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The New York Times has hired Suzanne Vega to blog about the creative process of the singer/songwriter, and so far so good. Her latest entry is all about how she writes music:

When I was a teenager, I used to have a neat sort of formula for writing songs. It worked over and over, and I got about 60 songs out of it. Now it doesn't work so well, and I am forced to write in all different ways. But what worked for so long was this:

I would start to write a song sometime late Saturday afternoon. Then, after dinner, when everyone in my family was doing other Saturday-night things, I would go into my room by myself and fool around with the guitar for several hours, usually managing to hammer out some kind of idea. In those days the chords came first, and they depended on what I was singing about. Then the melody, and lastly the lyrics.

It goes on from there, and they've been nice enough to post a demo of her song, "Bound," from the latest album.

Check it out!

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