How Do You Start Writing Songs?
No matter the books that can be read about it, the years of instrumental practice that can be put in, or the cover songs that can be played ad nauseum, every songwriter from Bob Dylan to Brian Davis has that moment when they actually have to start writing; the moment when the rubber finally meets the road and every intangible, ethereal desire to "write songs" is forced into the Terrordome where your lyrics and melodic notes are on a page for the first time.
There was a gap of about three years between when I bought my first guitar and when I tried to write my first song. On a nondescript payday from my bowling alley job (where I was making a cool $6/hour), I went to Elmore's music with two of my friends to get a guitar that ended up being a $175 Dean Vendetta electric that currently sits, like some broken, holy artifact, in the back of my closet without strings or a bridge. It seems I mostly made this purchase on a whim that my 18-year-old self decided to prioritize, a momentary decision that ended up being life-altering of the highest order.
This could have been the moment when the romanticism of it all came together. But in a reflection of what life often looks like on the ground, the guitar instead sat quietly in my bedroom for the better part of the next two years, picked up only occasionally to play the couple of riffs I had learned on my brother's guitar years prior -- the opening riff to Metallica's "Unforgiven" and the main riff to David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World." Though like most children of the 1990s, it was Nirvana's cover on Unplugged in the New York that was the culprit as to why I knew or cared about that song.
My introduction to the guitar was a slowly trickling faucet. I would learn a few chord shapes from my older brother over a few months and would hear my first distant hope a couple of months later when I began strumming along to the Decemberists' "Eli, the Barrow Boy". I was terrible, but this marked the first time I could hear what I was trying to do; I could hear the bones of what it was supposed to sound like. The level of excitement that this development stirred in me was the true catalyst; I started playing the guitar every day.
Interest and growth aren't always linear, and because you don't care about it now doesn't mean you won't care about it later. It's also a cautionary tale about believing that the people who do these things successfully were always predisposed to do it. Nonsense.
So, how did I start writing that first song? As with all empires, it started with a theft.
Trying to tackle the mountain of writing your own lyrics is hard enough on its own, but it's even harder when you're learning an instrument --your first instrument, no less-- at the same time. It feels like you have no anchor, no lamppost to set out from. Instead, you're just floating in a maelstrom of unknowns. You have no place to start.
The lyrics always felt the more vulnerable venture. Apart from the performance itself, the lyrics were the aspect of songwritng that I was most likely to be dismissed on. I had heard enough stories about many of the best songs in the world being of the three-chord variety. I didn't need to be virtuosic to be taken seriously in the world of songwriting. What I needed was decent lyrics. So, naturally, I stole some.
But what I stole was from traditional music databases, so negative legal consequences were minimal. Digging through dozens of songs from the British Isles, I would find lyrics or stories I liked and then start composing my own melodies behind them. It was crude, but it's how the pen started hitting the paper. I ruined “The Golden Vanity,” “Lily of the West,” and “The Rose of Tralee” in their turn, dicing up their age-tested melodies and replacing them with the slow, plodding chord structures of a new guitar player.
I took so much pleasure in those songs. Without actually listening to anything, I crafted my own melodies from what the lyrics inspired. In the hands of a seasoned musician, such a strategy might have had compelling results, as each of those songs could be reimagined without any influence from previous versions. In my hands, however, it was like unleashing disasters on a SimCity metropolis that someone else had built, “oohing” and “ahhing” as the tornado you summoned obliterates a fifty-story skyscraper.
Eventually, "The Golden Vanity" stared back at me with a repetitive D-minor/A-minor chord progression that I had written. The lyrics --a maritime tale of a sucker cabin boy being promised maiden daughters and endless wealth in exchange for sinking an enemy ship only to be left to drown after doing the deed-- were dark and sad, so I naturally thought minor key. I would later find out that "The Golden Vanity" is almost always in a major key. Without even realizing it, I had made my first intellectual songwriting decision.
Over the years, I have had people ask me "how do you write a song?" When they ask this, they aren't asking me how I write a song, but rather how does anyone manage to do this thing that feels so foreign and mysterious? They aren't asking for the step-by-step process, and they aren't asking for the deepest crevices of my creative process. They are asking because they have no idea how to harness that creative inertia they know they have. Like me twenty years ago, they don't know where to start.
The place to start is to find an anchor --any anchor. That might be doing what I did and finding someone else's words, or maybe someone else's music, but it can also be a non-musical anchor. Maybe it's an idea, a character, a setting, even a standalone phrase. Anything can be used as a means to stop your drifting.
The paralysis can come from thinking that that anything has to be important, or significant, or brilliant, or transformative. In the earliest days of my songwriting, my songs were all about (immature) relationship angst, pseudo-emotional observations about the world, or clumsy attempts to tie those two things together. That need drowned those songs in hollow, weak language --language that very much sounded like something missing that foundational anchor. Now, I write songs about crickets underneath my front door and Wisconsin museum exhibits. Quality can be subjective, but you can't deny how different those approaches are.
It took me years to implement these things --years of music that you will no longer find anywhere online. Lesser Tragedies was released in 2013, but I had been recording since 2008. There is absolutely a reason that those five years of songs are sitting sheepishly on my computer and nowhere else--they are the heartwarming, deeply embarrassing reminders of how terrible I was, but also of how far I've come.
And the only thing I needed to do was keep showing up and realize that everything, anything was the possible anchor that my songs so desperately needed. I didn't need to tell my audience how the world worked, but rather just give a glimpse of the world working. And then to never throw that glimpse away, no matter how seemingly insignificant it was.