SONGWRITERS

Inspiration may be impossible to define or control or predict, but that doesn’t mean that we have to just sit around idly waiting for it. There are many ways in which we can make ourselves more receptive to inspiration and quicker to recognize it when it comes.

1. Babble.

If you ever write music before words, chances are you sing nonsense phrases or just raw sounds that fit the melody and rhythm. Usually you need to get rid of these placeholders and write “real” words (we’re all glad that Paul McCartney came up with “yesterday” to replace his original words, “scrambled eggs”), but pay attention to your spontaneous utterances. Sometimes they’ll point you in an interesting direction, and besides, these words or sounds are beautifully matched with the music—that’s why you sang them in the first place. Run your recorder and just let the sounds flow without editing or filtering. You can look back later for usable ideas or just toss out the whole thing.

2. Make mistakes.

Many guitar-playing songwriters have gotten hooked on using alternate tunings because a new tuning undercuts what they know how to play and creates an environment for weird and interesting accidents. That’s just one example of how mistakes can generate great ideas and why they are worth cultivating.

3. Collect titles.

Many songwriters keep lists of potential song titles. Woody Guthrie was an avid collector. His manuscript “How to Make Up a Ballad-song” (in the Woody Guthrie Archives) describes how he spent hours thinking of song titles and had thousands of them “laid away like postal savings bonds.” John Fogerty has kept a title book for his whole career, and told me about its auspicious beginnings.

4. Arrange and rearrange.

If the silence is deafening and you’re tired of staring at a blank page, try working with existing material. Write lyrics to a favorite melody, or set some lyrics or poetry to a new melody. Or simply take a favorite song and change it a little; that’s how Alynda Lee Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff, like many other songwriters, got started.

5. Use a template.

Another way to write without starting from scratch is to take the structure of an existing song and fill it in with your own words and music. In terms of lyrics, for instance, the song can provide you with a template for the number of lines in each section, the number of syllables in each line, and where the rhymes fall.

Photograph by ultomatt

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