Listen to the songs that inspired the issue… The Winter edition playlist is here

Featuring Emeli Sandé, Ashley McBryde, Black Pumas and much more. Dive into the sounds of the season…

Aside from the occasional beige food break, we spent the festive period unable to remove our faces from the Winter edition of Songwriting Magazine. Having taken in all the tips, inspiration and information that any budding songwriter could need (until next quarter), now’s the time to dive into the music featured inside the 90 pages.

Consider this 50-song playlist your aural accompaniment to the latest issue. Whether it’s a quartet of Emeli Sandé’s finest compositions or our 10 favourite songs of 2023, we hope there’s something for everyone. We pride ourselves on being genre-agnostic and here’s the proof – where else would the industrial metal of Nine Inch Nails meet the traditional folk of Honey And The Bear?

Included in the playlist below:

Shape
“I wrote Shape in my best friend Lucy’s bedroom. She was out running errands and I picked up her guitar and started playing this riff I’d had in my head for a while. I don’t know, sometimes there’s something magical in an instrument that draws a song out of you.” — Victoria Canal

Hey There Delilah
“I met this girl named Delilah. She was really, really pretty, and I hung out with her one night, because she was a friend of a friend. We were hanging out, and at the end of the night I joked with her that I had a song about her. I was trying to be cute and funny…” — Tom Higgenson (Plain White T’s)

Ice Cream (Pay Phone)
“I thought of Big, the movie with Tom Hanks and that nursery rhyme, ‘Shimmy shimmy coco pop.’ It was one of my favourite movies growing up and I always remember how engaging that bit was and so I was seeking to integrate some of what I’d sculpted and cultivated based on what I was taking in culturally.” — Eric Burton (Black Pumas)

Light On In The Kitchen
“That was a phrase Connie [Harrington] came into the room with. We were laying phrases out on the table to see if there was anything we wanted to examine and Connie said, ‘How do you girls feel about the phrase, “There’s a light on in the kitchen?’” — Ashley McBryde

Wanted
“The intro piano riff was just what I started with, and the song wrote itself in a matter of… I’m sure every time I talk about it, that time gets less, but it feels like it was within an hour that we had most of the song.” — Hunter Hayes