The Resilient Songwriter

Songwriting is rarely free of challenges, from within and from without.

Some days you’ll love what you’re writing. Other days (maybe a lot of the time), you’ll wonder if you can even do this.

If you share your music, you might experience the thrill of great feedback. But then you might get slapped with negative comments you just can’t let go of.

If you’re writing for fun, songwriting might just be a pleasant diversion. But if it’s a practice you care about, you’re going to have to learn to take the good with the bad.

And sometimes it can feel like there’s a lot of bad.

In this post, we’re going to consider what it takes to be a resilient songwriter. Cultivating resilience can help you adapt, learn, and grow on a daily basis, taking advantage of both good and bad.

And it can help you persevere, writing songs for the long run.

A resilient songwriter adapts to the circumstances

Resilience is the ability to withstand difficult or unexpected changes. In psychology, a resilient person↗(opens in a new tab) is one who successfully adapts to challenging life experiences. In engineering, a resilient system↗(opens in a new tab) is one with the capacity to handle the inevitable surprises (events that were not planned for).

In both psychology and engineering, resilience is something that can be developed. And a big part of developing it is preparing to adapt ahead of time.

So how can a songwriter prepare to adapt?

One approach is to consider where you are the least flexible. I encourage you to think carefully about the following list of questions:

• Do you believe you need inspiration to be able to write a song?
• Do you have a specific idea about how you want each song to turn out? Are you frustrated (or feel like a failure) when it goes another way?
• When you’ve finished a song, do you feel like it’s proof that you are either a good or bad songwriter?
• Do you feel a strong attachment to your first drafts? For example, is it hard for you to let go of your initial lyrics, chord progressions, structure, or whatever?
• When you ask for feedback, do you hope to only hear positive things?
• Do you immediately judge music you hear (including your own) as great or awful? Do you think those snap judgments are getting at something objective?

Maybe this list seemed a little random to you. Or maybe you saw the theme.

Each of these questions concerns a belief or approach that will likely lead to frustration and disappointment.

A word about the future

I’m not clairvoyant, and I might not have met you. But if you’re serious about songwriting, I can predict your future:

• You will write songs that you hate.
• You will write songs that other people hate.
• You will receive negative feedback that you didn’t expect, feedback that will hurt.
• You will feel like you’re not good enough, or that your best work is all behind you.
• You will wonder why you’re even doing this.

Sounds kind of miserable. Why does anyone do this?

Well, there are a lot of reasons. Songwriting is interesting, exciting, fun, and surprising. It allows you to explore ideas, sounds, and emotions. It allows you to create something new, and get swept away in that creation when you listen back (maybe over and over).

Songwriting allows you to connect with other people, whether friends, collaborators, or perfect strangers. There’s nothing quite like having people sing your lyrics, or dance to your groove, or be fascinated by your experiment, or really feel what you were trying to communicate.

This is the good and bad of songwriting. If you stick to it, you’re going to experience both.

Maybe just within your social circle. Maybe on a much larger stage.

To get there and keep going, you need to be ready to adapt. And that will require challenging your own assumptions.

A resilient songwriter focuses on processes over outcomes

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about songwriting: you don’t have much control over when you’ll write a song you like.

Every time you write, you’re effectively rolling dice. There are things you can do to make it more likely you’ll write a good song, but you can never guarantee it.

This means that if you are focused on the outcome, on whether or not the song is great, then you are setting yourself up for frustration.

You can’t directly control the song, but you can control the process.

It is very common for songwriters to wait for inspiration to strike. This is not a process.

Waiting for inspiration is waiting to be lucky. And that’s just another path to disappointment.

Turning luck to your advantage

Let’s look at things a different way. When you’re dealing with luck, it’s better if you can keep retrying.

Normally you shouldn’t put your life savings on a single number in roulette. But if you were allowed to spin as many times as you want, then maybe you should!

The good news is that in songwriting you can spin the wheel as often as you like.

This doesn’t mean you’re going to write great music if you just do the same things every day. But it does mean that focusing on your process is a way to prepare for luck, both good and bad.

Treat your process as something worth investing time, thought, and creativity into. Use it to challenge your habits, explore new ideas, and continuously learn.

When a songwriting session ends, don’t just think about how good the song was. Ask yourself how the process went, and how it can be improved.

A resilient songwriter suspends judgments of “good” and “bad”

Focusing on process allows you to focus on what you can control, and let the things you can’t control unfold on their own.

Part of the reason this is valuable is that it stops us from getting caught up in “writing good songs”. But it’s also worth challenging this way of thinking even more directly.

It’s easy to view music in general through the lens of good and bad. In the United States at least, we’re often raised from a very young age to associate art with “genius”. And to think that only good art is worth experiencing (and making).

But the lens of good and bad leaves us with a pretty narrow view. For one, it normally conflates social fads and personal tastes with objective truth. And it closes us off to whole worlds of music that fall outside the norm.

The risks of too much judgment

Whether or not judgments like these have their place, they can do a lot of damage when it comes to actually writing music.

Writer’s block. Self-doubt. Sticking to what’s safe. An inability to focus on the here and now. A growing dependency on “inspiration”. An unhealthy fixation on competition.

These are some of the maladies that can be generated (or made worse) by too much focus on good and bad.

By suspending judgments of good and bad, a resilient songwriter focuses on the act of writing music, follows where the session leads, explores ideas even when they might not work, and searches for the details other people might miss.

If this is difficult for you, practice while listening to music. Instead of thinking about whether you like or dislike a song, listen carefully for one thing you find interesting, however small.

A resilient songwriter focuses on what’s happening now

If you’re committed to songwriting, you’re going to face adversity of one kind or another. You should expect unexpected surprises.

But no matter what else happens, as long as you’re alive, you’ll be here now.

So one way to prepare to adapt is to learn to focus on what’s happening now, even if it’s not going your way.

Do you hate the song you’re working on? Of course, you can always start another, but maybe this is an opportunity.

Can you figure out what you hate most? Can you think of ways to avoid that?

Can you find a way to turn it upside down? Can you change the instruments? Substitute a new chord progression? Replace everything but one part? Cut out a random part and loop it?

Or maybe you’ve just received some very negative feedback. Can you write a new song based on it? Either following the advice or purposely doing the opposite?

Can you write a song about the feedback? Maybe you can transform it into a story, or reinterpret your personal reaction? Is this how a bureaucrat feels when someone calls them a cog in a machine?

The resilient songwriter has a secret: almost anything can be turned into a songwriting exercise.

A resilient songwriter treats every idea as an experiment

We have collected a few principles so far:

• Focus on the process, not the outcome.
• Suspend judgments of “good” and “bad”.
• Focus on what’s happening now, and always find a way to create.

Together, these bring another principle into focus: treat every idea as an experiment.

Imagine you are writing a song right now. You are trying out these chords, this melody, this beat.

These ideas are not you, they’re not a testament to your skill (or lack thereof), and they’re not fixed in meaning. They’re just an experiment.

Experiments fail, and we learn. And sometimes they succeed.

The benefits of experiments

If every musical idea you have is an experiment, then you are always learning, always trying new things, always expanding your horizons.

You can devise new experiments. You can share them or collaborate on them or keep them hidden.

What matters is that you see them through.

Over time, your vocabulary will grow. Your boundaries will expand. Your perspective will change.

And when you listen back to all of the songs you created, you’ll probably discover some that you love.

A resilient songwriter reuses and reframes

You might have noticed something. If you follow the principles we’ve been discussing, you’re going to create a kind of distance between you and the songs you’re writing.

You’ll be less attached to them. Less concerned about how good they are. Less worried about how they’ll be received.

And this gives you a new opportunity. It will be easier for you to cut them up, steal ideas from them, and repurpose them.

You will be in a better position to reuse and reframe your ideas. And since following these principles will naturally lead you to build up a backlog of ideas, you will have even more raw material to draw from.

Because that’s what you’re making when you write daily: raw material for future songs.

You don’t need to care about those future songs now. But it can be inspiring to know that a future you will be able to write them.

A resilient songwriter takes a different perspective on time

The final principle we’ll consider concerns time, and the relationships between your different temporal selves.

The vision of your past self can be a tyrant, imposing standards and expectations that no longer suit you as a person and an artist, stopping you from growing and adapting.

The interests of your future self can make your efforts a chore, unpaid labor for a person who doesn’t even exist yet. The future self can tear you out of your creative work, constantly asking whether it’s good enough, whether it’s going to get you plays or build a following.

And what about your present self, easily distracted, easily bored, easily discouraged? And to make matters worse, continuously disappearing, forever replaced by some new thought or emotion or desire.

This is what you have to work with! No wonder songwriting is hard.

Two strategies to free yourself from your selves

I won’t pretend to solve these problems here, though it might be a first step just to acknowledge them as problems. But let’s consider a couple of strategies a resilient songwriter could follow.

First, you can search for ways to be absorbed in the act of creation. To quiet all of those voices as you focus on the next chord, the next melody, the next part.

Every songwriter is different, and you will have to experiment with your process to find what works best for you.

Second, you can set very specific goals when you write music. This is the magic of songwriting exercises.

By doing something concrete, like writing a song with 3 chords, you make success more likely and frustration less.

By choosing exercises that challenge you, you broaden your vocabulary, increase your skill, and deepen your craft.

Unlike playing through scales or lifting a weight, songwriting exercises are creative. You’re actually doing the thing, not just preparing for it.

And you can channel some of your creativity into developing new exercises to add to your growing list.

The resilient songwriter takes a different perspective on time, learning from the past but letting it go, preparing for the future but focusing on the present, and creating opportunities in the present to actually write music, regardless of the outcome.