until the rest exists. If the words and tune keep changing each other, lock one of them for the day. If the whole song stalls, put it down for a day: coming back after a break tends to help with creative problems.

That last claim has decent evidence behind it. A meta-analysis of 117 studies by Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod found a real, modest benefit from stepping away from a problem and coming back, which we look at in what to do with 200 voice memos.

Sometimes the missing piece is another song. John Lennon had the verses of "A Day in the Life" and didn't know where to go. Paul McCartney had an unfinished fragment of his own, and it became the middle section. "So, Paul said, 'Well, I've got this other song I've been working on,'" George Martin recalled in his book All You Need Is Ears, as quoted by MusicRadar. Look through your old memos before you write something new.

And sometimes it's just slow. Leonard Cohen wrote dozens of verses for "Hallelujah" over several years, according to Rolling Stone, before settling on the ones we know.

How do you know when a song is finished?

A first song is finished when it passes six checks: every section has real words, the title sits in the chorus, verse 2 says something verse 1 didn't, you can sing it in one take without straining, a listener can hum the chorus back after one hearing, and you've recorded it. It doesn't have to be good. It has to be whole.

No beginner guide we read gives this test, so here it is in full:

The listener check matters because you can't hear your own song the way a stranger does. In Elizabeth Newton's 1990 Stanford study, people tapping the rhythm of a well-known song guessed listeners would name about half of them. Listeners named 3 out of 120. Why you can't judge your own demo explains what that means for songwriters.

Then let it go and write the next one. Ed Sheeran says Max Martin taught him to "dare to suck": "If it sucks, no one has to hear it, we scrap it." Working writers describe keeping something like one song in ten. The late Ralph Murphy, a longtime ASCAP vice president, said he finished about 100 songs a year and got 8 to 10 of them recorded. We collected more ratios in the voice memo post.

How long does it take to write a song?

Anywhere from ten minutes to several years, and the fast ones are usually built on long practice. A beginner can write a complete first draft, with two verses, a chorus and a phone recording, in an afternoon. Finishing it, with the fixes from the finish test, usually takes a few more sessions.

The famous quick ones are real. Elton John said the music for "Your Song" "came out in about 20 minutes," in a 2013 Rolling Stone interview. Black Sabbath wrote "Paranoid" in the studio because the album was short, and Tony Iommi told MusicRadar "we wrote and recorded it in a day." The-Dream told Billboard that writing his part of "Umbrella" took "maybe 15 minutes".

The slow ones are just as real. Bruce Springsteen said "Born to Run" took him six months, line by line. Pharrell Williams wrote nine songs for a scene in Despicable Me 2 before "Happy," he told Pitchfork: "I tried nine times, nine different songs, and none of them worked for the scene."

If you want a deadline, FAWM (February Album Writing Month) has run an online challenge since 2004 to write 14 songs in 28 days.

What is the 80/20 rule in songwriting?

It isn't a formal rule, and nobody agrees on what it means. The most useful version is Gary Ewer's from 2011: a song should be doing something predictable for its style about 80% of the time, with no more than 20% being new or unexpected. Others use it to mean that a fifth of your songs will do most of your work.

Ewer, who writes the Essential Secrets of Songwriting blog, put it this way: songs "need to be doing something somewhat predictable at least 80% of the time." There's no data behind the exact split. It's a rule of thumb about balance.

For a first song it's a good one. Use familiar chords, a familiar form and a tune that repeats. Spend your 20% on one thing, usually a line in the lyric only you could have written. In our example song, that's the cup going back down off the shelf. Everything else in it is ordinary on purpose.

The other common meaning is the Pareto version: of everything you write, a small share will be your best work. Josh Ritter said it at a Berklee Online event: "There may be like 10 of them in 100 songs." Both versions point the same way. Finish lots, and don't expect each one to be the one.

Who owns the song you write?

You do, from the moment it's recorded or written down. In the US, copyright is automatic once a song is fixed in a tangible form. You don't have to register it to own it, but you do have to register a US work before you can sue anyone over it. If you write with someone, agree the split in writing before you finish.

A few things people get wrong:

• Mailing it to yourself isn't protection. The "poor man's copyright" has no provision in copyright law "and it is not a substitute for registration."
• The song and the recording are separate copyrights. Circular 1 lists musical works (with their words) and sound recordings as different categories.
• Co-writers co-own it. The law makes the authors of a joint work co-owners. Without a written agreement, US courts generally treat the co-authors of a joint work as equal owners however much each one wrote, so settle the split before the session ends.

This is general information, not legal advice, and other countries differ.

Where does Song Cage fit?

Song Cage is a songwriting app for the steps above: capture an idea on your phone, turn a hummed line into notes, write words onto it, and get chords that fit what you sang. It doesn't write songs for you. Every note and word in it is yours.

The phone apps for iPhone and Android are free and work without an account. You can hum or sing a line, type lyrics into Verse and Chorus sections, or try chords in the Jam tab. On a computer, record a take onto your song and click Detect melody, and the notes appear in a piano roll you can fix, then place onto your lyric line.

Chords are where it differs most from a chord chart. Click an empty beat and every suggestion is ranked against the notes you sang and the chords on either side. Place one, and the rest re-rank around it. The palette sorts chords into In Key, Borrowed (each labelled with the mode it comes from) and Secondary Dominants, and each suggestion names the move it makes, so you can see why it fits. The chord docs go further.

The Words panel finds rhymes, slant rhymes and synonyms for the word at your cursor, which helps in steps 4, 5 and 7. When the song's done, Song Cage can play it back with a synthesized voice singing your words on your tune.

The web app is free for one song. The desktop app has a 14-day trial with no card, and the Song Cage licence is a one-time purchase covering the web, desktop and plugin apps.

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