Ted Allen

You just write.

You take your heart, your soul, your guts, your pain, your passion, your anger, your love, and you twist them into something beautiful.

You find that lyric that drives it home, that chord that somehow grabs the emotion and wrestles it, kicking and screaming, into some kind of state of submission.

And the listener will never know it. He'll never see the scars, never hear the cries, never feel the blows as they strike home, carving the heart's likeness into an amorphous hunk of stone.

But, if done right, your song will reach him just the same.

You hope it connects with people. You hope it makes them feel, makes them think, makes them cry, makes them hope.

Yeah, maybe you'll get lucky. Maybe someone will record it. Maybe someone will buy it. Maybe it will be a hit. Maybe.

But that's not why you do it. You do it because you love it, because you need it. You do it because you have to. And then you do it all over again.

Ted Allen is a songwriter.