I know it’s different for everyone, but for me all songs start with a feeling: I feel songs, I don’t hear them. It took a long time to become aware of this fact, that realization only took place in the last year. In other words, I was involved in the process quite successfully before I began to understand how the process actually worked. In conducting a thought experiment around this process, I’ll state that when I feel a song I “become” it in some sense, and once I’ve become the song I know how to write it, or at least write enough of it that I can use existing songwriting structures and modalities to animate the truth of the song. If that’s done with honesty and if the feeling of the song is kept central (this is where the writer puts their ego aside) a song that’s authentic is created.
Well worn wide awake music: The mystery of songwriting part 1
As I’ve been turning towards music more in the last couple of years I’ve been experiencing increased success with songwriting (“Increased success” can best be understood as writing better songs with less effort.) I’d been writing songs for many years, but I finally began to consider making an album when the songs I was writing felt “right.” What does that mean exactly?
Searcher Thinker Singer Songwriter...Blogger?
The time has come…I’m adding a blog to my website, well, added if you’re reading this. It’s a funny thing, blogs and me, as I’ve attempted to start them before but could never gain any traction. Each previous attempt has fizzled, sinking deep into the mire of lost web content--all those thoughts and emotions gone forever--not just from me, but from the millions of others who thought they’d give blogging a go only to relent when they failed to achieve any reasonable semblance of readership.
This time may be different though. For starters, this blog wasn’t really my idea, at least not at first. The blog was suggested to me as being a good driver of web traffic, for giving fans something more to find on my website, and for aiding in search engine optimization; all of the above really. It took me a while to warm to the notion...