Writing a Song/SOL 3/6/14

When you write a song, there are three main things that you have to know to write a good one:
1. It doesn't have to be perfect. When I started writing songs, I would just discard an idea from my mind if it wasn't a good one. That is the curse of perfectionism. After a while I just was making no progress, and reasoned with myself that songwriting doesn't come naturally with me, and even if I should keep writing songs. This is not true at all. What I was doing was I wasn't even writing songs at all, because I didn't want to write at the level that I was at then. I had to put this past me and start writing songs a lot in order to get to the place where I wanted to be. This was hard for me because I'm a perfectionist with most things, so I had to lower my standards.
2. There is not one right way to write a song. When I started writing songs, I'd search the internet on how to do it, because I just didn't get it. There was all this information on tips about writing songs, but not how on you do it in the first place. This is because all of the smarty musicians online everywhere left out the fact that there is no right way to write a song. Some people start by playing some chords and singing along to them; this is often supposed to be the easiest way because there are a lot of common chord patterns that you can look up. Personally, since I had no idea how to write a song, I started writing melodies in my head, then trying to figure out the chords, and then finalizing the lyrics. You can also start with the lyrics, the beat, or even a riff or a hook. You can do whatever is the best for you.
3. Every song has to be personal for you. This is probably the most important rule, that you have some sort of emotion resting on this song. The way I do this is writing every song that I write about either me or someone or a situation that I know or know about. Basically, write every song like it's your last.


These are probably the biggest three rules in writing a song. The truth is, songwriting takes a lot of work. It took me a long time to get where I am now with songwriting, and to the point where I actually could write reasonable songs. I also didn't even write the songs down on paper for a long time, because I started thinking of melodies in my head. It's kind of like you don't talk before you know the words of a language. Overall, songwriting is totally worth it, but does take a lot of work, so if you want to, you better start writing now.