AJR's Advice on Songwriting: The Writing Secrets Behind TikTok's Viral Sounds

AJR is three brothers - Adam, Jack, and Ryan Met - with more than five billion streams on Spotify and 8.5 million monthly listeners. Their music video for "World's Smallest Violin" has over 170 million views. Songs like "Weak," "Burn the House Down," and "Bang!" have become TikTok staples. They play arenas. They started by busking in New York City.

Their songwriting advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast.

Embarrassment as Compass

The foundation of AJR's writing process: "What's the most embarrassing thing you could admit?" That becomes the song. "Weak" is about vulnerability. "Joe" is about admiring a high school peer. "Turning Out Part Three" explores intimacy issues. The specificity matters. They avoid trauma-dumping by zooming into precise moments rather than making broad statements.

Ryan puts it bluntly: "Write about something embarrassing, odds are that person in the audience is gonna feel the exact same way." The reward of finding an audience through truth is "so euphoric that it's like kind of the reason to be alive." Once you experience that connection, you cannot go back to writing shallow material. The embarrassment deepens on its own.

The band consciously chose goofiness over manufactured coolness. "We can't be cool like Drake, so what's our POV?" The answer: empathize, make the audience laugh, then make them cry. They cite Pixar as their template: "This is gonna be a silly movie about fish in Australia. Oh, it's a movie about a dad learning to trust his kid for the first time."

This connects to what Rosanne Cash calls writing the furniture, not the theme. Cash says: do not write about loss. Write about the coffee cup, the window, the clock. AJR says: do not write about pain. Write about the specific embarrassing moment that reveals the pain. Both arrive at the same principle from different musical worlds.

Write a Million Bad Songs

When smaller artists ask AJR for advice, the answer is blunt: "Write a million songs. Write a lot, tour a lot, and play a lot of shows for people that don't come, for just a few people."

"It's write a lot of bad songs. It's such an uncomfortable feeling to sit in that, and it makes you feel like a failure and inadequate, but that's just truly the only way."

The first five hundred songs will copy your favorite artists. That is learning. Gradually, you extract specific tools - Frankie Valli's voicing technique, Beach Boys harmonies - and synthesize something original. The shame about copying drives the search for authentic voice.

Subconscious Creates, Conscious Edits

Steve Martin said: "Your subconscious writes and your conscious edits." AJR lives this division. Ryan generates raw material from an emotional, subconscious place. Jack observes from the outside - studying how different songs trigger different responses. In college, Jack literally stared at people listening to music: "Two songs that sound almost exactly the same. One people are standing on the table, the other people are talking through. And I was like, there's a DNA, there's something living within music that make people do that."

The collaboration shows in revision. "World's Smallest Violin" originally had an extremely Broadway-sounding lyric: "That's the way it always is, and that's the way it's always been." It felt didactic - "like being lectured at." Jack's edit: "Oh my God, that's so insane. Oh my God, that's such a shame." More immediate, conversational, no exposition. The song went from two-dimensional to three-dimensional in a single lyrical swap.

During creation, Ryan enters what he calls "work mode" - a volatile emotional state that his friends recognize immediately. He becomes less social, hyper-attuned to every shift in his own feeling. If a beat turns aggressive, he pivots instantly from crying to bravado. "You have to become a shell of yourself in order to be that nimble." When he knows he has something, he texts Jack the eye emojis. Jack knows: it is time to write.

Albums Are Soundtracks to Live Shows

AJR inverts the typical relationship between recordings and performances. The album exists to serve the live show, not the reverse. Every song gets evaluated: "Will this work on stage?" Songs that do not translate to performance get discarded.

Tours are the ultimate artistic expression. Magic illusions, shadow puppets, narrative arcs spanning entire shows, hidden Easter eggs. They admire Penn and Teller's method of deconstructing tricks while performing them. AJR builds songs live onstage, showing the skeleton while delivering the spectacle. Audiences appreciate transparency combined with artistry.

They have abandoned verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. Live feedback revealed audiences disengage with expected repetition. Recent work has zero songs following traditional structure - incorporating unexpected elements, sampler experiments, and sudden shifts.

Reading the Culture Without Surrendering to It

Jack studies cultural shifts the way a trader reads markets. He noticed folk music rising and connected it to phone fatigue: "What do you want if you're doing this all day? You want some calming music. You want to be able to hear the guy talk over the music." When Hozier's "Take Me to Church" hit, Jack felt the shift before the charts confirmed it - "that really good nervousness where you're leaning in."

But AJR refuses to chase trends. They describe their relationship with TikTok as accidental alignment: their music naturally contained the switch-heavy, deconstructed, relatable quality that the algorithm favors. "We were already doing it anyway. So I don't feel like we're selling out trying to write TikTok music at all."

"World's Smallest Violin" took two years to gain traction. Another song went five years before TikTok picked it up. The old radio model was all-or-nothing: miss the window and the song disappeared forever. Now anything can resurface. Chris Martin told them their longevity strategy is sound: never be the coolest thing. Always be something to discover.

Defend Everything You Release

Critical hate bounces off when you can defend the emotional truth behind the work. "Write something that you can defend in front of a jury." They cite a song called "Thirsty" - yodeling, silly, experimental - that they cannot defend emotionally. TikTok mocks it. They accept that honestly.

But "Dog Song" - written from a dog's perspective, watching a father's illness, wanting to help with a stick - they would defend under oath. The lyric came from finding the emotional angle: "I hope we don't move again. They lost half my shit, those dumb moving men. And where did your dad go? Did they also lose him? Well I brought you this stick. I hope that it helps." Ryan cried writing it. That was the signal.

The slow-burn approach enables writing from a dog's perspective without artistic compromise. They watched other artists lose their edge by apologizing for uniqueness: "Their second album was like apologizing for how unique that first album was. And then inevitably those artists go down in popularity because they're in a race to the bottom of trying to sound like everybody else."

AI Averages Voices Into Nothing

"AI averages multiple voices into a nebulous middle without point of view." A Randy Newman vocal carries belief through his specific tone, phrasing, and melody choice. Josh Groban singing the same line would not convince - not because Groban is less talented, but because the alignment of artist identity to material would be absent.

Ryan is specific about where AI helped: they used Kits AI to generate a preview of Jack's voice singing a demo, letting Jack hear the song without recording it first. "No creativity was taken away from us. But it was just like a cool little tool." The line between tool and replacement is clear to them. As AI improves, music will split: generic content on one side, increasingly personal and idiosyncratic human work on the other.

Key Takeaways

• Lead with embarrassment. The most uncomfortable admission often makes the strongest song - or sentence.
• Write enormous quantities. The first five hundred will imitate. After that, original voice emerges.
• Separate creation from editing. Let the subconscious generate. Let the conscious refine.
• Design work for live experience. If it does not hold an audience in person, rethink it.
• Do not optimize for the algorithm. Write what you would write anyway. Let the platform catch up.
• Defend your work with emotional truth. If you cannot, acknowledge it honestly.
• Resist the average. AI produces the middle. Your specific voice is the edge.

AJR's career proves that vulnerability, specificity, and the willingness to look uncool produce work that resonates longer than anything calculated for virality. Athens can help refine your prose, but only your willingness to be embarrassed can supply the raw material.

This post draws from AJR's appearance on How I Write. For more on songwriting and emotional honesty, see Rosanne Cash's writing advice.