Songwriting – The Hard Part

Michael Anderson

The decision to actively pursue a personal manager will be the most difficult and most important career decision an artist will make. There's just no avoiding it—at one point you will have to turn your career over to a professional manager who has experience and connections in the music industry and charge him with the responsibilities of furthering and developing your career in this complex industry.

There is an old quote by Leonard Cohen or some other brilliantly cynical songwriter that the music business is full of liars and thieves and cheats and cutthroats and heartbreak — and there is also a dark side.

The craft of songwriting is tedious, frustrating, intensive, challenging, demanding, and lonely.

And that is the easy part.

The hard part is the emotion raw material a good song is often craved out of and used as material to build a work of art.

I have been talking to some of my students lately about the creative imperative and what drives people to write in the first place.

There are a whole host of emotions that can motivate people — artists are rarely well-balanced beings that lead normal routine lives and operate rationally. And it is often the most unbalanced of us that are the most creatively driven — I probably don't even need to cite examples as most people can very easily come up with a quick list of brilliantly talented artists that were (or are) a bit "off."

There are many emotions that drive us — I see anger and hurt, desire and lust, and sometimes even joy and peace, or possibly just desperation — the spectrum of emotion that we deal with through the human condition.

In the early stages of songwriting many beginning writers feel that just enunciating these emotions is art — for some reason, just because they are going through it, it must be important enough for everyone to be interested.

But with time and maturity, just like time healing a broken heart and giving perspective on a lost relationship, the writer begins to realize that everyone goes through it. What separates great art from mere observation is the ability to say something about it in a way no one else has before — or in a more relevant, meaningful, or even entertaining way.

For instance, many people write about lost love. But why is "Yesterday" by the Beatles a classic and so many poems by brokenhearted teenagers almost impossible to read? Same emotional terrain explored on two entirely different artistic levels.

Let's say for example we recreate a broken situation in our life in order to repair it — as an adult we substitute a new person as a love interest that more or less replaces a parent we had a hard time with in order to, on some level, fix a relationship we couldn't handle when we were children. And the emotions attached to that new relationship in our life seem out of proportion to what the situation is — because we are actually feeling the emotions from the earlier, more intense situation in our life and attaching them to the new situation. We wonder why the feelings are so strong in this new context.

Makes for good song material because it is relatable to everyone - it hits us all personally and emotionally. But it is difficult because as an artist it demands a level of awareness, as well as honesty and vulnerability. And it is difficult as a craftsman to make fresh and new because everyone has dealt with it in one way or another.

And that is the key. Pure emotion is a powerful motivator — it can drive us to do things we would never think possible.

But a craftsman — like Paul McCartney with "Yesterday" — can take that emotional content and make it not only something unique and relatable — but also uplifting and inspiring. It can give people in a similar emotional condition that feeling of "That's exactly what I feel," or "I wish I wrote that," or "I wish I could say it that way." That is when it becomes art.

So how do you get it there? It's simple, but it is not easy.

You learn — that old practice of doing and doing and learning each time, getting better gradually as you take in the nuances of how the greats got there and practiced their craft. "Yesterday" was not the first song Paul McCartney wrote. I have heard old tapes of early Beatle songs and many of them are no better than some of the songs I hear from my students. Lennon and McCartney were not born great songwriters. They became great songwriters by listening to great songs, writing a lot of songs, and learning. And being driven by emotional forces no one else could fully understand.

We learn from each other — keep your ears open — keep doing it and doing it. Over time you will see your songs get better.

And use your emotional raw material for inspiration. Remember though, nobody cares as much about your trials and tribulations as you do — the rest of us bore easily unless it is relatable somehow to our situation.

And the more you can craft that material into relatable, unique, and appealing songs the more you will be taken seriously as not only a sensitive human being, but an artist who can make some sense of this human condition. Which is what all good writing is about.