You’ve got little to no hope of achieving your goals in songwriting, or any of the creative arts, if you don’t have the confidence to be honest about your songs.
Confidence refers to your ability to stand behind and believe in your songs even though others might dislike them.
Honesty refers to your ability to hear your songs exactly the way others will hear them.
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If you falter and dismiss your own songs because someone else doesn’t like them, you don’t have the confidence needed to move upward in the music business.
If you find that everything you write sounds wonderful to the extent that you miss crucial opportunities to improve your skills, you don’t have the honesty or objectivity needed to advance from the amateur world to the professional world.
Tricky Tightrope
It’s a tricky tightrope upon which the best songwriters find themselves balancing. Too confident? You’re probably missing opportunities to hone and polish your music. On the other end of the spectrum, you might find your confidence collapsing simply because someone else dislikes your music.
If you are a songwriter with both of those characteristics in proper balance, the following statements likely pertain to you:
- You feel pride in every song you complete — but you don’t let pride cloud your musical or artistic judgment.
- You feel disappointed if someone expresses dislike for a song you’ve written — but you don’t use that opinion as the sole reason for changing the song.
- You feel able to listen to your songs objectively and honestly — and you work to hear them the way others hear them.
Confidence in your songs should never prevent you from seeking out advice from good songwriters and good producers that you respect and admire. Listen to that advice; you’ll find that more often than not, their advice is sound.
Professional producers with experience in your genre will almost always give you advice that will help you tap into your target audience.
Professional songwriters will be able to help you by teaching you the lessons they learned the hard way.
The Top of the Creative Tree
To be innovative and unique in the songwriting world means doing something that no one else is doing. That requires confidence, because you’ll be at the very top of the creative tree, and it’s a lonely spot.
For every song you write, you need to ask yourself, “If someone else had written this song, would I like it?”
You might find that it takes a lot of objective honesty to be able to answer that question truthfully.
Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter.
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