Your New Song Idea: Trash It Or Keep It?

Get “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Deluxe Bundle, and start a new chapter in your life as a songwriter. The Deluxe Bundle includes “Writing a Song From a Chord Progression” – perfect if you’re a chords-first kind of writer. Read more..

If you’re normal, you’ve started many more songs than you’ve finished. For the ones that you started, sweated over, and eventually abandoned, it can feel like a lot of wasted time.

In my opinion, the time you’ve put into trying to get a song working is never wasted, even if you’ve spent weeks or months on it. Everything you do changes who you are as a songwriter, and those changes are almost always good ones.

It may seem that some song ideas don’t have the legs to go the distance, and you’ll eventually call it a dud, and move on. Hopefully you never actually trash those failed ideas, because bits and pieces of them can wind up in future songs.

But wouldn’t it save you a ton of time, I hear you asking, if you could identify early on whether the idea you’re working on has “hit potential”? Why spend all that time working on something that doesn’t have strong possibilities of being a keeper?

Here are some of my thoughts on that:

1. Failed song ideas are failures because of how they’re treated within a song, and not usually because the idea itself is bad. Years ago, a visual artist friend of mine did a watercolour on parchment that she judged to be a failure. So she took the failed painting, tore it into vertical strips, and then mounted them on a canvas with about an inch space in between each strip. The painting was a dud; the treatment was successful: it was enticing to look at.
2. Songwriting as an activity is never bad, even if the end product fails. Songwriting is always just an exercise. That exercise can produce beautiful music, but no matter what happens in the end, songwriting is always just an exercise. It is never time wasted unless you stop. And even then..
3. Most song ideas have potential. A song idea may be great, but can still fail if it’s not partnered properly with other ideas. “My Sharona” by The Knack, has a distinctive melody that is mainly built around one pitch. Not a great idea, you would think. But everything else in the song is strong, and makes the one-note melody a great idea.
4. There is no time limit on creating a great song. Songs that work well can come together in minutes, or can take months or even longer. The creative process is like that: you adjust one part of your music, and you feel compelled to adjust everything else. That’s what the imagination does.
5. “Failed” song ideas can be combined to create something better. For you, your song idea might be a verse that doesn’t seem to connect well to anything else. But eventually, you may write a chorus that just doesn’t seem to have a verse that makes it work. So see what happens when you put those two together?

When all is said and done, problems happen more by the way an idea is treated than by the idea itself. That’s important to realize, because it means you’re never wasting time as a songwriter. With every song you write, you become better at what you do with those fragments your imagination creates.

______________

Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter.

“The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Deluxe Bundle looks at songwriting from every angle, and has been used by thousands of songwriters. How to use chords, write melodies, and craft winning lyrics. READ MORE..