I sat in Tara's living room by a sunny window with my favourite songwriting tools - my pink MacBook, my pink Bible, and my Masterwriter.
A blank Masterwriter page, ready for a new lyric...Masterwriter is our favourite lyric writing program. A new file opens for each song. From that page, you can visit several resources - rhyming and regular dictionaries, thesaurus, pop culture references, a full Bible - and collect words and phrases that might inspire your song.
In the silence, I transcribed a lyric I'd recorded last month on my iphone. As I wrote out the first verse and hummed the melody, the structure became clear, and I wrote a second verse and chorus. Next, I drifted through songs that are in my "close" category - lyrics that need a final polish or maybe a pass with a co-writer. Finally, I opened a new page, and thought about Palm Sunday. A first verse came, and then more verses that took the singer through the events of Holy Week. I wrote a full lyric, but it's a different theme than I first intended, which is always kind of fascinating.
I'm feeling more and more inspired to write these days. I often think of Brian Doerkson's term "writing for the gaps." In contemporary praise music, we don't have a lot of songs for liturgical moments or certain seasons of the church year. I want to write songs for these gaps.
It's been a funny trip. We haven't been able to get out and hear any music, but I feel like the music's been coming to us...
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