When it comes to writing songs, there’s a mindset I’ve learned to trust more and more over the years:
“Don’t ever be afraid to write ‘bad’ songs, they’re the stepping stones to your best songs.”
It sounds simple and maybe even a bit cliché, but this idea is something every songwriter, beginner or seasoned, needs to embrace. Let’s have a chat about why giving yourself permission to write something “bad” is actually one of the smartest things you can do.
Practice Is Non-Negotiable
Okay, let’s be honest: you don’t just sit down and write a masterpiece on your first try. Or your tenth. Maybe not even your hundredth.
Like anything else worth doing whether it be playing an instrument, singing, producing, building a business, songwriting takes practice.
It takes time, repetition, and a whole lot of trial and error. Every “not quite right” song you write is like a rep in the creative gym. You build strength, confidence, and fluency with every session.
Sure, you might write a song that feels awkward, heavy-handed, or just flat-out uninspired. But you’ve still written a song. That’s a hell of a lot more progress than just sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike.
The Bad Songs Build the Good Ones
Think of every “bad” song as a paving stone on the road to the great ones. Without them, you never reach the destination.
Those songs teach you what doesn’t work and sometimes that’s even more important than knowing what does. They show you:
- When your lyrics are too vague or too literal
- When your melody gets stale halfway through
- When your rhyme scheme is boxing you in
- When your chorus doesn’t actually lift
By learning to spot the flaws, you train your internal editor. That editor then becomes your greatest ally in writing songs that truly connect.
You Can’t Rewrite What You Don’t Write
One of the hardest lessons in songwriting is this: you can’t edit nothing.
A half-baked lyric, a clunky chord progression, a strange chorus idea, these are the raw materials. Once they exist, you can shape them. You can rewrite them. You can cut the good bits out and use them in something else entirely.
But if you’re stuck trying to write the “perfect” song before you even get anything down, you’ll never finish a thing. You’ll just hover in limbo, paralysed by the fear of getting it wrong.
And here’s the thing, most good songs start out as something very rough. It’s the rewriting, the tweaking, and the reshaping that make them shine.
🧠 “Bad” Is Often Just “Unpolished”
We’re terrible judges of our own work, especially in the early stages.
How many times have you listened to a song you wrote months or years ago and thought, “Hey… this isn’t half-bad”? Or maybe you thought it was rubbish when you wrote it, but someone else heard it and said, “Wow, I love that line!” or “That melody’s stuck in my head.”
We’re all too close to our own process. We’re all not seeing the forest for all of the trees.
What feels “bad” might just be unfamiliar, incomplete, or underdeveloped. It doesn’t mean it’s not worth finishing.
Sometimes, Creativity Needs Breathing Room
If you approach every writing session with the pressure to write something amazing, you’re going to choke. Perfectionism kills creativity. Full stop.
But if you tell yourself, “I’m just going to write something today, good, bad, or weird,” suddenly the pressure lifts. Your creative muscles relax. Ideas start to flow. You start to have fun again.
And that’s where the magic lives, in the looseness, in the experimentation, in the freedom to just try stuff without worrying how it will be judged.
You start getting out of your own way and just… create.
Even the Greats Wrote Clunkers
This might sound dramatic, but it’s true: even the most iconic artists in music history wrote a lot of forgettable songs. Most of them never saw the light of day.
The Beatles? Dozens of tracks that ended up in the bin. Prince? Famously wrote hundreds (maybe thousands) of unreleased songs. Bob Dylan? His outtakes are often more numerous than the songs on his albums.
What separates these artists is not that they never wrote “bad” songs. It’s that they just kept writing anyway.
Progress, Not Perfection
Here’s the real message: songwriting is a process, not a performance.
You’re allowed to be messy. You’re allowed to experiment. You’re allowed to write a dozen throwaways to find that one gem. It’s all part of the deal.
So next time you feel the urge to judge your latest idea before it’s even finished, stop. Just write it. Let it be what it is. You never know — that “bad” song might be the one that teaches you exactly what you need to know to write the song you’ve been dreaming of.
And that’s a pretty good trade.
Now, what about YOU?
- Have you ever written a song you thought was bad at the time, only to revisit it later with fresh ears?
- Do you struggle with perfectionism when writing?
- What helps you get over the fear of writing something that might not be “good enough”?
Let me know how you’re going on your songwriting journey. We all learn from each other.
And remember, just keep writing.
