It Doesn't Matter What You Know

Many of us are taught from a young age that it’s important to be right.

Mistakes are met with red pens, reprimands, and even mockery. This can instill a fear of being wrong, even in the most trivial cases.

But when it comes to creating music, it doesn’t matter if you’re “right”. What matters is how your music sounds.

This means learning about music shouldn’t be like preparing for a test. Even if you get the theory wrong, you can still use what you learn!

The theorist vs. the songwriter

There’s a big difference between approaching music as a theorist and as a songwriter.

The theorist wants to understand how music works, develop theories that can explain it, and teach these ideas to others.

For the theorist, getting the theory right is the point. And for teachers like me, getting things right is important so that we don’t mislead.

But a songwriter is trying to do something else: write great music. And for popular music forms, your audience couldn’t care less whether you are an expert in the theory.

They just want to love your music.

Music analysis is just a tool

Learning about music can help you broaden your horizons as a songwriter. And of course, you can’t understand something if you get all the details wrong.

But what matters more than anything is that you learn new ways of working.

If you learn a new scale, you can use it to write a melody or an instrumental part. But if the song demands it, you should always be ready to leave the scale behind.

If you learn about harmonic functions, you can use them to build tension and resolve it. If learning this helped you write chord progressions that you like, then it doesn’t really matter if you used the functions “correctly”.

As a songwriter, music analysis is a tool. Its purpose is to help you break habits, broaden your vocabulary, and try new things. But if taken too seriously, it can actually be counterproductive.

The power of mistakes

If you have ever studied the history of philosophy, you might have noticed that many new theories were built on a misinterpretation of someone who came before.

Getting a philosopher wrong is bad for a historian, but it can actually be helpful for developing new ideas!

When I was younger, I used to think the chorus to “Enjoy the Silence”↗(opens in a new tab) was “all I ever needed is here in my heart”. As a teenager experiencing heartbreak, I connected with the idea that I already had everything I needed.

But in reality the lyric was exactly the opposite! “All I ever needed is here in my arms.” I was pretty disappointed to learn it. But I could have used that mistake to write a new song expressing the idea that resonated with me at the time.

Mistakes are a source for creativity! You might be familiar with this when it comes to performance mistakes. I know I’ve discovered many interesting musical ideas by playing the “wrong” thing on accident.

The same idea can apply to theory and analysis. Imagine you identify a pattern in a song, and then use that pattern to write a new song you like. Does it actually matter if the original song used the pattern?

As Tom Waits said↗(opens in a new tab), “I get a lot of ideas by mishearing something.”

Don’t obsess over the details

I’m not saying you should strive to misunderstand music. Getting things right allows you to build on ideas and gain new levels of insight.

But you should always keep the goal in the foreground. Instead of obsessing over the details, you can focus on how to use the things you learn.

And when you’re using them, don’t worry about whether you’re “right”.

The same goes for analyzing music. It can be useful to try to work out what key a song is in or what role the chords in a song are playing.

But even experts often disagree about how to analyze a song. Don’t get hung up on getting it right. Do your best and then write some new songs based on what you’ve learned.

The songs you write are the test of how well you’ve spent your time.