I’ve managed to get into a good kind of stride with writing lately. I’ve written five new songs in the last couple of weeks, which is more than average for me. I’ve written songs since I was about 13, but never with any kind of regularity. I would have a good idea for a song, write it down, and then not write anything until the next time I had a good idea. But becoming good at something takes practice, and writing is no exception. To write good songs, you need to just keep writing and ‘get in shape’, so to speak. So I write.
Sometimes I have no ideas whatsoever. I just stare at a blank paper for hours and not a single good idea comes to mind. Sometimes I have an idea, and I write down two or three sentences, and then I’m out, there’s no continuation. So I keep writing down short sentences, and maybe they’ll combine into a song at some point. I had an idea a couple of days ago, and wrote down the first verse and half the chorus. After that I was completely stuck. Whatever I wrote down sounded stupid, and I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything more to say, even though the story I had on paper was obviously not finished. So I picked up a rhyming dictionary and dug my heels in. I can be pretty stubborn sometimes, and now I was hellbent on finishing this song. I read articles online, I flipped through the dictionary in search for ideas, I listened to other bands, studied their lyrics, and piece by piece I slowly added stuff to my song. After spending hours on trying to come up with different options every day, I finally finished the song today. It feels pretty good. After really working myself through this obstacle, I’m feeling quite creative, like it’s much easier to write now. I had another idea and wrote down a draft for a new song in about half an hour. It’s not finished yet, but I know more or less what the result will be. The rest is just tweaking.
The concept of a “hit” song is kind of funny somehow. Of course, not every song I write (or any other songwriter, I’m sure) is good. Some songs just suck. Some are more or less OK, and some songs I really like and feel like “Wow! This is going to be my number 1 smash hit breakthrough song!” Out of the dozens of songs that I’ve written, I don’t really like most of them. I have maybe ten songs that I think are any kind of good. But I’ve noticed when performing that sometimes people like the ones that I think are bad, and sometimes they don’t like the songs I think are great. What exactly a “good” song is, is different for different people. So how do you pick what to put on a CD, or which song should be a single? I don’t know. But fortunately, the internet is not going to run out of space like a CD would, so I think I’ll skip that problem and just record all the songs I write. I’ll leave it up to my audience to choose which ones are the good ones. Then again, do I want to be associated with songs I don’t like? Maybe not.
