What Goes Into A Song

Mark Thomas of DisasterTheory

Over the years I’ve been asked countless times “what goes into one of your songs? Where do you get your inspiration?”

For me, this answer is never simple and there’s a few reasons for that aside from the obvious.

More often than not, I begin with lyrics. To me, the lyrics are the heart of a song. They’re what gives a song meaning while the music gives the song feeling. I draw from personal experience, others experiences, and fantasy.

Ultimately, many things come to mind. I’m a member of this band, a collective of creativity and the others have to feel the song just as much as I do or it won’t work.

An added element of each song, and some of you may not want to hear this, is that when you’re writing songs for a commercial album, the business side of things play an important role. You have to write what’s in your heart but you also have to know that not every song you write is going to be marketable or “good enough” to be on an album. Yes, I’m saying that while you have to be true to yourself, you also have to think about what will draw people in, what will make money and what will sell. Some of you may think this is “selling out.” That’s fine, I understand but when music is how you pay your bills, “selling out” is really just doing something your boss has asked you to do in order to get a raise or promotion.

I always keep this in mind when writing. Your thoughts are unique. The way you express them are just as unique. You have a story to tell that’s true to yourself, but if no one listens to your story, then your story is lost. No one can benefit from your experiences if the song you’ve placed your story in, is not marketable enough for people to want to hear it.

recording

Once I’ve written lyrics, I’ll often sit down and work out chords (sometimes even an entire arrangement). Other times, I check to see what the other guys have come up with and work within that and we tweak it until we like it.

That is where the recording phase comes in.

We generally record, mix and master everything ourselves. We’re an independent artist and learning how to do these things right, is how you can get quality music out that sounds like it belongs on the radio. If you don’t have the time or dedication to this phase of your art, that’s fine. However, you need to find someone that is. You may have written the best song in the world, worthy of awards, but if the quality sounds like complete shit, no one will want to hear it, you’ll stumble and struggle to get radio play and you’ll struggle to get sync licensing (this is when they put your music in tv shows and movies). Incidentally, radio and sync licensing is where the fans and the money is. So this is really something you don’t want to skimp on. Either learn to record, mix and master your music on your own or find someone else that’s good at it, to do it for you. This is your art, don’t just throw some cheap shitty paint on a canvas and submit it to the world.

One thing about this process is that by the time your song or album is released, you’re going to be sick to death of your own music. You’re going to listen to it repeatedly to check for mistakes, quality issues, etc that you will get tired of hearing your own music. Hell, my wife loves our music and she gets absolute eye rolling agitated from hearing our songs constantly while they’re being recorded. It’s really a wonder she still supports DisasterTheory as much as she does.

Generally, especially during this entire COVID-19 fiasco, Derrick, Justin, Sleep, Riley and myself use digital and mobile means of communication to send ideas back and forth. We basically write through text, messenger and shit like that. It’s efficient and gets the job done for now.

What I Write

Remember when I said that you can’t miss out on radio and sync licensing? Well this is where being diverse is helpful as well. We all have a genre of music we live and breathe. For us, it’s metal. I absolutely love metal but my mind is very open to other genres of music as well. I can listen to country, pop, rap, RnB, and even classical music. I can also write in all of these genres. It’s ok to do this. If you open your mind to this, you will also open many doors of creative expression. Don’t feel that just because you might be writing a pop or rap song that you’re somehow “less metal.” In fact, if anything, this makes you more badass and gives you much more opportunities.

The way I handle this is that I don’t write strictly rap or pop or RnB music with DisasterTheory. If I write something outside of our genre, I hang on to it for different projects, sync licensing, etc. You can even sell these to other artists or producers.

A music journal my wife got me as a gift.

So my advice is write the damn song. It doesn’t matter if it comes out country, rap or bubblegum pop. Write what you feel, write the damn song and put it in your catalog. You never know what use it can have later.

I’m going to be adding more music, writing, music industry and recording tips to my portion of the blog and maybe I can help some of you out.

If you’d like to see more of that, please drop a comment and let me know what part of music you need advice with. I’ll do my best to answer and help.