Recently during one of our LEGACY Coaching sessions, Dwayne sat down with Stephen Moore, lead singer for Carrollton, to discuss songwriting with the online students. Here is part of that conversation…

Live Coaching Interview with Stephen Moore

As we start out tonight having a conversation about this let’s set the stage by saying, trying to write hit songs that everyone likes, that’s not our goal. Secondly, we got to just start doing it in order to develop this gift and that’s what I want to encourage you. If you don’t get anything else out of tonight I want you to feel inspired by Scott singing that song that he wrote and hopefully by Stephen encouraging you and me as well and going, you know what, I think that’s something we could try in our church. If that’s as far as we go, that would be a huge way to make an impact in your church.

We, at the Station Church in Birmingham, Alabama, wrote some songs that represented what our church was going through at the time and a couple of them became very popular within our congregation.

Stephen, I want to turn it over to you to just talk to us, share with us some tips of, generally speaking about songwriting or what you consider to be a quality song. Just talk to us.

Anybody can write a song

Stephen: Yeah, yeah. Well, I am certainly a believer that anybody can write a song. Anybody. It doesn’t matter your musical experience, your musical position, whether it’s at a church or otherwise. Anybody can write a song. Why is that? Because I think you only need two things. You need an appreciation or enjoyment for music, meaning you need to like music. I think that’s a pretty fair statement and then the second thing is you need to have an opinion. That’s it.

Dwayne: You need to like music and you need to have an opinion.

Stephen: Yes. In other words, you need to have the want to write music and then you need an opinion, the ability to be able to look at something and say, I like this or I don’t like that.

Dwayne: Okay, never thought of it like that. Okay.

Stephen: If you have the want and you have the ability to form an opinion then you can write a song.

Dwayne: Wow, okay. Okay. That boils down-

Stephen: Ready to go. That’s it. That’s all I got. No I’m just kidding. Now if you want to write a good song.

Dwayne: Oh, a good song, okay.

Stephen: That’s when it starts getting complicated. I actually heard it shared like that. It may have been in a Ted talk that I stole it from.

Dwayne: Oh okay, a Ted talk.

Stephen: And I love opening with it because in talking to people about writing music, the experience and skill sets of those people vary from very experienced and seasoned to not at all whether it’s in songwriting or even in music in general and the way he opened with that statement, with that idea just made it feel so accessible.

Dwayne: Yeah, it does. I’m still absorbing it, to be honest, but yeah.

Stephen: Yeah, and so it’s just the idea that everyone has something to contribute to that if they choose to and if they want to.

Dwayne: But it’s that second one that I’m still, that opinion. If they have an opinion.

Stephen: The ability to choose one thing over another thing.

Dwayne: Okay.