A Good Critique Of Broken Up…

In addition to publishing our songs on this blog, I’ve also been trying to post links to our songs to various songwriting sites and forums in the hopes of getting unbiased reviews and publicizing our songs in general.

One nice songwriting community can be found at http://forums.songstuff.com/. I posted a link to Broken Up there a few days in this forum topic.

And there, Michael and I received our best review to date from Tom Hoffman (http://www.tune-smith.com). It’s not really a rave review of the song, but it is our best review in the sense that it was a well-balanced commentary that offered very specific feedback. And so I’m sharing it here (with Tom’s permission).

Nice job….I actually thought the song was pretty cool! You really didn’t give much guidance about what aspects of this you’d like critiqued, so I’ll just give some random thoughts….

– as a general rule, it’s really helpful to the reviewers if you post the lyrics up with the song link

– It really didn’t seem like the imagery presented by the first 2 lines of lyrics were a good fit for the musical feel of the song. Birds & plants brought things to mind for me that didn’t set me up very well for where you took the rest of the song. Those 2 lines come off a little weak, a little too popish and they are the first 2 things sung to the listener…..you know what they say about 1rst impressions

– I’m not sure how well the non-ryhme at the end of the last line of that verse worked….it sounded a little akward. If you decide to rewrite thoses first lines, it might be good to give some thought to meshing them somehow better with the final one.

– I thought the song was a cool mixing of styles. The verses come off kind of grungy-pop & the choruses reggae….I thought keeping the bridge reggae was a good choice, loved the harmony lead sections….very nicely done. This player format doesn’t give the listener a way to fast forward or rewind, so I’m not possitive, but I thought you changed the format of the 3rd verse to reggae also? If I’m remembering right, I thought that worked well also. Up to the point of that first lead, that verse-to-chorus format shifts twice on the listener….after that lead I liked the style maintaining a more consistant feel throught to the end….another good choice!

Overall I thought it was interesting & well done…..nice job guys! Welcome to the site!