The “tortured artist” archetype is one of the most persistent myths in music. We love the image of the songwriter sequestered in a dimly lit room, waiting for the lightning bolt of inspiration to strike before they can finally pen…
Well known author and blogger Steven Pressfield wrote a piece recently called “Three Kinds of Self-Training”, where he breaks his own creative discipline into six categories: It’s a short piece, but it’s stuck with me since I read it, because…
You finish a song. You set it aside and start the next one. Then the next. Before long, you’ve got a folder full of songs, some are finished and some are half-baked all sitting there with the same unanswered question…
There’s a story most songwriters tell themselves, and it goes something like this: the best songs arrive fully formed. A melody appears in the shower. A lyric drops into your head on the drive home. The song writes itself in…
There’s a familiar feeling most songwriters know well. You sit down, open a notebook or pull up a session, and then… wait. You figure something will come. A melody, a line, a feeling. Something to kick things off. And when…
“Please stop thinking.” It’s funny, I teach writing, and before I taught I never would have guessed that’s the thing I say most often. But people really write better without thinking, by which I mean without self-consciousness… It’s not that…
You know the scene very well… It’s late. Everyone else is asleep. You’ve got a guitar slung around your shoulder, a notebook on the couch beside you, and something that might be the start of a good song sitting in…
Just imagine, you’ve been at this longer than you want to admit. You’ve tried the fixes. Morning pages for writer’s block. A heavier production layer for the flat chorus. Three rewrites on a stiff lyric. A week off when a…
Somewhere along the way, co-writing stopped being one option among many and started being treated as a rite of passage. If you’re a serious songwriter, the thinking goes, you’ll be in writing rooms with other people. If you’re not, you’d…