Write One Sentence About the Song Before You Make Anything Else

When a project starts, the first thing we ask for is not a mood board or a folder of references. We ask for one sentence about the song.

Not a pitch, not a genre label. A sentence a friend could repeat after hearing it once. “A slow song about leaving a city you still love.” “Dance music for people who stayed home.” If the sentence takes three tries, that is useful information, and it is much cheaper to find out now than after the cover is made.

Why a sentence

Every piece around a release is a small decision. What color is the cover? What goes in the bio? Which line becomes the caption? Without a shared sentence, each of those decisions starts from zero, and each one gets answered by mood.

With the sentence on the page, the questions get smaller. Does this cover look like a slow song about leaving a city? Does this caption sound like it? You are no longer choosing from everything. You are checking against one thing.

One sentence won’t make the work good. It makes the work consistent.

How we write it

We keep the rules short.

Say what it is about, not how good it is. “Honest” and “powerful” tell nobody anything. A place, a feeling, a person, a situation does.

Write it in plain words. If a sentence needs the word “journey”, it is not finished.

Write three, keep one. The first is usually a genre. The second is usually a feeling. The third is often the real one, the line you would not have written if you had stopped early.

Put it where you can see it. Next to the song file, at the top of the notes, anywhere you will meet it before every decision.

What we cut

Most of the time the sentence comes out smaller than the song. A track with three ideas becomes a sentence about one. That is fine. The other two ideas are still in the music, and nobody needs to explain them.

Sometimes the sentence reveals that the cover we were already imagining belongs to a different song. That is the best possible moment to find out.

The first thing to do

Open a note, write three sentences about your song, and keep the one you would be comfortable repeating out loud. Everything else you make this month can be checked against it.

If the song is close to ready and you want help turning that sentence into a cover, a bio and a release plan, that is where we come in.