A Songwriting Assignment · The Lyric Stack

The Derivation Brief

For Casey  ·  From Ted  ·  Toward the EP

Originality is the wrong target. Every song you love was built out of older songs — the writer just transformed the inputs past the point where you could trace them. That's not cheating; it's the whole job. This brief makes you run that transformation on purpose, with a paper trail, so the move stops being luck and becomes a tool you own and can repeat.

The feeling of inevitability in a great song is engineered, not found. Constraint is what engineers it.

01The Constraint

Pick one source song. Not a playlist — one. The rules exist to force distance, because distance is what makes the derivation invisible at the end.

  • Not your lane. If the EP lives where "Clover" and "Unseen" live, the source lives somewhere else — different genre, different decade, different temperature.
  • A song you'd never write. If it's already close to you, there's nothing to transform.
  • One song, studied deep. Breadth is procrastination wearing a research hat.

02Deconstruct — The Skeleton

Strip the song to numbers and structure. No opinions, no "I love this part." Just the X-ray:

  • Section map, with counts — e.g. I · V · C · V · C · B · C
  • Bars per section
  • Syllables per line across Verse 1
  • Rhyme scheme, letter-mapped (A / B / A / B …)
  • The emotional peak — which section, which line
  • The controlling idea in one sentence: what the song argues, not what it's "about." (Theme is the fog that comes off it; the controlling idea is the engine.)

A one-page skeleton. Numbers and structure only.

03Derive — Run the Five Operations

Take the skeleton and run each operation once. Each one must produce something concrete — a line, a structural change, a progression note. No skipping the ones that feel awkward; the awkward ones are usually where the new song is hiding.

1 · ConversionChange a part's form so it carries a new meaning. Their breakup becomes your leaving-town. Same shape, different sense.
2 · InversionReverse it. Start at the resolution. Flip the rhyme scheme. Put the chorus first and make the verses chase it.
3 · ModificationSubtract. Cut a section. Halve the syllable count of a line. Ask what survives the cut — that's the load-bearing part.
4 · ExaggerationTake one element and magnify it until it's unrecognizable but still rooted. One image stretched across a whole verse. A hook repeated past comfort.
5 · DistillationReduce the entire song to a single image or phrase that is now yours. This is the seed you actually plant.

Five labeled fragments — one per operation.

04Distill & Write — Your Song, Not Theirs

Lay the five fragments out. Keep what's alive, throw out the rest without sentiment. Then write one original verse and chorus aimed at the EP. The rule that makes it work: the source must be untraceable by ear in the result, and fully traceable on paper in your brief.

Verse + chorus draft, plus two lines on which operation cracked it open.

The Bar — How I'll Grade It

  • Could I hear your finished draft and not name the source — but read your brief and see exactly where it came from?
  • Did the constraint do the work, or did you fall back on your defaults the second it got hard?
  • Does the controlling idea hold from the first line to the last?
  • Could you run this whole move again, on a different song, with me not in the room? That's the only grade that matters.

One more thing, and it's the point of the whole exercise: you write all of it. I evaluate, I don't co-write. If you hand me a fragment and ask "is this right?" — the answer is "play it and tell me." I've done you no favors the times I reached over and fixed it myself. This is me handing the tool back.

The Derivation Brief · A Lyric Stack Assignment