How to write a brief that gets you an amazing song send us this

Here's the good news: you don't need to be a writer to brief a brilliant song. You just need to be the person who knows the daft details, which, since you're the one ordering, you are. The whole job on your end is handing over the specifics and getting out of the way. This is how to do it well.

Specifics beat adjectives, every time

"He's funny and kind and a great dad" is true of half the men on earth, and it gives a writer nothing to grab. "He cried at a dog food advert and still won't admit it" gives them a whole verse. The rule is simple: anything that could be said about lots of people is wasted; anything that could only be said about this person is gold. It's the same idea behind why specific gifts land and generic ones don't. A song just turns it up to eleven.

The stuff we're actually after

• The nickname. Especially the embarrassing one nobody outside the family understands.
• The running joke. The line you all quote, the bit that started years ago and never died.
• The 2014 incident. The story that still gets brought up at every gathering.
• The little habits. How they make their tea, the catchphrase, the thing they always say before leaving a room.
• The soft bit. The genuinely lovely thing about them, the heart of why you're doing this at all.

Don't tell us they're "one in a million." Tell us they reverse into parking spaces they could've driven straight into. We'll handle the one-in-a-million part.

Set the tone

Tell us roughly where on the dial you want it: a daft, laugh-out-loud roast, a genuinely touching tribute, or (our favourite) quietly both. A nudge on genre helps too: think acoustic and tender, cheesy pop banger, country ballad, whatever suits them. You don't need to know music; "something like the stuff they'd actually play" is plenty to go on.

What you can happily skip

You don't need to write any lyrics, find rhymes, or worry about structure. That's literally our job, and you can see exactly how we handle it in how we actually write your song. You don't need perfect grammar or polished sentences either. A messy brain-dump of real details beats a neat paragraph of vague praise every single time. Over-explaining is fine. Under-specifying is the only real mistake.

A quick before-and-after

Too vague: "She's an amazing mum and my best friend, so caring and always there for everyone." Much better: "She calls everyone 'duck,' has burnt the same Christmas roast three years running, cries at the school nativity every December, and once chased the ice cream van down the street for me when I was 27." The second one isn't just more fun. It's a song that could only ever be about her.

So when you're ready, don't overthink it. Picture the person, jot down the five daftest and dearest things about them, and send them over. We'll turn it into a track that gets the room to go quiet. It's about five minutes to start their song here, or if you'd like the why before the how, here's why a song is the perfect gift.