Welcome to the unfulfilling, painful, frustrating world of being a songwriter.
Why do we struggle with finishing a song? That problem plagued me for years. I heard about this elusive ‘high’ people get when they finish a song and desperately craved it but somehow could never get past the second verse.
Perfectionism:
Problem: There is no point continuing this song because you can already tell it is terrible and you don't want to have to deal with the self-disappointment in having failed and ‘written a bad song’. Whereas if you leave it half finished you technically haven't failed to write a good song, you simply didn't try. Which is easier to justify to yourself.
Or even worse, no point even starting a song because you know its gonna be bad. Especially when you look at all your idols who are songwriting geniuses
Story: The ceramics teacher divided the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an “A".
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Solution: Finish the song. It doesn't matter how bad it is. Just finish it. Finish it and let it go and allow yourself to fail. Allow yourself to be totally horrible. Don’t even judge it. Don’t draw conclusions from the song about your worth and skill as a songwriter.
Even better: embrace the belief that for every good song there are 50 bad ones. All your favourite artists are the same. So write those 49 and tick them off as the bad songs you HAVE to go through to get to the 50th.
The problem with the term ‘finishing’ a song is that we often link finishing with a feeling of completion. Of ending, resolution, a ribbon, satisfaction etc. Art is however not like sports. You will NEVER have that feeling. You will always continue to want more, feel there is more to be done, hear mistakes, feel the need to edit, avoid it so you don't have to face it etc.
So embrace that. Stop searching for a feeling. You wont get it. You’ll get a lot of frustration.
2. Is it my Passion?
Problem: It is hard. It doesn't come naturally and sometimes I have to force myself to write when I don’t feel like it. So it must not be my true calling, passion etc
Story: Cal Newport argues against the ‘follow your passion’ hypothesis in his book ‘So Good they cant Ignore You’. According to the hypothesis, we all have one true ‘calling’ and once we find it we will ‘never work a day in our lives’ because we will love it so much. So god forbid you have any negative feeling when songwriting, as it must mean you are an impostor, you don't want it for the right reasons, its not your passion so you'll never be good etc
Solution: If it is something you want to be good at, stop having unrealistic expectations of how you should feel towards it. Just do it everyday like a job, in certain hours, then stop and leave it until the next day. Don’t analyse whether you feel like it today, whether you're inspired etc. Just do and then let it go.
3. Ill never be as good as ‘X’
Problem: You write the song and realize halfway that its not as good as the song that made you fall in love with music and want to be an artist and there is no point. You’ll never be as good as those musicians you admire
Solution: Take them off the pedestal. See songwriting the same way you see accounting. It is a job. Humanise your heroes
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