i love reading about how songwriters write songs. i’ve heard that the best songs come out fast. i’ve heard some songs are more like giving birth. some take 12 minutes and some can take a year or more before they are “right”. or you’ll give up on one and later come across it and be like ‘what was i thinking, this is brilliant!’ or the opposite, where you champion an idea for awhile and a week later you play it and you’re like ‘what was i thinking, this is complete and total crap.’

so i guess the lesson is that songwriting is really pretty different for everyone and you just have to find what works for you.

my friend justin, who is one of the most creative people i know, says that it’s good to have distractions because you can’t be creative all the time and you can drive yourself nuts trying if you’re not in the moment or inspired. it made a lot of sense to me and helped me a lot when he said this because i go through times where i cannot be very creative and it used to get me really disappointed and down. but now, even though it can still be frustrating i know it is just part of the creative process. it’s unpredictable.

all that is to say that today was a fairly uncreative day. i did have a tune come to me in my head (which i think showed up once before and i didn’t write it down….so it actually came back and that is rare) and i tried to work out the words that might be in it. it is this sort of ascending tune, which i think might be a good melody for a verse of a song. that’s unusual for me….i generally have choruses come to me first. and then there were brief stints where everything i thought of sounded like a prechorus or a bridge. i don’t know what that means but it can’t be normal.

oh, and i also got a slide today. the other instrument part i hear in my head for ‘beautiful’ sounds like a slide part….so i got one to try and learn. let me tell you it is much harder than it looks. so if anyone is any good at the slide and can teach me some technique that would probably be a lot more productive than what i did for 20 minutes this afternoon. although i am 20 minutes better at it than i was when today started.