My new favorite song writing tools

When I first started writing songs, I thought using anything besides my brain was cheating.  At some point I got stumped with lyrics and started to branch out from my melon.  Here are my current favorite song writing tools:

The first:  The Thesaurus

Or, more accurately, Thesaurus.com.  Sometimes I come up with a phrase, and I find it too common/boring/sucktastic....so I take the most common words and get the synonyms.  This doesn't always help change a specific word, sometimes the whole phrase gets changed around depending on what I read.

The second: Rhyming Dictionary

I used to think going to a rhyming dictionary was way worse than the thesaurus. It was major cheating.  Then I learned to give myself a break.....one cannot possibly come up with all ryhming words on ones own.  The thing I really love about the online rhyming dictionary RyhmeZone is this:  not ONLY will it spit out rhyming words, but it will spit out rhyming words of MULTIPLE SYLLABLES!

There are certain songs where the number of syllables in a particular line is actually more important than the rhyme, so looking at multiple syllable rhyming words gives me options to add or decrease the syllables when I need to.

That's it!  That's all I wanted to say this evening :)

(Listen to my music and find upcoming shows  here)