Everybody are saying songwriters should focus on their strenghts and their own thing instead of following the current trends all the time.
But how to know what are your strenghts? How to know what kind of songs to write at the first place? (Btw, if you’re just starting out songwriting – check out my songwriting guide for beginner songwriters).
“Do what you know well, write music you would write anyways”.
That advice is actually pretty straightforward and we probably can all agree that. You cannot really write songs you’re not into yourself since after a while you would just burnout and trade your guitars. Life is too short for that.
Yep, but how about all those days when you’re feeling you should completely change your way of working music since you just want to go that way that day?
Should you still just forget it and stick with your songwriting niche you’ve been writing for years? Or maybe it’s necessary thing to do because you want a change, you’re feeling unconfident and not having a good time at all.
There are so many those days as well.
What is it all about – why I’m bored or frustrated with my songs
Writing music can be pretty stressfull sometimes even though it should be fun and entertaining most of the time.
When you’re searching your own artistic path as a songwriter there will be days when everything you do feels and sounds just horrible. Same way you probably doubt your path sometimes, even when you’re a quite confident with your songwriting usually.
Our minds get tired easily. Everything gets boring after a while even with so awesome thing like songwriting. With songwriting it’s a quite normal since songwriting is a demanding activity to do, it’s not easy.
A human being is lazy and you need to trick your mind all the time.
You may feel the need of change your course if you’re not progressing fast enough and you’re not getting instant rewards from writing songs. Your mind just cannot understand why do you keep going sometimes.
It’s pretty much like any other activity you really need to commit to gain a success with it. Starting a diet and living a healthy lifestyle, starting with evening classes at uni, starting a habit of writing morning pages every day etc.
After a while your songwriting habits gets boring (which are a very important thing to have) and you feel you should just take another direction. Leave everything you have and start again.
Believe or not, you have gained some serious songwriting skills already
It’s not bad thing to do if you really feel that you should change from writing singer&songwriter stuff to drum&bass beatmaking. But if you’re aiming to perfect your craft you should stay at your niche. No-one is perfect in everything.
We all have past and we’ve learned lots of things already whether we’re proud of them or not. Some songwriters have always played guitar and it’s natural that they know how to write guitar driven songs better than pianists.
It may sound boring and cliche but you should seriously define what you’re good at in songwriting already. You don’t need to focus on those things only but remember not to leave them unused since you have precious knowledge you can use.
So you can change and try things but try not to lose what you have already.