So let’s say you’ve been away from home for a while, and you come home, and you turn on your faucet, and something that doesn’t bear much resemblance to water comes out. Maybe it’s brown. Maybe it’s got stuff floating in it. Maybe both. So you let the faucet run for a while, and eventually, it turns back into water. Eventually.
The analogy to songwriting could hardly be more obvious. Due to various personal matters, I hadn’t attempted to actually write a song from early February until late June, which is an immensely long time for me. And what’s coming out, right now, is kinda brown, and definitely has stuff floating in it.
This couldn’t be more frustrating. “Real songwriters finish their songs”, a famous (and apparently real) songwriter supposedly said, but how can anyone bear to polish these turds? Sure, I’m being a little hard on myself – after all, I’ve been writing songs for almost thirty years now (yeep!) and anything that’s really a turd gets flushed pretty early (to push the analogy into territory that virtually no one will be happy about). But the two songs I’m writing at the moment just ain’t gonna make it into the rotation.
So why? Why bother? Well, the standard answer, and I buy this, is that if you don’t, you’ll never get the rust out of the pipes. For the vast majority of us, it’s just like any other acquired skill: stop doing it for a while, and you lose your touch. And the only way to get them back is to practice. And practicing is dull, and boring, and in the beginning it feels awful because you’re bad. Your rhymes are hokey. You pick the same damn progression or rhythm you always pick. Your images are leaden and boring. Your topics are obvious and your approach is unoriginal. And you feel like a moron, and you’d rather be doing anything else: doing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom, stripping paint. Anything to pry you away from this damn rhyming dictionary and thesaurus.
But there’s no way around it. I don’t know how many boring songs I’m going to have to write before I get to that magical place again where I channel something like “The Land of Misfit Toys”, but I enjoy the end state far too much to give up. Right now it’s rust, but I promise you, sometime soon it’ll turn back into water.