Every year, I set out to write a song a month. And every year, I fail. What goes wrong, you might ask? Well, it’s more a matter of what else goes right: there are books to read, vacations to take, money to earn, friends and family to see, and of course there’s my beloved wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, who commands every ounce of my loyalty and attention, even when I’m doing something else (inconvenient for me, convenient for her). And in that sea of priorities, my commitment to write a song a month ranks somewhere below cleaning the toilet (which, frankly, isn’t even my job – SWMBT is in charge of bathroom sanitization and vermin control, and no, you do not want to know why we have a special category for that).
This year is no exception: unless I write nine songs in December, I’m going to have to look to 2026 for my next chance at success. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to write songs. It’s just that I don’t get around to it. Usually.
A few days ago, I woke up around 5:30 AM with a verse in my head, and a commitment to write a song that day. I didn’t have a whole lot else to do, and there was this verse. And what was it about? Why, writing songs, of course. I don’t know about you, but when I have an idea for a song, I’m almost always absolutely convinced that (a) it’s brilliant, and (b) it’s going to write itself. The idea is right there – but then, I write a verse or two, and it stalls, or I end up increasing the degree of difficulty (“no, the protagonist isn’t just from Alaska, she’s got one Indigenous parent and another who emigrated from Russia, and oh, a pet seal that’s a metaphor for freedom”). And then, a while later, I have another idea, and it’s brilliant, and it’s going to write itself, and in this way many spiral notebooks of lyrics are filled and few songs are finished.
The other problem, nowadays – and some of you may also be suffering from this – is that between the pandemic and the availability of cute cat videos, I seem to have lost the ability to focus on anything for more than ten minutes at a time. And when you combine my distractibility with the sub-toilet-cleaning priority of my songwriting, well, you don’t really get any songs out the other end.
But this day, I was not to be vanquished. That feeling that I’m absolutely going to write a song, and the sneaking suspicion that I’m wrong, was stuck in my head. In other words, they tell you to write what you know, so I wrote about writer’s block:
Got that aching in my bones
Those itchy trigger fingers
The ringing in my ears
The restlessness that lingers
I’m gonna write a song today
I’m gonna write a song
If it kills me
The good news is, it didn’t actually kill me; otherwise, you wouldn’t be getting this newsletter. And the only upside to that would be that I wouldn’t have to fail to write a song a month next year.