The Shapeshifting Principle: Let Your Songs Become What They Will

It’s powerful for an artist to have a vision. But when it comes to writing an individual song, a vision can sometimes hurt more than it helps.

It all depends on how rigid your thinking is.

I suggest that songwriters embrace the shapeshifting principle. This principle says that you should treat every step and every idea in your process as provisional and subject to change.

You won’t know what your song is until it’s become what it’s going to be. Your job is to help it get there by whatever means necessary.

A song is whatever it will be

If you’re like most songwriters, you’ve probably started many more songs than you’ve finished.

Whether we’re talking about fragments, single sections, verse/chorus drafts, or whatever else, you’ve probably written many “songs that could have been”.

When a building is midway through the process of construction, it is also unfinished. But its endpoint is definite, specified precisely in the blueprints and designs.

Unfinished songs, on the other hand, don’t have a definite endpoint. Each of them could still be many different things.

When you “hear the potential” of a song idea, you perceive that it can be developed into something interesting. But you don’t actually know what that “something” is, not until the song is complete.

The value of a plan

It’s useful to approach a song with a plan, something more specific than “write a great song”.

Some of these plans might be more-or-less intangible. You want the song to be about feelings of isolation. You want it to have an ethereal vibe. You want it to be reminiscent of a certain sub-genre from the 80s.

Plans like these help you make specific choices as you go, and hopefully inspire you as you explore creative ideas.

But you still face countless options as you sit with your instrument. So you might also choose more technical plans, like using F major as your home chord and trying to write your melody in the Lydian mode.

Limiting your options with technical plans is a great way to get focused quickly. And it helps you make progress without obsessing over “good and bad”.

Your plan is just a step along the way

Any plan, whether intangible or technical, comes with a risk: the risk that you start to worry more about the plan than the song.

As you work out your chord progression, you might find that you are writing in a major key and not the Lydian mode. You might find that your attempt to center on F major has also gone out the window.

As long as the song is going somewhere, who cares?

Or maybe the song is failing to capture an ethereal vibe. And maybe it’s not the ode to isolation that you had hoped, with other moods coming to the forefront instead.

Unless you’re setting music to a film and need a very specific feel, these are not reasons to despair. As long as a song is emerging, you don’t need to force it into your initial mold.

Be open to where it’s taking you.

Plans are like exercises

I often talk about songwriting exercises on this site. They are a great way to get started quickly, build (and break) habits, explore techniques, and, most importantly, write songs.

A songwriting exercise often has a specific goal. Any of the plans described above could function as an exercise.

But failing to achieve that goal is not failing the exercise. The exercise works like scaffolding. You should always be ready and willing to push it away if the song calls for it.

Let’s take writing in the Lydian mode as an example. From a songwriting standpoint, it can be interesting to write in a mode you don’t normally use. But it’s just not important that the finished song is actually in Lydian.

Even if the finished song is in plain old major, odds are that you ended up approaching the melody in new ways.

Maybe you normally sing your melodies, but had to work on a piano in this case, leading you to discover a different kind of melody.

Or maybe you tried to use the distinctive Lydian #4 note, but in the process hit on a cool melody in a different major key built around that same note.

An exercise structures your songwriting, allowing you to explore the same notes and chords in new ways. But the important thing is the song that emerges in the end.

Don’t get hung up on your immediate goals. They are a means to an end.

The shapeshifting principle

You begin a songwriting session in a certain frame of mind, with assumptions and plans for the song you’re writing (or revising).

Think of this as a character you’re playing, and the song as an extension of this character.

Be ready for this character to transform into something else. And then simply play that character instead.

The shapeshifting principle says that we should be open to these transformations, and view them as a normal part of the songwriting process.

This fosters an experimental mindset. Whatever you do, you’re just trying something out.

Your value as a songwriter is never hanging in the balance. Experiments fail. And when they do, you try something else.

You’re always discovering, step by step, what the song will be.