Andrea Stolpe
Songwriting Instructor and Artist Development Coach
Andrea Stolpe is a songwriting instructor and artist development coach based in Los Angeles, CA. With over 20 years of experience in the music industry, Andrea is a multi-platinum songwriter with songs penned for artists like Faith Hill, Julianne Hough, and Jimmy Wayne, and has worked for companies like Universal Music Publishing, EMI, and Almo-Irving. She has taught songwriting programs at Belmont University, Berklee College of Music, and the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. Her online courses received Music Educator’s Grammy Nominations, and the prestigious Gold Telly Award for non-broadcast educational videos. She also wrote a book called Popular Lyric Writing and hosts a 5-day immersive songwriters' retreat called Writer to Writer. Andrea has a Bachelor of Music from Berklee College of Music.
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Forum Comments (2)
How do I get better at writing poetry?
Number one, do a lot of sensory writing, because it's the imagery that drives a lot of lyric and poetry. It’s also about having the ability to substitute a verb like slide or cast or beam or waft for a boring verb like put or go, because the motion in lyric often lies in the verbs rather than in the nouns or the adjectives.
I think what we’ve come to understand about songwriting is that it's more about structure than it is about what we say many times. We teach in terms of phrasing and the rhythm of the language. So, it is how the language carries with it on a syllable level, a rhythm. And then the lengths of the lines and the lengths of the sections are the other structural elements. Become aware of how structure affects the impact of the words themselves.
I think what we’ve come to understand about songwriting is that it's more about structure than it is about what we say many times. We teach in terms of phrasing and the rhythm of the language. So, it is how the language carries with it on a syllable level, a rhythm. And then the lengths of the lines and the lengths of the sections are the other structural elements. Become aware of how structure affects the impact of the words themselves.
How do I write good lyrics?
I think one of the top tips, and it comes across a bit cliché, but is to write what you know
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It's difficult to understand that concept until you have a sense of what you know. Because what I know makes me unique or different or distinctly able to respond to my own instincts when I write something down. So, to break that down into a tool, that's why we do free writing, journaling, object writing, and sensory writing . And this is something that certainly wasn't born with songwriting. It's fiction writers who really know how to visually write a scene. It's a bit like character development when we write lyrics.
And different song styles value lyrics in different ways. So, for example, if we're simply trying to write something lighthearted that has a groove underneath, think funk, for example, the lyric could be, ‘get up, get up’. And we think that's the best lyric for that moment. So, I think part of writing great lyrics is to understand what great lyrics are in the context of your music. And I think this is where people get stalled; we seem to want to just get to the lyric writing part without knowing where we're going. So, we just know that there is someone who is going to determine whether this is great or not. And often, it really depends on who the personality is musically.
Whenever we write a song lyric, even if we're writing something completely fictional, the words that we choose, the perspective of the character, stem from what we empathize with and what we think is an interesting story, but it's all about the character. And that should be absolutely dripping through the musical setting, as well as the words themselves. Sometimes we think that lyrics are somehow a kind of binary expression, like this word means this. And sometimes that's true, but when there's metaphor and abstraction, it takes on a quality that is layers and layers deep.
So, write what you know, and try to take exactly what you've written in your free writing and transfer that into a song lyric . Because again, we sit and we try to choose what we want to say, and then we somehow feel like we should interpret that and write lyrics that are lyric-y. But when we do that, something gets lost – a lot gets lost.
It's difficult to understand that concept until you have a sense of what you know. Because what I know makes me unique or different or distinctly able to respond to my own instincts when I write something down. So, to break that down into a tool, that's why we do free writing, journaling, object writing, and sensory writing . And this is something that certainly wasn't born with songwriting. It's fiction writers who really know how to visually write a scene. It's a bit like character development when we write lyrics.
And different song styles value lyrics in different ways. So, for example, if we're simply trying to write something lighthearted that has a groove underneath, think funk, for example, the lyric could be, ‘get up, get up’. And we think that's the best lyric for that moment. So, I think part of writing great lyrics is to understand what great lyrics are in the context of your music. And I think this is where people get stalled; we seem to want to just get to the lyric writing part without knowing where we're going. So, we just know that there is someone who is going to determine whether this is great or not. And often, it really depends on who the personality is musically.
Whenever we write a song lyric, even if we're writing something completely fictional, the words that we choose, the perspective of the character, stem from what we empathize with and what we think is an interesting story, but it's all about the character. And that should be absolutely dripping through the musical setting, as well as the words themselves. Sometimes we think that lyrics are somehow a kind of binary expression, like this word means this. And sometimes that's true, but when there's metaphor and abstraction, it takes on a quality that is layers and layers deep.
So, write what you know, and try to take exactly what you've written in your free writing and transfer that into a song lyric . Because again, we sit and we try to choose what we want to say, and then we somehow feel like we should interpret that and write lyrics that are lyric-y. But when we do that, something gets lost – a lot gets lost.
