If you work hard at songwriting, does that mean you lack talent?
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It’s relatively common for the average person to believe that most pop songwriters are gifted from birth, and that there’s something magical about being musical. Magical in the sense that musical people just have an innate awareness of how good music works. It’s not all that uncommon for a songwriter to describe the big hit they wrote as just flowing out of them:
“One by one, new tracks just flowed out of me… It was a bizarre, spiritual experience. I felt as though I had floated out of my body and was watching someone else.” – Tailor (South African singer-songwriter)
“I wrote them all when I was in Austin recovering from this accident about two years ago. They were all brand new. It’s just flowed out of me.”– Michael Des Barres (British Singer-Songwriter-Actor)
While not denying those wonderful circumstances when music just seems to happen, where does that leave the rest of us? Does the fact that you happen to work hard for every song you write mean that you lack that same instinctive musical ability?
Musical instinct is probably more common than you might think. It’s part of what makes us human, so even those with no apparent musical abilities likely have it lurking in their DNA somewhere.
Because you work hard to get a song to finally work, you may believe that talent and work are diametrically opposed. After all, if you were truly talented and filled with musical instincts, why would you need to study songwriting?
This notion of musical instinct is what causes many up-and-coming songwriters to shun music theory, believing that knowledge of theory will stunt one’s creative side. Of course, we know that to be hogwash. The world’s greatest composers were masters of music theory; trying to convince the world that Beethoven would have been great if only he hadn’t studied music theory is a non-starter to be sure.
We all know, however, that some of the best songwriters (Irving Berlin, Paul McCartney, for two famous examples, as well as countless others) don’t read music. The main difference between writers of Classical music and writers of pop songs is likely to be in the length of the piece of music in these musicians’ chosen genre. While it’s possible to imagine an entire pop song while sitting in an armchair, it’s far less likely you will conceive of an entire symphony without some ability to write ideas down. Symphonies are simply too enormous and, by comparison, too complex to be conceived in a few minutes.
So back to the original question. If you find that every song you write represents days, weeks, or even months of work, are you lacking in musical talent? If your instincts don’t produce a song quickly, are you doomed?
The evidence would say no. Leonard Cohen, for one example, reputedly spent years working out the verses for his famous “Hallelujah”, a song that sits at #259 on the Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.
Quick writing means that you were able to envision an entire song as a “snapshot”, but slow writing does not mean that you are working without a vision. Sometimes, the best ideas do not necessarily occur to you instantly. (See my article, “Creative Songwriting: Try the Second Thing that Comes to Mind“).
The best composers in the world often spend years studying their craft. And despite the myth that the best songwriters don’t know how to read a note of music, many of the best (Cole Porter, Elton John, Billy Joel, Imogen Heap, Alicia Keys, and countless others) use their training to create, but then hone, their musical outpourings.
I am a fan of studying. Studying songwriting allows you to take your abilities and provide you with a toolbox for developing those abilities. Sometimes, a song will flow out of you, and it’s wonderful when that happens. But the fact that that may not happen is not an indication of a lack of musical instinct.
It’s simply a reminder that, more often than not, the best music comes from an initial idea that takes moments, followed by days, weeks or even months of working and reworking to get it just right.
Written by Gary Ewer