First, if you’re here: thanks for your interest in writing for Two Story Melody. That’s cool.
This page exists to help you align your writing’s style, focus, and purpose with ours. Hope it’s helpful.
Purpose
This site exists to tell the stories behind songs and bridge the gap between the story that’s written and the one that’s heard. We believe that by understanding the stories artists create, we can better understand our own stories.
We are not a taste-making blog. We want to give music a context to be understood. More on that here.
Audience
Our audience is made up of songwriters of all levels, PR folks, and people who just like music. Our readers tend to lean more toward the indie-pop, folk, singer-songwriter side of things, but we do get a decent variety of genre tastes.
Formats
We tend to write pieces in three formats:
- Interviews (an email or conversational transcript, edited for flow, with an introduction of 300 to 600 words). Here’s an example.
- Reviews (at least 500 words). Here’s an example.
- Opinion Pieces (your opinion is what counts). Here’s an example.
Tone
The general tone of our site is thoughtful and honest, with the goal of getting below surface descriptions to the story of the artist. That being said, it’s conversational, too. You’re not writing a school paper – you’re talking to somebody about music. Sure, you want to speak well, but if you’re checking thesaurus.com more than 19 times per piece, you might be overdoing it.
There’s always a songwriting focus. We’re not just writing about music – we’re looking at it from a songwriting perspective.
Don’t undercut your own expertise. Don’t go into a ton of detail about how you’ve never heard the song or artist before, or shortchange your take with caveats (“But what do I know?”), etc.
Jokes are acceptable, as long as they’re not terrible.
You’ve got this.
Technical
- Always write in the first person – that’s pretty much the key to being conversational.
- Use you / your / you’re pronouns. You’re talking to a friend, not the blob (hopefully).
- Use the Oxford comma. It’s cool.
- Use contractions (unless you’re really feeling breaking words out for emphasis).
- Use the present tense when describing songs. “The guitar is sparse” vs. “The guitar was sparse.” Music never dies.
- When quoting lyrics, use a quote call-out (as opposed to just quoting mid-sentence).
- Line breaks are your friends; try to keep paragraphs under five sentences.
- Please add social links, Spotify / Soundcloud embeds, and site links where appropriate.
- Songs get “quotes”. Albums get italics.
- Go with single space, and don’t do paragraph indents. It’ll look great.
Again, thanks for your interest in writing for us. The chance to connect with other people is one of the coolest things about being involved with music, so cheers to that.
Looking forward to reading.
