Songs Are Written Not Born
Songwriting puzzles me.
Writing a rough draft of lyrics is much more challenging for me than a rough draft of prose.
They’re distinct crafts, understand that. But why is my experience so different?!
Image by Aliko Sunawang.
In both, I mix words to paint a portrait of a story or an idea. The entire dictionary of words is available and I possess a sprawling creative freedom.
I pay attention to pacing, rhythm, and cadence. The length of the words and qualities of their sounds mingle to produce a soundscape, heard aloud or audiated in the reader’s mind.
What about the contrasts?
Lyrics, like poetry, generally fit a specific metre. They also map onto a sung melody so there are questions of accent placement and how long a syllable can be drawn out without becoming awkward.
Prose is not beholden to those metric constraints. It conveys rhythm and pace through sentence and word length, grammatical structures, and intensity of the content. It has a distinct history of literary conventions to follow, adapt, or eschew.
Much is different, to be sure… but those differences are not the ones preoccupying me.
I’m hung up on the head games I have to play.
Like many other writers, I’m cursed with a drive to generate a finished product with my first attempt. My mind figures I should be able to put down a complete, excellent work in the same length of time it takes someone to consume it. But this never happens!
A first draft is wandering and slow. Most of the time it is a process of learning. The task of making it presentable comes later.
To accommodate this, I’ve found certain analogies helpful: archeology, choreography, exploration of a wilderness. All of them involve steps of solo discovery before ever bringing someone along to see what I’ve found. I have to learn what is there before I can experiment with the best way to show someone.
Writing the first draft of this post, I am comforted by the knowledge that this is solitary exploration. People will only read a more refined tour through these thoughts.
But songwriting…
Oh boy…
I have no mental furniture to host the same patience!
When I put my hands on a musical instrument or put a pen to a note book, I still feel enormous pressure to birth a fully-grown song.
They are different crafts, I understand that.
But why is my mental resilience not transferable between them?!
Has the practice I’ve put into writing stories, scripts, articles, marketing assets, academic papers, and more not shaped my mind enough to reliably keep all first drafts in perspective?
When I began this blog, I planned to spend the week songwriting every day. I wanted to apply my prose writing analogies to the process and narrate the journey of successful growth.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, songwriting proved as intimidating as ever.
Each attempt is still frightening.
It would seem building mental strategies for a distinct skillset is a learning process just like each new draft. There may be transferable practices between the two crafts. But transferal may not be as simple as I thought.
Still learning!