Welcome to The Songwriter's Desk
I’ve been writing songs for a long time. I’ve also been frustrated for a long time by the state of the tools working songwriters actually have.
The rhyme sites are old and ugly and mostly push you towards perfect rhymes that no one has used sincerely since 1998. The songwriting advice on the internet is either TikTok-level “write from the heart” pablum or a thin listicle recycled by a marketing team at a SaaS company. The business side — splits, royalties, publishing, PROs — is deliberately confusing because someone makes more money when you don’t understand it.
The Songwriter’s Desk is the place I wanted. A real desk. Small drawer of sharp tools, big drawer of honest writing about how the job actually works.
What’s here, roughly
Tools. Songstarter is the first one — a generator that turns a mood and a life situation into a specific song starting point, which is usually the thing blank pages are missing. After that: a proper slant-rhyme finder (the thing RhymeZone has never quite built), a split sheet generator, a royalty split calculator, a syllable and stress analyser, a song title generator, a song structure builder. More coming every couple of weeks.
The blog. Three kinds of post. Craft teardowns of songs I love and why they work. Business explainers in plain English — splits, streaming math, publishing, how to not get ripped off. And process writing: songs I’m currently trying to finish, where I’m stuck, what I tried, what worked.
What’s not here
No fluff. No SEO-bait listicles. No AI-generated pages trying to rank for every rhyme in the English language. No pretending I know more than I do.
Who I am
I’m Dan Healy. Songwriter. You can poke around under the About page for the longer version. Everything on this site has my name on it because I think Google is right that the internet is drowning in faceless content, and you deserve to know who’s writing what you read.
What I’d like from you
Use the tools. Tell me what’s missing. Email me when I’ve got something wrong — I’ll correct it publicly. If a tool would help you in a real moment of writing a real song, tell me and I’ll probably build it.
That’s the whole thing. Welcome to the desk.
Written by Dan Healy. If this was useful, the tools page has more like it, and the homepage has a newsletter signup.