What you have to do is listen to every single genre of music that you possibly can, become inspired. Write soundscapes to express your emotions in noise and follow this through into actual music. NEVER take someones music and deconstruct it for your song. Only do that to see what they are doing. It means that you suck. Put yourself into a musical trance, become the song you’re writing and let the music flow through you like some kind of spiritual cleansing exercise. Then you can call yourself a songwriter.

I’m in a funny situation right now. I’ve written many songs with more or less like you describe here. I have taken a song, any song will do, and started to chance it. There are so many ways a certain melody can be “de-constructed” that I never run out of ideas. One of my favourite is:

Keep the melody same, change the chords: with new chords the melody sounds already different, but usually the melody needs to be fitted, that is, slighly altered, to fit the new chords. Very soon the chords start to feed on themselves while the melody also will seem to want to go to a different direction all by its own.

I don’t know how this happens, maybe it’s instinctual or some weird subconscious process. This whole thing takes time, and it helps if you have like 2 to 3 hours of free time that you can use just to do this and nothing else. It also seems to help if you can sort of keep your mind “empty”. Ok, that sounded funny, but it’s a ZEN-thing, you know.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was, I’ve never cared about originality. I have never tried to be original. Of course, If my song sounds too much like some other song I will change it. I don’t want be blamed for blatant copying .

My songs tend to be pretty ordinary, but accessable, and people usually seem to like them. The funny thing is, I’ve done this for years now, and my friends hear my new demos they say things like : ” Oh, this is so you.” or ” This is your style”. Maybe this whole deconstruction has given me a style of my own. ( Or my friends are just nice to me…)