New guy here, so bear with me if this has been discussed...

This post was triggered by Garth Algar's post "verses, verses, verses" in which he stated that he is able to create chorus' and melodies easily, but struggles with verses.

I'm the other way around. Looking back at many of my lyrics, I'm more of a story teller than a songwriter. It seems I can always come up with a storyline, but struggle with the chorus and a hook.

Looking at the lyrics of most top 40 songs, it seems it's the chorus and hook that make them popular. Often the story really doesn't seem to go anywhere, especially in the country-pop genre. "Hey, let's party in my truck all night, get drunk, and go skinny dipping in the creek" or "Hey, we're going to Mexico to sit on the beach, and get drunk or stoned until the money runs out".

When you sit down to write, how do you come up with the hook? The lines that everyone learns to sing? Do you come up with the chorus and hook first? Then the verses? Or the other way around?

When I write a song I come up with phrases that i think go with my chosen subject or just sound catchy and write them down. I don't put them in a particular order until I'm confident I can write all the lyrics.

Then I usually start writing the first verse, I then write the chorus then the second verse and finally the bridge. Not all the phrases I originally had end up in the piece and most of them end up combined with each other.

The phrases I don't use I store in a little book so that I can use them later on. So really my work relies on the amount of phrases I can come up with.

I hope this helped your discussion.

pretty much do the same as Kiera.