Where have the last 10 days gone! I seem to be so busy at the moment with my music. To be honest, I’ve probably taken on too much, but c’est la vie. I keep telling myself that things will calm down once I’ve released my album (but maybe not!). I’ve still got quite a bit of admin work to do around that, but my rough plan is to release my second single in 3 weeks time and my album 1-2 weeks after that.

This last fortnight I’ve started sharing the process of writing a new song with my facebook group community and, after posting up my latest re-write of the lyrics, I had a friend contact me, very concerned about the state of my marriage as the song is about a dying relationship. It gave me pause for thought, and made me realise that many people who have listened to my songs over the years must think that I live in constant emotional turmoil! One moment deeply in love and the next moment at the point of divorce, or beyond.

I had to re-assure my friend that everything was hunky dory in the marriage stakes, but just like an actor who puts themselves into different roles, as a songwriter, I do just the same.

In other words, I role play.  I imagine myself as different people and try to understand how they would feel and what they would say in different situations and under different circumstances and so, try to write from that perspective.

Sometimes, something totally unrelated might spark an idea – in the case of this latest song, it was watching a beautiful sunset go down and seeing the world around me fade slowly from a miriad of colours into greys and then blacks, and that gave me the idea of using that as a metaphor for a fading relationship.

Of course, when I first started writing songs, I had a pool of feelings and experiences to draw from, but very soon I needed to expand my source of inspiration otherwise my songs would become boring – my life is just not that colourful!

And so it is for many songwriters.

It might interest you to know that many pop songs that you hear on the radio, even though they claim to be about the singers relationships or feelings, have been written by someone else. For example, Rihanna’s beautiful ballad “Stay” was written by Mikky Ekko and Justin Parker, although many people at the time thought it was about one of Rihanna’s personal relationships.

I hope you found this interesting. I love being asked questions and I’m really glad that my friend asked me this one so that I could help to explain a bit more about the songwriting process to you. Please feel free to write to me at any time (laini@lainicolman.com) if you have a question or simply a comment to make. If you’re wondering something, then more than likely someone else is wondering the same thing 🙂

And, it you’d like to join my facebook group, then just click on the link below to sign up for my newsletters and you will receive an e-mail link to join.  Look forward to seeing you there 🙂

Sign-up for Newsletters and Facebook group

Until next time, take care,

Laini xx