After a year of intensive songwriting and improvement efforts, and months of trying to record, mix and arrange as best I could, I’m finally ready to release something new! The Fine Print is the first album I’ve made all by myself that’s not acoustic. I wrote and played some electric guitar parts, and then I added some virtual drums, bass, and even strings depending on the song – and I’ve only learned how to do this stuff this year.
I had a lot of fun making this album and I’m very proud of it. Of course there’s always room to improve, but I finally feel like I’m coming into my vision of what I want to sound like. I hope everyone else will enjoy it as much as I do.
For those who are unfamiliar, the goal is simply to write 50 songs in 90 days, no rules; I did that. It was not my first intensive songwriting challenge – in 2015-16 I wrote a song a week for 52 weeks, and this year I did my first February Album Writing Month (FAWM for short, 14 songs in the month of February) – but this was definitely the most intense one I’ve done yet. My main conclusion: it wasn’t that easy, but it wasn’t so bad!
Here are a few examples of the songs I wrote (and the first three are 2020-themed, and the last two are children’s songs!):
Looking back on the songs and my experience, I definitely learned a lot to take with me into future songwriting. I thought I would write it down to cement what I learned, and perhaps it’ll be useful or interesting for someone else too.
GENERAL/MINDSET
A prolific writing challenge is the perfect time to experiment. I did this a little bit by writing on themes I normally wouldn’t and shaking up my chords and melodies with randomness or simply attempting to be different. It was fun and I think I’ve improved a little, but the next time I do this I would actually experiment a LOT more. I’d have a list of crazy ideas to shake things up and I would go through and do every single one in order.
Churning out songs (without regard to quality) is not difficult. It’s as easy as writing down a stream of consciousness lyric and the first melody that pops into your head, and you’re capable of this regardless of mood and energy level. Of course, that might not lead to a good song, but sometimes it does. And anyway, you should welcome even 50 bad songs in a row because, if you can figure out the various reasons those songs didn’t work, your next batch of songs will be infinitely better.
If it is difficult, then it’s probably a mental block. I actually anticipated this. I knew there was no way I could write 50 incredible songs in 90 days – at least some of them would have to be bad, and I’d have to be okay with that. I wrote a letter to my inner critic (I named her Sally) sympathizing with her desire to avoid embarrassment and disappointment, but reminding her that we’ll never achieve the dream of greatness if we don’t allow for works that aren’t great. In the beginning, I wrote 18 fairly lighthearted songs in less than two weeks before I began to worry about writing “album worthy” songs. I never got past that, and the rest of the challenge was 10 times harder and less fun. (Other worries, by the way, have included getting too personal and offending people.)
You will get burnt out if you try to just write and write and write with nothing in between. Between the world still being largely on lockdown and me not having much in the way of a day job or relationships at the moment, I was almost entirely focused on trying to write more and better songs for three months. If it wasn’t for the pandemic, I would have been performing, socializing, traveling, and having more life experiences. This meant that inspired moments were few and far between after a month or so. I never came up with a great solution – I just powered through the slog – but I’m curious to see if I’ll do better during a year when things are more normal.
PRACTICAL
If you want to improve your writing, a thesaurus and rhyming dictionary are invaluable. It doesn’t mean your vocabulary is inadequate, and it’s not cheating. In fact, using those tools tends to make me take a LOT longer to finish a song because I get so invested in finding the perfect word. I rarely do, but when I do it’s magnificent! And even when I don’t, I still end up with a better word than the first one I had, and I’m glad I looked it up. It’s also a good tool for exploration when you’re in the early stages of writing a song – it can spark entirely new concepts and images to add to the song.
Listening to music helps with creativity on the musical side. The more time you spend listening and the more variety, the better. It seems to give your brain an idea of the possibilities. Also, especially if you listen to songs you don’t like, it helps you refine what you like and don’t like in a song, which in turn refines your writing.
Let the song go where it needs to go. If you have a great idea, but the song starts to drift in a new direction that actually seems more coherent or impactful, no matter how much you love the original idea, let it drift. If you need to take out a line or portion that you really loved, just save it for later. Maybe it can be the main focus of an entirely different song. However, sometimes I find that my original idea just wasn’t that good and I let it go. I get enough ideas regularly (and have enough of a gigantic backlog) that I don’t need to keep bad ones.
Writing a new song from scratch in one sitting is a lot easier than stitching together several pages of disparate ideas. This is a reminder to myself that if I have an idea that inspires me, I should finish that song as soon as possible. The longer I take adding bits and pieces to it (sometimes over several years!) the less satisfied I end up being with the final product. What’s worse, sometimes so much time passes by that I lose that spark of inspiration completely and never finish the song. I have half-finished songs from when I was 16 and even younger that once lit a fire under me and now I can’t see myself ever finishing. That makes me sad. And I know that some ideas I’m passionate about today, I’ll feel that way about when I’m older, so that’s one of my motivations to finish more songs now.
If you’re uninspired or unmotivated, go (temporarily) for a frivolous or silly topic over a deeply meaningful one. It could be an idea that just popped into your head, a writing prompt, or a randomly generated title. These are also probably better options when you’re practicing new techniques, because you’re likely to take more risks and thus grow more as a writer. Your frivolous topic can sometimes even be another person’s favorite song. Just make sure you’re only using it to warm you up for those deeply held songs and don’t put them off forever, or you’ll regret it when those sparks die out.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I highly recommend these kinds of challenges to anyone who’s trying to get better at any creative skill. You will get better, but more than that, I am concrete proof that even if you’re prone to perfectionism and procrastination, you can train yourself to just get on with it. Not everything you write will be good, but it will be done. And some of it will be good.
I did “behind the song” blog series for both of my last two albums, and some people seem to like them, so I thought I would do it again! “The Difference Between” is the final track from my latest release, Better. For convenience, the lyrics and YouTube & Spotify streams are at the bottom of this post.
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This is my only cheat song on Better that I actually wrote years ago, around 2017. All the rest of the songs I wrote this past February. Even though I always liked it ever since I wrote it, for some reason I didn’t think it was worth releasing at first because it felt too short and simple. And okay, I know most of my songs are simple, but most of them aren’t this short!
I don’t want to go into too much detail about the inspiration for privacy reasons. But generally speaking, it’s about people who get into music for the wrong reasons. I’m not talking about people who just like to party and are hoping to get rich and famous – I mean, good luck with that, but if that’s the dream that makes you happy and you’re not hurting anyone with it, more power to you.
It’s more about people who think that music gives them status (rich and famous or not), and that’s the only reason they do it. While I like to think they are not the majority, unfortunately there are a lot of people like this. Unfortunately, music does tend to confer status more often than not, and so people with these kinds of tendencies are attracted to it as a career/hobby. I’ve occasionally been mistreated by people like that, and seen others mistreated, because once they got a bit of power they couldn’t bear to make room for anyone new, lest it take away from how special they were. Basically, just like in any other facet of life, these are insecure people who feel like they have to build themselves up by tearing other people down (or at least holding other people down).
The worst part is I’m sure I’ve got a long road ahead of me dealing with people like that for the rest of my life! But don’t worry, a few bad apples is not nearly enough of a reason for me to give up on the only thing in life that’s ever meant something to me. I’m here to stay regardless of these experiences.
I actually wrote the lyrics to this song pretty fast, and I’m proud of them. They seemed to be more vivid than most of my other lyrics, especially back then – I like to think I’ve gotten better with hard work and practice. I think it was just because I was so fired up when I wrote it that it just poured out of me! I even found it easier than usual to come up with (near) rhymes. I actually like every part of it – amazingly, for once I have no complaints on the lyrics – but some of my favorite parts are the “getting the gold” and “foot in the door” verses. I read those lines and I’m just like, damn, I can be good with words sometimes (just not nearly often enough, haha).
And then of course I like the ending – I thought “scrounging together pennies to pay my bills” was an apt contrast for being the leader of the pecking order. And honestly, it’s accurate for me. Not that I’m not ambitious and wouldn’t love to be recognized on my merits and be financially comfortable someday… but if I only ever make enough to live on, I’ll still feel very fortunate to be able to do that. And I have met a lot of people for whom that is not remotely the case!
Musically, I wanted it to be a simple acoustic punk song, a genre I’ve always preferred even though most of my songs don’t fit neatly into it. I like to think this one does. And while I definitely think I’ve written better songs since then, and I know the melody is very simple, I still really like this song.
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LYRICS The difference between you and me Is with me you get what you see And I’m capable of love and it’s free
And you’re too focused on the fact that The only way to get the gold is if it’s yours and yours alone And everybody else goes home empty-handed I would be surrounded by a few who Encourage everything I do but always try to speak the truth Before I’d have an army to be my yes men
And you’re not interesting, you’re interested In looking cool and talking shit Where everything’s about the drink And I just want to leave ‘cause it’s not my style And well, sometimes I wonder if it’s even worth The struggle and the pain and hurt To get my foot inside the door When I’m out in the cold and you’re waving from the inside
The difference between you and me is in the dream I want to scrounge together pennies from this work to pay my bills someday And what I want I will achieve You want to be the leader of the pecking order till you’re old and gray And you will never be happy.