Music, Lyrics, and Life

When the Hits Hit the Fan is the songwriting class you always wish you’d taken. It’s a deep dive into the heart of questions songwriters of all levels ask, laid out along the timeline of a song’s completion. For years, inspiring students on campuses including Yale, Wesleyan, The New School, Berklee, Oberlin, Hofstra, and NYU.

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When the Hits Hit the Fan marries the process of songwriting, and living a songwriter’s life, with humor and empathy. It unravels the mystery, science, and livelihood behind the rapidly evolving art of songwriting, but ends up revealing just as much about who we, the listeners, are, and where we may be going. These are lessons and tools Mike Errico has honed over years of writing, performing, teaching, and mentoring. This is a book for songwriters, future content creators, music lovers, and all the rest of us who are dying to know how popular art forms are able to touch us so deeply.

Think Stephen King’s On Writing and Mary Karr’s The Art of the Memoir, for the songwriter, meets books that are a result of that writing, like Alan Light's The Holy and the Broken and Jacob Slichter's So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star, to books about the industry, John Seabrook's The Song Machine and Derek Thompson's Hit Makers, and finally, experimental love letters to the art form like Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles, David Byrne's How Music Works, and Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia.

40,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify...per day. Recording equipment is cheaper than ever, which has lowered the bar of entry for music creation. Educators have taken note, and "School of Rock" franchises are opening nationally, while major universities scramble to update their music curricula and provide courses their students find relevant. Songland, a songwriting-specific competition show, just debuted on NBC, and the interest in how songs work has never been higher. People spend millions of hours on YouTube learning how to mix and master their music. When the Hits Hit the Fan will be an invaluable tool to help them find (and write!) material that rises to the level of their creative curiosity.

Anyone who reads When the Hits Hit the Fan: will definitely gain help in writing a tight, focused song that kicks the door down for all their visions to rush through. You’ll plant a flag so you can build a creative world around it; a world intrinsic to who you are, and for it to feel nontrivial and undeniable to whoever’s listening.