There’s quite a bit of pressure building in the creative world right now. Open your email and autocomplete finishes your sentences. Turn on the TV and there’s another ad telling you to let AI do your writing for you.
It seems that the message, whether intentional or not, is clear: your voice isn’t really necessary.
Marty Dodson and Clay Mills from SongTown push back hard against that idea. In a recent video, they lay out nine very good reasons why writing songs matters, regardless of whether those songs ever find an audience.
It’s definitely worth unpacking.
1. Most people want to do it. Few actually do.
Think about how many people have said “I’d love to write a song one day.” Now think about how many actually sit down and do it. There’s a HUGE gap here.
When you write a song, even one that never leaves your notebook or your voice memo, you’ve crossed a line that most people never cross. And here’s something worth remembering: being a songwriter doesn’t require having songs recorded or charting or winning awards.
If you write songs, you’re a songwriter. Full stop.
2. Talent matters less than you think
A lot of people talk themselves out of writing before they even start. They assume they’re not talented enough, not musical enough, not something enough.
Marty and Clay have both watched writers come into co-writing sessions looking completely lost, and then go on to write genuinely great songs. What changed?
They learned. They put in the reps. Passion and repetition will outwork raw talent most of the time, and they’ll absolutely outwork the version of you that never tried.
3. It grows you as a person
There’s a particular satisfaction that comes from building something from nothing. Marty puts it well when he talks about growing up on a farm and the feeling at the end of a harvest season, knowing you were there from the first seed.
Writing a song has that same quality. You take a blank page, a feeling, a half-formed idea, and you shape it into something that didn’t exist before.
That process changes you, regardless of what happens to the song afterward.
4. Doing hard things builds confidence
Trying something difficult and surviving it, even failing at it, gives you something. Clay shares a story about auditioning for a show at Opryland, getting the polite rejection letter, and realising that the world didn’t end. That experience gave him the nerve to try the next thing.
There’s a phrase that came up in their conversation that’s worth sitting with: fall reaching. If you’re going to fail, fail while you’re reaching for something. That’s a very different kind of life than playing it safe.
5. It trains your focus
Songs are a tight format. Three minutes, maybe three and a half. You have to tell your whole story inside that window, which means you have to make choices. What stays, what goes, what really matters.
That kind of disciplined focus is actually unusual in daily life, and it’s useful well beyond the writing room.
6. The skills transfer
Songwriting teaches you to tell stories. And storytelling turns out to be one of the most transferable skills there is.
Marty has done a lot of corporate training over the years, and sales professionals tell him consistently that learning the basics of songwriting helped them communicate better, persuade more naturally, and connect with the people they were talking to.
If you’re a songwriter, you’re also developing skills that show up in how you write, how you speak, and how you connect with people generally.
7. It helps you find your people
Clay tells a story about going to songwriter Skip Ewing’s place for dinner, and the moment when the conversation took off and he realised, these are my people.
Not people who think the same about everything, but people whose brains work a similar way. Always listening for the double meaning, playing with language, finding the angle in everything.
Marty and Clay’s online community, SongTown was built on exactly this idea. Songwriters who feel isolated, who don’t have other writers around them, find community with people who get it. That’s worth a lot.
8. You might inspire someone without knowing it
Even a messy, imperfect attempt at something can move other people to try. Marty tells a story about playing the Bluebird early in his career and flubbing a performance, and the audience waiting patiently for him to get it together.
Nobody laughed. They just empathised.
And then there’s the more quietly powerful version of this. Marty wrote a song for Clay Walker that became a hit.
He wrote it as a love song. But someone came up to him after a show and told him that during the two years her husband was bedridden at the end of his life, that song got her through. He had no way of knowing that when he wrote it.
Now, what if he hadn’t written it?
9. The win is becoming a songwriter
Not the plaques. Not the chart positions. Not someone else’s validation.
Marty and Clay both make this point clearly: if you write songs and you put your voice out into the world, that’s the win.
Whether ten people hear it or ten million, the act of creating something real and human and yours is what matters.
A lot of people write to SongTown asking whether they’re “good enough” to be a songwriter. The answer is always the same: if you wrote a song, you’re a songwriter. Don’t ever hand that decision to someone else.
My Final Thought
In a world that’s getting noisier about telling you your creative voice isn’t needed, writing songs is quietly radical. It’s an insistence that what you feel and think and want to say matters enough to be made into something.
Even though that’s always been the truth. It’s just worth saying out loud right now.
