As I’ve been spending a bit more of limited free time with my guitar, I have started to notice that I’m learning what works for me in terms of songwriting.
When I was first starting to write songs, I would read everything that I could about how to write songs and I expected that to help me but mostly I got frustrated because I didn’t really understand that songwriting isn’t and shouldn’t be something that is forced. It may have worked for the hit factories when Motown was churning out hits, but it doesn’t work for someone that tries to write songs that they can actually feel.
Then, I went through a long phase where I was constantly writing down lyrics and trying to make them fit whatever music I could come up with afterward. This resulted in some of my worst songs.
Now, for that past year, I’ve been working the other way around. I know that “lyrics first” works for some people and it works really well but as I’ve been writing slower and working on figuring out if each song is really worth my time, I have definitely been focusing on getting the base of the song right.
And the songs that I’ve managed so far are starting to sound much more coherent than my previous attempts. What I mean by that is I feel like they are all part of a bigger project. I feel like I’m writing an album rather than a bunch of singles. I don’t feel like I have to engineer them into a cohesive unit when it comes time to record them. They already feel like they belong together.
