A Little Something About Songwriting

My ill-fated music blog returns after nearly a year of silence. Raising three kids under 5 during a pandemic tends to have a temporary freezing effect on elective pursuits. But I'm here now.

I was looking through entries I'd done for an old deleted blog and ran across something I wrote about songwriting in 2009. I was struck by this entry because, although I love songwriting, I haven't written a new song since 2018. It's not that I don't have anything left to say - at least I hope not. It's more that I haven't had the time or energy; our household has been in survival mode for the past two years. I've had a few ideas and phrases floating around, but finding the time to work with them has not been easy.  An additional difficulty is that music, while a sincere passion of mine, is not my day job.

Anyway, here's what I wrote nearly 12 years ago. I find that I feel it's still true:

"Eager Anxiety* has been taking a break, so I have been trying to turn the incoherent phrases, expressions, and other words that I scrawl in my notebook during the day into coherent songs.  I've written three new ones in the last month and a half, entitled 'Breathe Easy,' 'She's Not There,' and 'Predator.'  Three different songs about three different things. 

I still have a work in progress, called 'Fragile,' that I'm sitting on.  I find that calling songs 'done' has been more of a challenge as of late; I tend to want to re-examine the lyrics and rewrite them until the perfect words come through.  But I realize the danger in overthinking anything you write, especially song lyrics.  If I stare at them too long, I start to approach them like I would academic or professional writing, and not let the creativity run the show.  Some of my better songs have been the ones that I just sort of cognitively vomited out in a short amount of time with a lighting bolt of inspiration.  But you can't force those.  And they only strike when they want to."

What I would add to this is a quote that Moody Blues guitarist/vocalist Justin Hayward adapts from Pablo Picasso: "Inspiration's got to find you working." I guess I'm hoping to find that space between purposeful songwriting "work" and letting the creativity direct things so that I don't approach songwriting like an academic essay or a memo. 

We'll see what happens. 

 -----

*Eager Anxiety is the alt-folk-rock duo of which I am one half. We've been hibernating for the past 5 years.

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