Fern Michonski / Fern’s Music
Pre-School Music Education Expert: The Children’s Advocate for Love and Kindness, Inspiring Creativity and Joy.
April 10, 2013—How do I write a song? 
I have been asked many times how I go about writing a song. I am asked what instrument I use, if I write the lyrics first or the music first, how long it takes and what inspires me. My answer to all of these questions is, “It depends.”
Writing a song comes from deep within my heart and soul. Sometimes my children inspire me or else the children I work with daily at my various preschools. At other times my pets get me writing. However, the bottom line is that every song I write has a different beginning and comes to life in a variety of ways.
Sometimes I might be thinking about a particular theme, such as with my Easter CD, and suddenly a stream of lyrics comes into my head. I write them down and then pick up the guitar and start figuring out what key and melody works best. It is about how I feel. Other times I suddenly feel a melody. That usually leads me to my piano where I sit down and play with the sounds I am hearing in my head. And on a few occasions, I have suddenly had an entire song simply burst into my brain, words and music, all at the same time. Why? I just don’t know. It just happens.
I make it a regular practice to carry around a small tape recorder so that when this happens, I can literally stop what I’m doing and sing the song into the recorder so I don’t forget it later. This happened to me in the creation of my song, “The Galactic Hop Bop.” I had written a CD for preschool children all about outer space. My sound engineer said to me, “You know Fern; you don’t have any songs on your CD about aliens. I think you should do something about that.” Ok. I mulled this over in my mind for a couple of days. About 4 days after he suggested that to me, I was driving down the highway when the entire song suddenly burst into my head. I was amazed! There it was words, music and all, playing in my mind. I grabbed my little recorder that was sitting on the seat beside me and pushed the record button. The song was born, right there on the highway while driving 65 mph. Go figure.
Sometimes I have to work at it while other times a song simply appears. It can happen anywhere and at any time. Frequently songs appear from my childhood memories while other times I wake up at night with a song in my head. Once I wrote an entire song, both lyrics and music, while waiting for my daughter to finish up her dance class.
Some people call it the “Song Gods.” I call it my gift from God. I figure that is why I am on this planet—to write music for children that inspires them to love one another and all the creatures we share this earth with.
Here is my song, “The Galactic Hop Bop.” Enjoy!