Top 5 insights from the Throwaway Song of the Week project
After 52 weeks of weekly songs that definitely wasn’t always easily, I’ve finally reached the end of the road! Just wanted to share some quick thoughts about how it went.
1) Gratitude: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, my subscribers are my favorite people in the world! The project would have been nothing without them because the accountability of people on the other end of my emails is what kept me writing songs on the weeks when I was tired and uninspired. Most of them also sent me compliments, encouragement and/or constructive criticism at some point, all of which contributed to making me feel like what I was doing was cool, and mattered. I’m not sure I would have stuck it out without that!
2) I have a lot more music in me than I’d thought. It is actually entirely possible to keep coming up with a new song idea from scratch every week indefinitely. While I knew that career songwriters exist who write 100 songs a year or even more, I thought they were creative wizards or something. Now I know it’s not wizardry, but pure discipline.
3) Skills improvement: Obviously, with practice I just get continually better at writing (and rewriting) lyrics and music, as well as singing, playing and recording, not to mention time management and last-minute problem solving! This was true even when I half-assed it, but the more I took risks and followed my whims and had fun with it, the more I learned. However, the half-assed, often formulaic songs I wrote were surprisingly not always the worst ones, and some of them turned out to be among my favorites!
4) Self-disclosure: One of the main things I wanted to get out of this was to lose my fear of publicly releasing both imperfect work and deeply personal content. I imagined this as a learning process throughout the year. However, it seemed like the first few weeks actually broke me and I lost those fears pretty quickly. On a somewhat related note, last year, listening to amazing songwriting as an artist used to make me want to give up and curl up into the fetal position. Now it energizes and motivates me to give it my best shot. Progress.
5) Knowing I’m doing the right thing: I took a break 1/4 of the way through at a stressful time when I genuinely thought I might never be able to write music well, and secretly, I told myself, “If I can make myself stop caring about music in these two months, I’ll just quietly quit this project and songwriting and music in general.” And… I couldn’t. A lot of the improvements are slow going and come at great difficulty, but when they do, they make me happier than anything else ever has in my life. This is the thing I would work at all day if my livelihood was sorted and I didn’t actually have to work at anything. I’m doing the right thing.