Reviews

On Songwriting

Patty Osborne

Bob Snider is a dishevelled man with a beard and longish hair who writes and sings simple songs that play with language and usually make people laugh. In the first part of On Songwriting (Gaspereau Press), he advises songwriters to use nouns and verbs, not adjectives, and to distrust their favourite lines and avoid ego—useful advice no matter what you’re writing—and states that songwriting relies on serendipity. When you succeed, it usually means that “you shot an arrow and then you painted a bull’s-eye around it.” In the second section, “Ten Songs and How They Came to Be,” Snider describes how a few lines or a melody will come into his head while he is walking late at night. His inspiration has come from his dusty shoes, a wrong number and his La-Z-Boy recliner, and each time he describes how a song came to be, Snider gives us a slice of his life that is as simple and straightforward as the songs themselves.

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