4. Story of Music

The Story of Music

An intructional guide on the steps of songwriting described by Noelle Hampton and John Branch.

By Ella Brotman

You sit down at your desk feeling creative, the pen gripped firmly in your hand. You’ve written many songs before, but tonight it’s different. For a long time you’ve worked on this song, but all you could do was stare at the blank page, waiting for inspiration to hit. But suddenly, almost out of nowhere, the words seem to start writing themselves.

Writing a song is a lengthy, difficult process. There are many steps along the way that you have to go through to create a good song. Ideas can happen anywhere at any time, but writing them down to create something can be easier said than done. Songwriting can be a healing process for some people or just a way to get emotions out of their heads. Anyone can write, but if you want to, you need to put in the work to learn how to write and produce your own music.

Noelle Hampton is a singer-songwriter in Austin, Texas. She has been writing songs for over 20 years, and has a band called the “Belle Sounds” which has been around since 2013. The Belle Sounds are one of the most recognized Austin bands. Hampton writes and produces all of the songs her band puts out. She said that the program “Logic Pro” changed her life.

Logic Pro is a music production software that makes it easy to create and record songs. Before using Logic Pro she would sit with an instrument and, “just start playing music, [until] something would come.” was playing a chord progression. Then, she would make up a melody and start singing “nonsensical words over the melody.” She would keep going until something started to happen, when those nonsense words would begin to make sense to her, and then she would finally write them down.

She says that “It felt more kind of pains” with her old process. She said it was more painstaking because she felt the pressure of coming up with a whole song right then and there. Now that she uses Logic she doesn’t feel that pressure anymore and can just play with the music more.

“It starts to become something very tangible, it’s like you can feel a song actually happening already,” Hampton says. Hamptom adds her lyrics last, so she can figure out “what the story

Noelle Hampton and her husband. Image by Noelle Hampton.

of the music is telling me,” she explained.

At the beginning of 2020 Hampton made it her goal to write and release a song a month. She said that “it was sort of a real teaching moment that if you sit too long without writing, it’s harder to come back.”

She put pressure on herself to think that every song was going to be great, but she explained that if you come into the songwriting process with no expectations that you will keep the song then it makes it easier to create more songs.

She finds that the best songs that she writes draw from her influences (70s harmony bands, 80s synth pop, hip hop and more) and her own modern sounds. She also said to, “do what your heart tells you to do without blatantly ripping something off.”

John Branch is a songwriting guitar player in Austin, Texas. He has been playing guitar since he was a kid and has been songwriting for almost as long. He says that the most important thing to do when trying to write songs is that you do it regularly.

“Just to get up every day and

do some work,” Branch said. He talked about how it doesn’t matter how long you write for as long as you can set aside some time each day to sit down and try to create something. He advised people to just, “do a little bit of something every week” Branch explained that he focuses on the rhythm of it more when he writes songs. “I like to walk into something more set,” he said. After he makes a beat he then starts to play chords along to it. Then he adds harmony and then bass. He feels that he likes to, “look for the simplest stuff.” He later added that “Simpler is always better,”

Branch noted that the hardest part when writing a song in his experience was completely finishing. Hampton also said that it was hard to know which songs she thought were good. She said that “sometimes I think I’ve been so brilliant in one moment. And then I come back and look at it again and reevaluate.”

Hampton said that “when I was young, I felt, if I couldn’t make a song work, that I was never going to write another song. It was that kind of feeling, like I’ll never write a song again. Or if I wrote a good one, I’d never write one better than it.”

Making music can be extremely disheartening when what you create doesn’t come out as expected, but when it does, writing music can be the best feeling in the world.

“Look for the simplest stuff, simpler is always better”