When I was a teenager, I’d play bass in bands, sing horribly and toy with the idea of being a songwriter. This is a letter I wish somebody had written to me when I was 17.
Strive to be prolific.
Notice I didn’t say ‘aim to be great,’ or ‘just have fun’. Both of those are stupid directives, because they’re overly vague. And trust me, the two most frustrating things you can get caught up in are “Will I be great? Am I good enough?” and “Am I having fun?” You have a far greater shot at tasting greatness and fun if you simply write as much as you possibly can, and then some.
You might think that you ought to try to write the best song that you possibly can, but you’d be wrong. That’s actually a trap that you should try your hardest to avoid, especially when you’re just starting out.
Why? Because your concept of ‘best’ is a work-in-progress and a moving target. Why spend a year working on writing the best song you can, when you could instead spend a year improving your idea of what makes a song great?
You don’t actually know what makes a good song, you don’t actually know what matters to you, you don’t actually know what you ought to be writing about. (Some veterans will tell you that they don’t know either, but at least they know that they don’t know, and songwriting is their way of figuring that stuff out.)
So don’t worry about any of that.
Write the worst song you can.
Just write a song. Make it as stupid and silly as you can. Finish it. Allow it to be a little strange, weird and rough around the edges. In fact, go especially out of your way to try and write the worst song ever. Then try and top that with something even worse, if possible. It’s hard to find good ideas when you’re looking for good ideas, but you can sometimes find them just next door when you’re looking for bad ideas.
When you’ve written a hundred songs, you’ll look back and realize that you’ve learnt things that you couldn’t possibly have anticipated when you were starting out. I haven’t written a hundred songs, but this is my experience with writing blogposts, and I imagine songs are no different. Quantity has a quality all of its own.
Avoid trying to be original; learn other people’s songs instead.
Trying to be original is exhausting, and it is impossible. Give up the pursuit altogether. There’s no such thing as original, everything is derivative. Everything is a remix. The artists who are held up as ‘original’ are simply much better at remixing than everybody else. They make familiar remixes with elements people don’t quite expect, or they make unfamiliar mixes with familiar elements.
All great artists start out producing derivative work. There’s no other way to learn! You learned walking and talking through imitation, and you’ll learn to write by doing the same. ‘Originality’ or ‘personal style’ are things that emerge not from you trying to be creative or original, but from you trying to make things as well as you possibly can.
“At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted most of all to develop a personal style. But if you just try to make good things, you’ll inevitably do it in a distinctive way, just as each person walks in a distinctive way. Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo. He was just trying to paint well; he couldn’t help painting like Michelangelo.” – Paul Graham, Taste for Makers
The Beatles and Bob Dylan and many, many others all started out by imitating the work of others. Even Mozart, I believe. You’re no better than them, and you’re no different, either. So just make stuff. Make and make and make and make.
Smartness is overrated, think less and write more.
When I look back on my life and my work, I find that I greatly overvalued ‘smartness’. On hindsight, I would happily trade quite a chunk of ‘intelligence’ for ‘more data points’. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have interesting things to say about this. Let me quickly paraphrase both of them:
Gates: Intelligence is the ability to enter a new field and to ask thoughtful questions- Well, what about this? What about that? What if we reversed it? To get good at this, you just need to turn things around and over in your head as much as you can. Take things apart, put them back together. Over time you’ll notice that things aren’t as opaque as they seem. Really, everything is made up of other things, and it’s not too difficult to start seeing patterns in the way they work.
Jobs: Creativity is just connecting things, and to connect things you need two things- a bunch of dots to connect, and the habit of attempting connections. You won’t get them right all the time right from the beginning. Nobody does, and there’s reason to believe that you’ll never quite improve your batting average. You can only just step up to the plate more often. So collect as many dots as you can, and mess around with connections as much as you can. Tinker. Make a mess. Clean it up and start over.
Play scales. It’s like walking through the ‘underlying fundamental code’ of music itself.
I never bothered with these early on. They both bored and intimidated me. Why would anybody learn to play scales, when they’re both boring and difficult? The guy in the video above gives a GREAT explanation that I wish I had when I was a kid. (YouTube is such an INCREDIBLE resource.) I finally picked them up out of boredom and curiosity when I had a guitar and a lot of free time during my mandatory military conscription. I practiced the major and minor scales up and down the fretboard. I did it because I was curious about the differences between the major and minor scales, and I vaguely sort-of wanted to explore the differences.
Awaken to the world you already inhibit.
I didn’t know what to expect, but here’s what happened. I developed a bit of a sense of it, and it felt like a whole new world in the space I already inhabited. Each note has a certain flavor, and the different notes have different relationships with each other, just as words do. After a while you develop a certain “rhythm” or “prosody” for notes. It gives you the vocabulary and ability you sort of need to better process what you hear.
Playing scales trains and improves your ear, and I personally found them very transformative as a musician. This is coming from a person who absolutely hated music theory when I first encountered it, and hates practicing. It also gave me a sense of possibility– I started to understand how professional musicians are just more in tune with their ears and their instruments than I am, rather than mystical alien creatures.
Deliberate practice is the smart, lazy thing to do. It requires the least effort for the greatest output in the long run. It’s the fastest way to get better. It just requires you to pay careful attention, and to focus on your weaknesses. That can be a little counter-intuitive, but it’s so incredibly powerful I wish somebody taught it to me when I was younger.
Play slow. Don’t rush the music, immerse yourself in it.
Man, it took me years to do this. When I was starting out, I was so edgy, anxious and excitable that I tried to go as loud and as fast as I could with everything I played. That was the only way I knew how to be intense. But that gets old and tiring really, really fast. It wears you down.
The joy of music is in timing, in placement, in tastefulness. You need to be relaxed and learn to feel the groove, feel the beat. Lots of practice will help with this. And lots of listening. Listen to yourself when you play. Listen to the rest of the band that you’re playing it. Music isn’t about proving yourself, it isn’t about showing off, it’s about appreciation. Kind of like sex.
Consume content extensively and thoughtfully.
This goes back to connecting the dots. Watch lots of movies. Read lots of books. And this is maybe the most important part- write down your thoughts about them. Try to capture them in song, if you like.
Have some records of what you thought about things at a certain time in your life. The main reason for this is so that you can look back at them years later and see how much you’ve grown and changed as a person. I think that’s very fundamental to appreciating life, and music, and expression of any kind. A blog is a great way to do this. Notebooks and recordings are fine, if you’re shy. (Nothing beats publishing stuff in the public domain, though, because you get real feedback from real people.)
I especially recommend reading biographies, and reading about how your favorite artists talk about their creative processes, but always make sure you spend more time creating than reading about creating.
If all else fails, remember this: Always Be Creating (…or listening).
If you’re not creating, you’re decaying, you’re dying, and you’re going to start feeling sorry for yourself. You’re going to start being miserable, you’re going to start getting into boring conversations and arguments with other people who’re procrastinating and distracting themselves from their work.
If you feel like you have nothing to say, then take a long walk. Listen to some strange and unfamiliar music. Or listen to some really familiar music from your childhood. Think of it as a pilgrimage, or a declutter, whatever you like. Your cup is empty, so go fill it.
A quick recap/rewrite of this post:
- Aim to be prolific, rather than “to be great” or “to have fun”. We can have much more interesting conversations once you have a body of work.
- Screw ‘best’. Avoid trying to write the best possible song. Your definition of ‘best’ will be a moving target.
- Write badly. Deliberately try to write bad songs, rough songs, strange and awkward songs. They’ll teach you more than you’ll learn from writing what you think is “okay”.
- Screw originality. Forsake the quest for originality, it’s a mirage. Learn other people’s songs as much as you can. Learn songs from genres you don’t really care for.
- Think less, write more. Don’t try to be smarter by thinking harder. Be smarter by processing more, recursively. Write new songs. Learn songs you didn’t know. Learn new chord progressions. Take long walks through unfamiliar territories.
- Play scales. It’s like learning to play with the underlying code of music itself. It’ll improve your appreciation of music that you listen to, and it’ll improve your ability to navigate the music you play.
- Play slow. Don’t rush after music. Immerse yourself in it. Imagine really bad sex, and then imagine really good sex. What’s the difference? Good music is like good sex.
- Always Be Creating (Or Listening). If you’re not doing one of the two, you’re probably procrastinating. Ask yourself which of the two states you’re closer to, and dive into that.
Thank you.. Not a musician but this is going to help me with all kinds of other things.