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If you’re anything like me, you may have found yourself coming face to face with another form of writer’s block that can be quite potent in nature. Finishing the song!
Agh! It’s bringing back painful memories as I write this! It can be hard enough getting started on something let alone knowing how to wrap things up, right?
There’s no doubt that there’s never been an easier time in our history to write, record, and release music than right now.
While this is beautiful in more ways than I can say, the problem that comes with this new territory is that the music world has become oversaturated.
An overabundance of new songs are being uploaded every single day making it difficult for an emerging artist to be heard above the noise.
How do you start a song anyway? It can be overwhelming right? Instantly, the mind locks up as you feel the weight of your own herculean expectations you’ve set upon yourself to come up with something absolutely amazing out of thin air in record time bearing down upon you. You feel the self-imposed pressure and before you know it, you’re paralyzed.
As a private instructor and songwriting coach, I’ve received a lot of the same types of questions from students over the years when it comes to writing songs. One of the most commonly occurring questions looks something along the lines of: “Hey Aaron, when you’re writing songs, do you start with the lyrics? Or does the music come first?”
Writing songs is its own form of storytelling that can take as many unique forms as there are emotions associated with the messages conveyed in the music. When I say storytelling by the way, I’m not necessarily referring to lyrics.
Though lyrical content is without a doubt crucial in most genres, history has shown that you don’t need lyrics to write incredible and memorable songs (Thanks Bela Fleck and The Flecktones!)
As someone who writes music for a living, its my job to maintain a constant creative mindset. The way I personally like to go about this is to write a single melody on guitar first thing each morning.