The Songwriter’s Mindset

As we touched on in the introduction to this chapter, Songwriting is a deeply personal thing. Not only is your own taste and aesthetic judgement crucial, at its best Songwriting means expressing the emotions and ideas that are most significant and personal to you as an individual.

This means that it is particularly important to be mindful of the Heart: all the emotional and psychological aspects of taking on this task, both the positive and the challenging.

Remember the Pillar Belief of Enjoying the Journey (Chapter 2: Mindset) and the principle that “creativity is the vehicle, not the destination”. Even if your Big Picture Vision has you writing incredible songs that blow people away and stand the test of time as classics, you will have the most success if you focus primarily on enjoying the experience of expressing your own creativity. Try to see the final songs which emerge as a happy byproduct of time spent delighting purely in the experience of creating.

Put Your Inner Critic On Hold

One of the biggest tips I can give you is to very intentionally fire your “Inner Critic”. That voice in your head that tells you “it’s no good”, “that sounds rubbish”, “you never come up with anything worth listening to”, or whatever other negative, judgemental, or discouraging thoughts pop into your head.

The trick is to not try to argue with it, or even to suppress those thoughts by brute force. Instead, we acknowledge that this voice exists and that it has things to say—and we invite it to wait its turn.

During the act of creating, we want to turn off that “inner editor” entirely. Self-critique has its place, but just like a literary writer must write before an editor can edit, we must allow ourselves the free creative space to come up with ideas and capture them, quite separate from any critique, editing, or judgement.

Our members have found this a really helpful mindset principle: to not fight against that Inner Critic, but to simply put it aside “for now”, making a promise to listen to it later on. And that’s a promise you have my full permission to break ;)

We’ll discuss this more in Chapter 18: Performance.

Make It A Habit

A common piece of advice is to make writing a habit, and that’s very good advice indeed. Like anything related to musicality, you do need to “put in the reps” to improve. Not mindlessly, and not allowing it to become a dreaded burden. But forming a habit of writing something every day, for example, will do wonders for how creative you are in your writing and how easy you find it to write music you’re happy with.

If you take the approach presented here, you’ll find there’s always something interesting to do next with your Songwriting, and (just like with Ear Training) “a little and often” tends to work best.

Share Your Creations

One of the most challenging Heart aspects of Songwriting is sharing your music with others. We’ll talk about this more in Chapter 18: Performance, but just know that it’s perfectly normal to be shy and nervous to share what you’ve written. But the strong emotion there also points to the enormous power in learning to do so!

One of the most impactful books I read in my 20s was “Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway” by Susan Jeffers. The big takeaway was that fear isn’t an indicator to avoid something—it’s most often a good indicator that that’s the direction we need to move in, if we’re to grow and improve—and that rather than try to eliminate fear, we simply need to practice being okay with doing something through the fear.

So if Songwriting is new to you, or you haven’t been comfortable sharing what you wrote in the past, try to start being more willing to share your creations with others.

It is important to be thoughtful about who you choose to share with. One of the parts of Musical U that I’m most proud of is how friendly and supportive the community is, and whether it’s there, or with trusted friends, or some other group of people you can rely on to encourage rather than tear down what you share, make it a priority to find a way to share what you write.

Not only can this be huge for motivation and provide objective feedback on what you’ve created, ultimately music is a social artform and if we’re not sharing our music, we’re missing out. Although it may seem like this would flip your Inner Critic into overdrive, with the right person it can actually help you to “get out of your head” and move forwards.

You may even consider collaborating with other musicians. This can be enormously rewarding, not just for motivation and to reduce musical loneliness, but also to make writing easier for you. If some of the elements we cover in this chapter feel “easy” for you while others are intimidating or challenging, you may turn out to be the mirror image of another musician you know, who would love to partner up. In the immortal words of Captain Planet, “Let your powers combine!”

Document The Process

With Songwriting we generally have in mind the end product we’re aiming for, i.e. a song, or other piece of “finished” music. But our desire to have that end product be the best it can be often actually sabotages us, by making us resistant or unwilling to document things that feel far from “good enough” yet.

However there’s no doubt that the more you document the process, the easier it will be to get to a final result you’re happy with. That means jotting down lyric ideas, making notes on what you worked on each day, recording little sung melody fragments, or even recording very rough takes of very early, half-finished songs.

Try to be organised. For example, if you’re keeping notes digitally, come up with a naming convention for files and/or a structure of folders to use consistently. This makes it much easier to return to earlier ideas and keep track of what stage different projects are at.

This point ties in with sharing and collaborating (don’t be afraid to share early drafts and ideas) and with making it a habit (because with a stash of notes, recordings and ideas, there will always be something to work on next).

Don’t Put Songwriting In A Box

Like we said at the outset, what’s presented here is an approach to Songwriting which is designed to be part of your overall holistic musical development i.e. your musicality.

So don’t treat Songwriting as an activity separate from other things you might be working on. You can “mine for diamonds” in your Improvisation practice, you can find inspiration and greater understanding through your Active Listening, you can let Creative Superlearning spawn new musical creations out of pieces you’re working on, and so on.

The more you allow Songwriting activities to flow into and out of your other music-making, the faster you’ll improve and the richer your creativity will become.

Adopt The Identity

In the Introduction to this book, we said that anybody who makes music is “a musician”. In the same way, I would encourage you right now, whatever your past experience might be, to start considering yourself “a songwriter” (or if you prefer, “a composer”).

You may not have written anything yet. You may not yet think you know the first thing about writing music. Or you may think you’re just not any good at it yet.

Adopting the identity today allows you to start seeing it as a journey, and start respecting and appreciating each step forwards you take towards becoming the songwriter or composer you wish to be.

So that begs the question then: how do you take those steps forwards? How do we learn to write songs we can be proud of?

We’re going to go through each of five elements of a song (Form, Ideas and Emotion, Lyrics, Melody, and Harmonisation and Arrangement), providing ways for you to create each, and then discuss how to bring it all together and practice writing songs.