If you simply look up ¨how to write a song¨, the internet will answer with a few things. Songtown advises you to find a topic and develop the title first. Wikipedia tells you to create a major scale and a basic melody, and Reddit is a rabbit hole I don’t even want to go down. While this is all great advice, the question remains. 

How do you write a song? 

First, most people don’t just want to write a song. Most people also want to produce one, which adds another level to the whole process. Finding time, space, and energy to put together something musical is even harder. It takes a lot of patience and plenty of us feel discouraged by our lack of skill or even our age. 

To help you feel less lost, here’s what I did and learned while writing and producing my song ¨delivered¨, which you can find on Soundcloud, Bandcamp, YouTube, and Spotify under mercury skye.

THE IDEA

  I was in my feelings during a breakup and it started as a poem. I know, basic. But I needed to get my feelings out somehow and it felt like a good idea to write some words to collect myself. I wrote them on a Google document, but paper or the notes app on your phone works too. If you’re scared the idea will leave faster than you can type, you can sing or talk it into your phone using voice memos or a video. Remember, songs don’t have rules. Your music is your music. They don’t have to have words, a beat, or layers of tracks for your song to be considered a song. You only need some rhythm and whatever inspires you to create. 

THE IDEA PART 2

Chorus

  I’m a singer and an actor, so my brain defaults to songs. If your brain isn’t so musical and you need somewhere to start, you can look up the major scale and pick notes from it for your song. Here’s a tip: I usually start with writing the chorus, or the part of the song that’s catchy. It helps to use a very specific circumstance you were in to make your song stand out amongst the others. This method developed the chorus of my song, and I worked backward.

Pre-chorus

I turned the pre-chorus into a fast-paced loud part to express a feeling opposite to the chorus to make the song more interesting. Be smart: your song doesn’t have to stay at the same level or tempo the whole time. Experiment. 

Verses

For the verses, I used my inner dialogue about how I felt regarding the situation. More generic lines that would connect with a larger audience like “I’m still here after all of this time” and “I’m staring at this mess you made”.

In summary, the structure moved like this:

Verses: My inner dialogue, explaining the situation 

Pre-chorus: What was expressed to the person 

Chorus: The main conflict

Bridge

Going back to earlier when I talked about playing around with your songs, I left the “bridge” for the end. There’s a super huge build and then the song quiets and forest noises are echoed in the silence. It goes into the chorus but the time signature changes, and there’s a muffled effect on my voice to make it sound distant. The songs that always catch my attention are the ones that throw me for a loop and leave me wanting to listen to them again to recognize those smaller details. 

COLLABORATING & RECORDING

I brought it to my dad and sang it for him, and as a singer/songwriter himself, we got our keyboard out and started messing around after recording some raw vocals. Long story short, after about a month of my dad and I working hard, my song was finished. We used Reaper and paid for the pro version on our PC, but here is a free alternative if you don’t have a PC or money to spend. 

BandLab

  BandLab has it all: I used it to write the intro song for my album (coming out in the summer of 2025). It can be hard to use at first because there is a lot to look at, from the ability to explore other artist’s music to creating your own. It allows you to record your vocals and program in drums, guitars, pianos, string instruments, and more. If you’re more into producing synthpop or EDM, they have tons of synth pads and sequences, and you get access to most instruments and effects with just the free version. You can also load files of other music or sounds to give your music some more pizazz. If you want to go the extra mile, you can export your song, give it a name and a cover, and put it on BandLab with the thousands of other BandLab artists. It’s a great start if you’re interested in becoming a public musician, but it isn’t as scary and overwhelming as a platform like Spotify. GarageBand is very similar but has less versatility, so I would recommend BandLab if you have the storage space. 

DISTRIBUTORS

This was a hurdle that took a while to overcome. Once my song was ready to go live, I had no idea you couldn’t just upload your music directly through Spotify. Here’s what I had to do instead:

Create an account with a distributor

A distributor is a company that takes your song from you and sends it off to the music platform. I use DistroKid, but there are also other music distributors like Routenote and CDbaby. Keep in mind some of these distributors, like Distrokid, require a small fee depending on the artist plan you select. 

Select a plan

Speaking of an artist plan, each distributor has one to select on their website. I can’t say for other websites, but DistroKid offers 3 plans from most expensive to least expensive, each plan offering different kinds of benefits. I chose the “Musician Plus” plan, which was about 7 dollars a month. 

From there, go to the upload section, add your audio file, and any other required information like your song name, producer, and album cover, and click submit. It’s very straightforward, and if you’re lost, you can go to your distributor’s “help” section. Your distributor will take 2-5 business days to upload your music to Spotify and any other platform you select. You’ll also want to create a “Spotify for Artists” account using Spotifyforartists.com to access your stats once your song goes live. 

And after all that work, you can finally enjoy watching your music grow and thrive in the music industry you’ve dove into.