8♥ Round robin

8♥ Eight of Hearts in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

Eight of Hearts suggests a songwriting game that you can't do by yourself. Gather a group of 3-6 songwriters for this game.

Here's how to play: Get a pad of paper, and sit around a table. Decide who gets to start. That person writes down a single line of lyrics, and passes the pad to the next person, who writes the second line of lyrics. As you continue, each person writes one line of lyrics in turn.

Don't talk, don't make suggestions, and don't coach each other. Each of you might have a different idea of where the song is headed, but none of you is individually able to control the direction the song is taking. Just let the song emerge.

"Slow Dancing Beast," on Left Brain's Raspberry Park album, was written this way. The songwriters used Scrabble Sentence Cubes, a game with words printed on dice, as a random element to create the first line of lyrics.