When you turn on the radio and tune in a music station, why do you do that? Are you waiting to hear a great guitar solo? Drum solo? Or...bass solo? I don't think so.
You want to hear a song that is going to reach into your heart and express exactly how you feel in that moment, or how you have been feeling, what you've been going through, what you've been experiencing, or lamenting a lost love, finding new love, and well... expressing something you believe.
The guitar solo or other elements that may be part of the song (for good or ill) are just an added benefit (hopefully) that makes the song all that much better, but the song can exist without it... should be able to stand up without it.
No matter what instrument you compose music upon, the rules, the inspiration, the excitement should be there. Now, I know that sometimes writing a song can be similar to one of the twelve labours of Heracles (Hercules to you who don't read Greek Classic Works); I know I sometimes go through great painful trials when trying to get a song out. But it is part of the process, part of the experience. What woman, when the child arrives, remembers the labour pains that preceded the birth?
The analogy to child birth is not without relevance here. Sometimes great pains are experienced, as I mentioned, in the creation process. You should never seek to avoid this, ever. Some of the best music ever written took not only great pains to compose, but some took many years to complete. This is a fact in the reality of song writing.
Shania Twain relates a story that when she arrived in Nashville, the label greeted her and then on her "first day" as a signed artist, they took her into a room where there were a few other people. She asked, "Who are they?", to which the label representative responded, "They are your writing team." Shania was rather a bit surprised because she had always written on her own. She was told, "It's the way we do things here." She didn't know the "Nashville Way", the system employed in the Country Music business in writing music. It is a team effort - particularly for "new" artists - the label uses to create music and maintain control over the process. They don't care how good your songs are, unless they really are amazing (think Taylor Swift - yes, yes, get over it; her songs speak to a whole demographic and do so with amazing results because she is one of them). You will follow their method, a method with a proven track record, and that is that.
So, eight hours a day, like a regular "job", Shania was thrown into a writing process to create new songs that would appear on her album. She was part of the process because, a) she was a song writer, and b) to give her at least token input on the material, even if her name ultimately would not appear in the writing credit. She said it was the weirdest most uncomfortable process. But she adapted. Shania's first album did not sell well at all. This demonstrates two things:
First, too many "cooks" can spoil the meal. With so many people involved in the writing process, it becomes writing by committee. No one person's opinion - even if it is a great idea - will necessarily prevail unless the "committee" agrees. So a "thread" gets pulled left, right and center, and often a great idea comes unraveled, which means that a potentially great song gets wiped out because too many voices had a say in the make up of the idea, the outcome of the lyric, everything. On the other hand, the committee may find a rough cut jewel in the midst of the morass and pull that out and then work together to ensure they craft a great song. Ironically, while there are a whole lot of wankers that come out of this process, there are an equal or greater number of gems that come out, too. It does work.
Second, good songs do not always come as a result of any specific formula. In the case of Shania's first album, it was quite mundane and didn't produce anything noteworthy or memorable. They used a system that had a proven track record for success. Here we had a singer/song writer with talent and a great voice being marginalized because the system, the Nashville Way, took prescedence over the organic process. Add to this that Shania did not have a "proven" track record of success. So they went with what traditionally worked, but in this case, it did not work.
For her second album, Mutt Lange came on board - at his own request - to produce the project. He saw her talent and encouraged it. That second album blew the charts wide open. Nashville really didn't understand the talent they had in hand until that second album came out. And Mutt Lange taking interest made it happen. Had he not gotten involved, Shania probably would have made it, she is that good, but it would have been a far different journey.
There is a cautionary note to make here, though. We can make a system like a stable of song writers work, and make it work quite well. But if we rely upon that system as the only way something should be done, particularly with singers who do not write their own material, it will inevitably fail at some point. Conversely, we can rely upon a proven single or duo writing team that also works quite well.
The challenge is to make the committee method more intuitive, more open to letting someone "lead", particularly when the person's ideas are making things work, even acknowledging the need to back away when someone is on a roll. It's okay to let one person author a tune when in a team writing situation. And I'm sure that in some instances this does happen. The writing team would be foolish to discourage this kind of creativity.
Remember, too, without songs, singers have nothing to sing about. It's a symbiotic relationship. You write, they sing. You need each other to be complete.
In my forty years of writing music, I have found that I go through cycles. These cycles are of an ebb and flow variety. Some periods, lasting days or weeks, I sit down at the instrument and great things come out without even trying. Other periods, no matter what I do, nothing worthwhile comes out. This same cyclical flow affects the Nashville machine, too. It affects great song writers and mediocre song writers.
The great song writers go through dry spells, which can last months or years. Sometimes they will take on a writing partner to stir things up, to inject another view into the mix. It may become a permanent team effort or be a temporary arrangement until the slump ends. Some writers rotate those with whom they write, moving from writing alone to taking on a particular partner for certain kinds of projects.
The mediocre song writers can have that "one hit wonder" and never write a good song again. That's why they're mediocre; they cannot produce with any reliable consistency, don't know how or will not listen to (or learn from) those that do know how. They refuse to change their process, are generally "lone wolf" writers and will not partner up, even if it means gaining more success. They simply bludgeon their way through life thinking that next great song is coming.
Robert Heinlein, noted Science Fiction writer, made a very salient statement, I may have noted in a previous article. But it bears repeating: "The writer who waits for inspiration starves."
The real point here is simple: If you are going to become a song writer, you have to write. It doesn't matter if what you write is any good or not. It doesn't matter if what you write is in a style you hate. Do not interfere with the process! Write. Write what ever comes out. Write because you have to write. Write because it is the very process of writing that gives you information, experience and knowledge you need to learn, to improve, to get better. If you only write when you feel like it, you won't write very much.
If you get a brilliant idea, don't stop and admire your work. Keep going. The idea itself may not result in a whole song that day, that week or even that month. And sometimes it will never be finished. That's okay. I've written a ton of song bits that never resulted in a finished tune. Sometimes, though, those unrealized bits come to matter because you'll be writing something else totally unrelated, maybe a year or more later, and suddenly you'll remember you wrote this bit that will fit quite nicely into the song.
But, if you don't keep pushing away at that idea to learn what is supposed to come next, what the next progression or lyric is, you will lose everything and the great idea will continue to be just that, an idea.
I can't tell you how many ideas I've had and lost because I didn't write them down. Got that? WRITE DOWN YOUR IDEAS! You may not know how to write notation. It doesn't matter. You need to develop some way to put ideas to paper so you can remember them. Create your own form of short hand, or learn basic ideas like the Nashville System (numbers/intervals used to identify chord positions relative to one another, you know I, IV, V type stuff) Or, because of the derth of cheap recording devices, record the idea and then make verbal notes about the idea, how you're playing it, any odd aspects, everything you require to help you remember everything so you can play the idea exactly the way you did at the inception of the inspiration.
There is no reason for you to lose another idea ever. If you are not writing down or recording your concepts, you're an idiot plain and simple. Harsh? Sure, but it is all too true. Okay, sometimes you're nowhere near your gear and can't "capture" the idea. Well, yes, actually, you can. If you learn the major scale, you know: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, si, do, then you have everything you need to find the intervals in the progression you're humming in your head. Get a piece of paper and write it down.
Okay, for those of you who don't quite understand, here is the guide:
Remember that the 2 (re) is also a 9 and the 4 (fa) is also an 11 and the 6 (la) is also a 13. This should give you the information you need to be able to scribble an idea. Musicians typically write out the chords using Roman Numerals: Capitals means MAJOR, lower case means minor.
Example: Minor Blues Progression:
The information after the i or the IV is the chord type, in this case a minor 7 for the i chord and the ii chord and a dominant 7 for the IV and the V chords. So the Progression, if we assign it a specific key would be Am7, D7 and E7 respectively with a Bm7 tossed in for the turnaround, as they occur, the i, ii, IV and V chord.
For other chord types, you could write them thusly: Imaj7; vii7♭5; Vaug. Well, you get the idea.
You can write it out just as I did for the example; if you need further clarity, you can write out the basic tempo, say around 110 beats per minute (bpm) and say, "shuffle feel", to speak to the approach. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
It would also be a good idea to learn simple notation stuff, like NOTE VALUES, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, whole notes, half notes, as well as triplets as they apply to "3 over 1" and "3 over 2" concepts. (I will have this information elsewhere on this site at some point so you won't have to look far.) The reason is you may need a very special note for the end of a progression or a break of some kind that does something slightly outside the norm. If you can write out the feel via note value description, you will then know absolutely how the progression, break or whatever it is, is suppose to sound. Do not rely upon your memory to keep that information. You will lose it. Trust me. Memory works, but not as well as you might think. And if it is a particularly cool idea, you definitely want to be writing it down so you will not have to wrack your brain trying to remember what it was you did when you were at that truck stop outside Sheridan, Wyoming.
The fruit of our labours is the finished song or lyric set, not the idea, not the half composed music or words. Without the whole, the piece is just an orphaned bit we created without context. The fruit of our labours is the sculpture, the painting, the drawing, the sketch, whatever we create to be a finished work.
The tools, the resources we use to craft our product - yes, songs are product, just as a work of art is a product - need to be understood. As I outlined above, there are things you can do that don't require you be around an instrument to be able to capture ideas. I've written entire compositions this way (minus the lyric, which was written later). And on some occasions, I've not had to make even one minor adjustment or correction once I was able to sit down at an instrument and play through the written concept I took the time to scribble down on the paper towel I got at that restaurant in another state.
If you're going to have the greatest opportunity for success, you really need to be able to operate in any situation when an idea hits you. I've pulled over to the side of the road; I've gone to a pay phone and called my answering machine at home and hummed an idea and spoke some notes afterward (all this before mobile recording devices were practical). You do whatever you have to do to make it possible to capture every idea that actually sound like it might really be able to become a real song.
Who knows, you may just find you created the germ of what will turn out to be the song that puts you on the map as a "go to" song writer.