Crossing over from twitter here because I couldn’t fit this in a tweet. Daniel was saying that he was trying to write his first original song, and implied that he might still be trying this in five years! Asked if I had any advice.
So first off I guess I would say don’t try to write one song. Instead write ten.
That sounds harder, but what I’m saying is when I started out, I was trying to write one song and I wanted it to be perfect, so every time I got halfway through something and it wasn’t perfect, I’d give up and throw it away. That’s obviously a sure-fire way to never complete a song. Aiming to write lots of songs is a good way to not get hung up on the first one being perfect, and perfection is not what you’re looking for here. Ignoring the absolute futility of aiming for perfection in an any artform ever, the most important thing when you start writing is to finish something. If it’s rubbish, that’s fine - it’s your first song, it’s supposed to be rubbish! Now it’s done move on and write another, slightly better one. Repeat that, a lot. One day you’ll realise they’ve stopped being rubbish.
If you’re anything like me, once you get into a routine, you’ll find it much easier to get through songs. I was writing for about ten years before I have enough songs to fill my first album, the songs for my latest took four months, because I made sure I wrote a song a week for those four months. Easy!*
Hope that helps, good luck!
*I’ve written about two songs since Winter came out. I’m a massive hypocrite and I need to take my own advice.
(Source: musicfromblueskies)
