I have a remarkably consistent process in my songwriting. A song idea (even if I have a bigger sense of what I’m trying to write about, although that’s rare) comes in the form of a lyric phrase. I then immediately put music to that phrase, and build out that piece of the song by coming up with the next or previous lyric line and giving it a melody. So although the words and the music come in close proximity to each other in the writing process, and build together, the entire journey is led by the lyrics. This month, when I’m trying to write fourteen songs in twenty-eight days, I’m surprised to find melody taking the lead. That happened first with my third FAWM (February Album-Writing Month) song. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I wanted to write about, and had a little time to get going on a song. I figured I’d write a riff that I could then use when I came up with the idea for the song. But something happened to the riff – it turned into a gorgeous and complete guitar part. Once I had that, I started singing the melody it suggested, and once that was completely done I turned to figuring out what the song might be about. The guitar part and the melody together suggested lullaby, so I set out to figure out the concept and what words might work for a lullaby. I guess in this case it wasn’t so much the melody that was leading me, but the guitar arrangement, but the melody still came long before I had the slightest idea of what the lyric would me. My fifth FAWM song was a “morph,” in which songwriters are put into a chain. Your task is to take the song before you in the chain and write a new song inspired by it, keeping about half of the elements of the song. In my morph the song before me was truly weird and it was hard to figure out what I could keep and still make it a song that would really be mine (and one that had a chance of being a keeper – this month I’ve vowed not to write any songs that I know won’t last as I write them). So other than working with a subject matter that involved nuns (the song before me was called “Where are the Nuns?”) I pretty much needed to stick with the – quite odd – chord structure. So I kept some of the chord progression and rearranged the rest (same chords, different order), which is what suggested the melody. In the case, lyrics started coming as I wrote the melody – it was like the opposite of my normal pattern; in this case I’d get a line of melody that I’d put a lyric to, then get to the next line of melody and add words. Then just before bed last night when I was thinking about where I would go next with songwriting (and thinking that what I wanted to write was something that sounded like a traditional (folk) spiritual), I got a chorus melody that I sang into my phone to make sure I didn’t forget it, since it came so quickly I didn’t even have time to write it down the way I usually do. I woke up this morning with the melody running through my head (a good sign). No idea where I’ll go with it, but I love the way it sounds. And then after I walked into the office, another – completely different, for a completely different type of song – melody started presenting itself, so I wrote that one down. Suddenly I find myself creating melodies out of thin air, something that is really different from my normal pattern. It’s exciting, but it’s scary. I think of myself as a lyric person (although I’ve been pretty happy with some of the melodies I’ve been creating lately – I’ve paid attention to that more), and when I have a set of words that suggest the melody, I’m much more confident that I’ve chosen well. The other way around seems riskier to me – there are so many more options for what a lyric could be than for what a melody could be. But since part of the goal of this month is to challenge myself as a songwriter, I guess my process is ensuring that I do that.