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 particular kind of frustration that comes with being a songwriter who isn’t finishing songs. It’s not that you don’t care. It’s not that you’re lazy. It’s that somewhere between the idea and the finished track, something stalls. You…
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…
Ok, let’s set the scene here… You’ve got the chorus. Or at least the feeling of one, turning over in your head. You know what the song wants to say at its peak. You can hear it. Then you sit…
There’s a version of this conversation that happens in every generation of musicians. The details change, but the shape of it is always remains the same: the industry is in chaos, the money is drying up, the old rules don’t…
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…