Hello, today I’m writing a bit about the joy of writing lots of songs.
I’ve noticed that many songwriters rarely have only one project. It seems that it’s more common to have multiple bands or studio and songwriting projects at least at the level of thought instead of focusing on a single project only.
Or at least that’s what I’ve seen. Everyone is doing so many things probably because songwriting and making music is so much fun. It’s exciting to be involved in various projects and get songs written.
There’s no problem in that, it’s awesome if you have an energy and songs to share.
But there’s a change for a common pitfall and that’s repeating yourself when writing songs for multiple projects.
We all have our songwriting habits
We like to get comfortable when writing songs. We all have our own standards – how we like to write songs, what’s good from our perspective and what kind of background we have.
Many songwriters like to get into a songwriting zone and follow their instincts without thinking too much. Everything you know then, how you’re feeling etc. influences your songs naturally since it’s the most comfortable way of writing songs.
If your main instrument is drums and percussions there’s a big change that songs your write are always a bit more rhytmical when compared to songwriters who are more used to keys or guitar.
No matter of what you probably repeat yourself at some level everytime you write songs. Otherwise you’d need to push yourself out of your comfort zone continuously.
That’s actually a good thing in many cases but I think there’s no need to overdo it.
Find ways to make the creative process different but easy
As a songwriter you probably don’t want to repeat yourself too much. You probably also want to keep songwriting as easy and natural as possible.
If you’re writing songs for multiple projects you need think what is that small fix that makes your songwriting a bit different for each of your projects without making it too hard for yourself.
Try these working methods and see if you get any different feeling in your songwriting:
- Cowriting. This is obvious, writing with other songwriters will always make it a unique combination. Unless you’re forcing it to some direction the outcome will be something you probably would never write by yourself alone.
- Different genres. If you’re into writing different kinds of music there’s no really fear that you would write same songs all over again. For example if you’re writing for a punk and pop projects the basic idea behind those genres it’s so different it would be a really hard to repeat yourself too much.
- Different starting point. I’ve been writing in several posts here that I believe writing the first draft version of a song fast is one the most important things to learn in songwriting. Now you should think how you could do this step in different ways. I personally write songs usually on acoustic guitar which lead into certain style of songs. Changing my guitar for electric one and fingers to guitar pick will lead my songwriting into a bit different route and for one project I always start with writing lyrics and vocal melodies first.
Whats your trick or do you think this stuff doesn’t matter that much?
Here’s one cool song about songwriting by Roy Cooper & Jane Karwoski. It’s called “A Songwriters Dream (Gone Is The Wonderland)”.