Hearing Voices?

One thing that I love doing is writing songs. I love to write my own songs. I also love writing songs with others and I especially love teaching people how to write their own songs. A couple of years ago, a student of mine, Ben, came to his lesson with an idea for an instrumental song that he had come up with on his own at home. Right away I got really inspired and suggested that we work on the song together, finish it and then record it. We did and the song came out really well. That gave me the idea to propose the same project to all of my other students. As a result, we wrote and recorded nineteen songs that year and performed some of them at my year end show. This year, we have completed four new songs so far. I have posted all the songs on SoundCloud so my students can share them with others. They are also on my website on the Audio page.

When working on songwriting with students, one of the first things we talk about is how to begin. In 2005, I wrote a manual called Anatomy Of A Rock Band for a course that I was to begin teaching. In it, there is a section on songwriting. It begins with some advice that I routinely give to all my students:

"Let me start off by saying that there isn’t any one way to write a song. What I can do is give you starting points and ideas from which you can discover and create your own method.

There is one crucial thing that a songwriter must learn to do. He or she must be able to shut out and ignore the little voice we all have inside of our heads that tells us, “This sucks! You suck! You’ll never be able to do this, etc…” This is hard to do, especially at first but the only way around it is to keep telling yourself that it doesn’t matter and that the only way you will get better is by trying and doing it over and over. Hey, everyone goes through it. Give yourself permission to be bad. It’s the only way to get better."

Of course, like many things, this is easier said than done. However, it is definitely something that can be put into practice in time. If you can keep your focus on the joy of the process and not on the often unrealistic expectations for the end result, you may begin to love it as much as I do...

You can download a free .pdf of Anatomy Of A Rock Band here. Besides songwriting, It features sections on how to learn songs, soloing, recording and playing live.