Songwriting doesn’t begin when you pick up a guitar, sit at a piano, or open a DAW. It begins much earlier than that. It begins in how you move through the world, how you notice things, and how you respond…
Songwriters and authors don’t often get mentioned in the same breath, but they wrestle with remarkably similar problems. Yet there’s one area where authors often have a quieter advantage: they tend to think long-term by default. Songwriters, on the other…
One of the quiet truths about songwriting is that you’re working with the smallest canvas in all of storytelling. A novel can wander for chapters. A film can take two hours to build a world. A songwriter gets a verse,…
People love the idea of sudden inspiration. It’s dramatic. It feels mystical. It makes for a good story. But the truth underneath it all is far less glamorous and far more useful: the songwriters who win the long game aren’t…
John Steinbeck wasn’t a songwriter, but he knew something about creativity that every songwriter eventually bumps into: the moment you start editing too early, the whole thing can fall apart. He once wrote… “Write freely and as rapidly as possible…
Every songwriter, no matter how long they’ve been at it, eventually runs into that quiet moment where the question sneaks in… Why am I doing this? It rarely arrives with fireworks. It shows up late at night when you’re stuck…
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.”— Charles Bukowski There’s a brutal kind of beauty in that quote. Bukowski wasn’t talking about songwriting, but he might as well have been. Because if you’re serious…
You know that folder… the one with 147 unfinished demos? We all have it (I know I do). Verse fragments. Voice memos. Half-formed chorus ideas that once lit a fire, only to fade into digital dust. It’s not that those…
Rick Rubin once said, “The audience comes last” and in a time where songwriters are constantly told to build a fan-base, game the algorithm, and tailor their songs to what’s trending, this statement might sound radical. But for anyone who’s…