Has this happened to you?

You open your DAW of choice and import or create a drum loop or a beat. Next, you play around on the guitar or a keyboard for a while and, after a time, you’ve got some chords or a riff that you really like. Maybe you flesh it out with some overdubs. Eventually you’ve got a track.

Now flash forward a month or so and you’ve got a hard drive full of 20 to 30 of those tracks, but none of them have managed to magically transform themselves into actual, full fledged songs, with a lyric and a melody and a clear point of view. We’ve all done this, and I'm not suggesting that this method can’t ever yield a good finished result. But I am suggesting that it’s often not the best way to begin and moreover that if it’s your only method you might want to seriously rethink.

Starting Before You’re Ready

Part of this has to do with the ease with which we can put together rather complete sounding tracks these days. When all you had was an acoustic guitar and a notebook, or perhaps also a cassette recorder (luxury!), the songwriting process had to be perforce different. But the question remains as to whether these modern convenience abilities are really leading us to better songs or whether they’re more often leading us down blind alleys toward dead ends.

Some of us have had the opportunity to be asked to write a song for a specific purpose. Perhaps it’s a TV show or a movie. And in those cases there is usually a quite specific brief: “in this scene, lead character wanders the streets after coming to the realisation he’s falling for the co-lead character. Song should express the joy and uncertainty of falling in love.” So you have a theme and to some degree a mini-plot. Do you write I’ve Just Seen A Face? Could It Be I’m Falling In Love? Something’s Telling Me It Might Be You? There She Goes?

Where would your mind go with such a brief?

But without that film director giving you a task, you can certainly create the movie in your own mind and start with a premise or ‘scene’ of your own making. But try starting with what your song is about, rather than from the music up.

Having Something To Say

Some of the world’s greatest lyricists (the Springsteens and Dylans) keep notebooks of lines and ideas that pop into their heads or snippets of conversations they’ve had or even overheard. Then when they’re stuck for an idea, or just a line, they’ll pour back over those notes and look for inspiration.

Starting with the idea as to what the song has to be ‘about’ and then moving on to perhaps that t-shirt title as the hook/refrain/chorus, is almost certainly going to get you moving toward a complete song in a way that putting up a drum loop and free associating just is not. You want to paint the picture first, and only then think about the perfect frame and lighting and wall placement; not the other way round!

Along those lines, it’s also worth talking about demos.

Most people these days consider the demo as the start of making the record, rather than as a separate endeavour. I’m not so sure that’s always the best idea. The point of a demo is right in the name; it’s to demonstrate an idea or approach. There’s nothing at all wrong with recording your ideas to have them as future reference or to sort through and pick the best songs for an album, for example. But it’s way too easy to find yourself going down the rabbit hole of overdubbing and processing and mixing and trying to make your demo the ‘record’ way before you know if the song is worth finishing, and in many cases before there isn’t even a song yet!

In their earlier writing days, Lennon and McCartney used to sit opposite each other with acoustic guitars and write, singing back and forth at each other. Refining it and changing it as they went until they thought they had it. But they never wrote anything down because, as they said, “If we can’t remember it then certainly no one else would!” There’s also something to be said for making the recording process special. To knowing you have that magic song that now needs to be made into the best version of itself that it can be.

That discovery process is part of the joy of making a record. But it’s a different and separate process from the creation of the song.

Listen to the acoustic demos of John Lennon writing Strawberry Fields Forever.

This has almost nothing in common with the iconic final version, put together from two wildly different visions of arrangements and vari-speeded into place via a brilliant edit. But the song was there that was worth all those experiments and perambulations.

Of course write any way that works for you. My is question is does it work for you?  Is your workflow an actual flow, or just a few short steps to that dead end?

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