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This is a podcast about the road less travelled in songwriting. Join me as I share the strategies that have helped me to find my own voice in songwriting, interview others on how they stay inspired, and share resources to help you finish more songs and find your path as a songwriter.
Hey there folks. You are listening to the Analytical songwriter. My name is Johnny, also known as Locke Power, and I wanna welcome you to this podcast.
In today's episode, I'll be sharing a few tips about how you can beat Rider's block, so stay tuned.
Writer's block is like Bigfoot or the Lochness Monster. People debate its existence, but I mostly don't believe in it. My observation is that writer's block is typically a symptom of one of three problems, one unfair comparison to the work of other artists. Two succumbing to brain crack. Three option anxiety or decision fatigue.
Isolating the cause of your writer's block will help you overcome it. Comparison, brain crack and decision fatigue are all distinct enough problems that warrant different solutions, but there are solutions overcoming comparison. I remember the moment I realized I wanted to play music for the rest of my life.
I was seven years old in the backseat of my Uncle Monty's car, and Russia's free will came on. The radio lyrics overwhelmed me and my heart raced at the dire precision of Neil Pierret drumming. From that point on, I trolled record shops to find incredible artists who could be distant mentors. To me, the joy of being inspired by other artists.
Was almost as exhilarating as sitting behind a drum kit. As I got older, something else started to happen. When I started writing my own songs, I found that nothing I wrote was as good as anything I had been inspired by. I tried using the same words, chords, phrases, and it all felt awkward and contrived. I was a kid the odds that any 13 year old could write a song as good as any established artist or dismal.
So I did what most people do. I clammed up and used writer's block as an excuse for years. As artists, there's an omnipresent temptation to compare ourselves to those who inspired us to pursue our craft in our infancy as artists. We exist with a full knowledge of the gap between our current skill level and our potential.
IRA. Glass introduced the idea of the gap in this beautiful quote, quote, all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there's this gap for the first couple of years that you're making stuff. What you're making isn't so good. It's not that great. It's trying to be good.
It has ambition to be good, but it's not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that. They quit. End quote. Writer's block is effectively a form of quitting, so the first decision to make is to be persistent.
Once you've resolved to stick with your craft, there are some practical approaches you can take to bridge the gap. Number one, limit your inputs. One excellent strategy to mitigate the influence of your inspirations is simply limiting your interaction with. Streaming music has the pernicious effect of putting us in competition with the entire history of recorded music.
Seeing how many plays or likes an artist gets through streaming platforms and social media can be disheartening and is usually an unfair comparison. When you need to write, limit the amount of information you take in. Listen to fewer records and reduce your social media time. Focus on synthesizing what you know and working within your capabilities.
It took me a long time to realize that there is time for action and there's a time for wood shedding, and those two things rarely intersect. Try looking at your songs as progress reports of where you are as a songwriter. Number two, stop buying the myth of the solitary genius. In his book How Music Works, David Byrne details the impact modern recording Technology has had on the amateur musician community.
He makes one fascinating point regarding the story we tell ourselves about how culture progresses. Quote, in the modern age, though. People have come to feel that art and music are the product of individual effort rather than something that emerges from a community. The meme of the solitary genius is powerful and has affected the way we think about how our culture came into being.
We often think that we can and even must rely on blessed individuals to lead us to some new place, to grace us with their insight and creations. And naturally that person is never us. It's important to realize that you exist in the community of artists who all had to start somewhere at some point.
Every artist you admire was like you. Even those touched by genius. Take the pressure off yourself to embody the meme of the solitary genius and focus on the song in front of you. Three, play the numbers. Game. Ira Glass articulated a real problem spectacularly. He also gave a perfect solution to the problem of the gap.
In the second half of his quote, quote, everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that, and if you're just starting out or if you are still in this.
You gotta know it's normal. And the most important thing that you can do is a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month, you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap.
And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions. End quote. Playing the numbers game to build a body of work is the best strategy to overcome the tyranny of ambition. You'll turn your songwriting into an iterative process by finishing more work, and you'll learn more along the way. Brain crack kills.
Brain crack is something you've seen the effects of, but maybe never had a name for. Logger a frank coined the term to describe what happens to an idea that is allowed to go unexecuted. When we have an idea. It's tough to see the shortcomings of that idea because no one can build a complete model of reality in their head.
The idea may be good or bad, but if you leave it untested, you can always be satisfied that you have a good idea. The other upside of not moving on, the idea is that you insulate yourself from failure. It sounds like a great strategy, except it's not. Eventually, if you let yourself indulge in enough brain crack, you'll become a bitter person with a life full of regrets.
I see brain crack addicts all the time in songwriting, subres, and it usually looks like this, quote, Hey guys, I have this great idea for a song, but I can't figure out any good lyrics. How do I come up with good lyrics for this really good song idea? Songwriting is really hard. Thanks. End quote.
Songwriting Brain Crack keeps you believing that if you have a good idea, there should be some way to magically invoke the good lyric muses to lend you the words for your great idea. The reality is that anything can make a great song in the right hands. Usually when people are frustrated by their lack of lyrics, they're afraid to face the quality of the work they're capable of producing.
There are two solutions to this problem, and they go hand in hand. The first thing to do is to be humble and make peace with the fact that you will imagine ideas that exceed your current skillset. I can imagine building a rocket, a hot dam. If I tried to do that, it would be a cata troph. Cultivate a growth mindset and don't pin your image of success on the execution of a single idea.
The other practical step you can take is to seek feedback regularly. Show your songs to people. Sit down and co-write with someone and try to take a backseat, ask questions about why they make the decisions they do. If you feel you would've done it differently, now you have something new to. Ultimately, the gap between our taste and ambition causes us to derive pleasure from brain crack.
If you focus on execution and receive feedback on that execution, you'll be able to grow more quickly. As a songwriter. You'll also become the type of songwriter that people like to collaborate with. A willingness to learn and hear other people's perspectives is always an asset In a collaborative project, the paradox of choice and option anxiety.
In his book, the Paradox of Choice Psychologist Barry Schwartz, details how the proliferation of choice in Western industrialized society has produced a unique overabundance of options. This proliferation of options has the effect of inducing analysis paralysis and a nagging dissatisfaction with the decisions that we end up making.
You've probably felt this at some point in your musical career. You pop open a new project in your do of choice, and before you know it, you've spent the last hour scrolling through plug-ins and presets looking for that perfect sound. Or maybe you stared at a page in a chord or rhyming dictionary.
Desperately waiting for inspiration to strike. In both cases, the number of decisions leading up to getting anything done will likely take the wind outta your sails before you can coast along, let alone finish a song. If you feel this type of option anxiety causing decision fatigue in your songwriting workflow, you can make Pareto improving moves that take decisions off the table.
A Pareto improving move is a strategy that offloads the bulk of decision making to some other system and leaves you in a position to make the 20% of decisions that matter in music. This means establishing creative limits or boundaries. It's crucial as you approach this to think of songwriting as a game instead of the creation of your magnum opus as you were working on a.
If you keep all options on the table at all times, you're likely to lose steam. Imagine a game of chess. There are 64 squares for a reason. If there were infinite squares, the game would become utterly pointless. Think of these limits as rules of a temporary game. Once you finish the song, you've completed the game, you can always decide if you want to play that particular game again later.
One, make decisions before your songwriting session. One game you can play is the Jack White Game. The White Stripes are a perfect example of how to remove options strategically. Jack White plays poorly made guitars to resist the temptation to get fancier than he needs to with a song. The White Stripes as a band only had two members and chose three colors for their visual aesthetic.
By making these decisions ahead of. They could focus on the musical elements that mattered most to them. Another shining example of innovation within constraints is Koji Kondo. He built his entire career on outsmarting the limitations of sound reproduction technology in home video game consoles. Still, one of his finest moments was composing all 12 spell melodies for Zelda Arina time.
The unique design of this classic game and the limitations of the Nintendo 64 controller, forced condo to produce melodies from a set of five notes alone. You can replicate this experiment by choosing a select pool of notes before you start writing. The cool thing is that you only need to stick with this limitation as long as you are stuck.
Once you develop your song, you'll find that the rule will become less crucial and you'll have a better idea of what you want to say. If you're working on lyrics, try limiting the pool of words you're selecting from. Number two, choose a musical form and stick to. An understated advantage of the White stripes is that they began making music using a very restricted form.
The 12 Bar Blues is one of the most recognizable forms in popular music. The White Stripes music has its roots in this form. And by internalizing it, they were able to subvert and reimagine it. This isn't only true of the white stripes, it's true of the Beatles as well. The Beatles started as a rhythm and blues cover band before changing the world with their music.
One of the reasons they began to write songs was because the bands they shared the stage with were playing all the same covers. Paul McCartney elaborates on this. Quote, we started off listening, then got into a band playing and doing covers of all these Elvis and Little Richard and records like that.
But then what happened was the bands on before us also had these records, so they did 'em all before we got on. And I remembered recently that's why we started to write and for no other reason, just that the only way around this is if we write our own songs, they won't know 'em. So we wrote terrible little songs.
End. In this one quote, we see several ways that the Beatles were able to master their craft. They internalized the musical forms of their day, used great songs as a template for their own terrible songs, played their songs to an audience, and eliminated the songs that stunk. There's no shame in playing an established game.
Try playing some covers and then use the structure of those songs to craft your own. Live with the form for a while, and you'll be amazed at how quickly you start to think of clever ways to make that form sound fresh. Number three, set a deadline or a timeframe. There is heated debate regarding whether or not deadlines kill creativity.
I shake out on the side of deadlines on this debate. Yes, deadlines kill creativity, but when you're trying to take a song over the finish line, it's likely not beneficial to dream up new potential ideas. Remember, be aware of Brain Crack. A deadline makes you commit to ideas and drive for results. Jack White said a little about this in an interview, quote, deadlines and things make you creative, but opportunity in telling yourself, oh, you got all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors and the palette you want, that just kills creativity.
End quote. And if we recall, even Ira Glass recommended having a deadline quote. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month, you know you're going to finish one story end quote. It's easy to believe that there's a better idea waiting around the corner if we give ourselves time, but Barry Schwartz has written an entire book about how this is usually a fairytale.
We tell ourselves, I've lived both strategies. And always benefited from a deadline. I have a songwriting friend named Paul. We work on projects together from time to time, and we get something done every time we get together. I learned how to work at this pace from him because of him. I don't view deadlines as my enemy.
They're helpful boundary that enables me to get to the essence of a song with more focus and clarity. The added benefit is that your songs will have a sense of urgency that they may have otherwise lacked. Deadlines aren't the only way to limit your timeframe. You can schedule your songwriting time and be strict about that.
The funny thing about giving yourself a finite block of time is that once you're in flow, you'll inevitably want more. I encounter this in object writing exercises. The exercise period is 10 minutes long, and every time I start it, it feels like I have to fill an eternity. I usually get frustrated by the end of the 10 minutes because I'm just getting on a roll.
You'll astound yourself with how beneficial it can be to limit your songwriting sessions. Parameters are your friend. Things need boundaries to be distinct. It's easy to feel constrained or hemmed in by the rules or limits. The artists who complain about these things are least productive and have the least to show for themselves at the end of their careers.
Usually the best of the best have mastered a game. And can transcend the rules of that game to arrive at something novel. Bach may be the ultimate example of this. He is the best composer of Fugues the world has ever known. It doesn't mean that he only ever followed the rigid rules of polyphony. There are plenty of examples of when he didn't.
You can bet the man could write something to the letter at the drop of a hat when he needed to. Interestingly enough, Bach never reported having writer's block.
Well, there you have it, folks. Several ways you can beat Writer's block. I hope you found this helpful and that you'll go out there and write more songs. You never know who you'll inspire, and that's the beauty of being an artist and sharing with the world. This podcast was researched, written, and recorded by yours.
If you have a podcast you need help producing or want custom music or sonic branding, check out my services www.weirdwonderfulsound.com. Thanks for tuning in to the Analytical Songwriter. We'll see you next time.