Workshop: Songwriting 1

I've attempted to write a song plenty of times, but none of these times ever fell through to something successful. I guess it just takes practice to get better. For the workshop we had to write a song with another person. I worked with John. This helped me realize something: doing art with another person is hard. A lot of it is because two different people have two completely different thought paths. It's hard to tell what the other person is thinking, and it's difficult to get the ideas to correspond together. It makes me wonder how Paul McCartney and John Lennon were able to pull it off so well. I wonder what it was like when they first got together in high school to write their first song, how much they struggled with it.

After the workshop I went home and attempted to write my own song. Unlike before, I just sat myself down and forced myself to do it. I played around with chord progressions, words, and rhythm. After working on one song for a while, I decided to just play around with some finger picking and I started playing a waltz. Then I started singing and all of a sudden I had the first lyrics to a song come right out of my mouth. Following the idea, I continued writing and finished it in 10 minutes. Of course I still have to work on improving the lyrics and melody line, but I was able to get something with set lyrics, set music, and a set ending, which was something I've never done before. Needless to say I was overjoyed. I might post it in my next workshop post.

People say that you need inspiration to create art. That's not true in the slightest. It was only when I had a deadline that I finally let my creativity out and wrote a song, not when I felt "inspiration". Some things you create may be better than others, but you need to constantly create to even have a chance of getting something great. It's tedious, but worth it.