Why Saving Your “Failed Songs” Pays Off

If you’re not saving the bits of songs that never see the light of day, you should be. You could be tossing out hit material.

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Over the past few years I’ve been writing almost daily articles on this blog. And if I’m ever stuck for a word, or a better way of communicating an idea, I do something rather simple: I walk away from the computer for about 15 minutes. When I return, I almost always have a better solution for wording my thoughts. There’s something about temporarily ignoring a problem that clears the mind and allows the creative juices to reassemble themselves. There’s an important lesson here for songwriters: if you’re throwing out your scraps of song failures, you could be inadvertently throwing out material that might make its way into a great tune.

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There’s a quote, attributed to Michelangelo, that offers a very fanciful opinion of what sculpture was to him: “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”

That’s not a view that will help most songwriters, however. Would that we could all say that entire songs existed in our minds: complete entities, only needing us to strip away the unwanted notes to reveal it to everyone else.

No, most songwriters I know are predictably mortal, and songwriting is a process requiring the notes to be revealed to the writer first, and then (hopefully) to everyone else.

My gut tells me that Michelangelo required the same kind of time, experimentation and editing to produce his great works of art as the world’s best composers claim to have needed. Michelangelo was a grand self-promoter, as many of the world’s best artists were and are. Though he didn’t need it, he wasn’t above a little bit of myth creation to help his career.

Songs that appear in our minds in almost complete form are vanishingly rare. What’s more likely is that you’ll get a few bits working together, and then… a bit of a block. Much of the time, that block is short and inconsequential, a normal part of the songwriting process. Little by little, you’ll pull that song together from the musical fragments drifting about your creative mind.

But what if the block lasts longer? Most of the time, if you get a great idea that just doesn’t seem to go anywhere, you’re more likely to toss that idea aside and forget it if the block happens early on in the songwriting process.

The sad reality is that there are likely many, many bits of songs that have been created and disposed of, bits that might have eventually worked their way into something great. So do yourself a favour: keep a journal, diary, or digital recording of all your failed songs, or unsuccessful attempts at songwriting.

And then dig those old ideas out every once in a while, and make a second attempt at working them into a song. That bit of time away from it will give you a new perspective, and you just never know what your creative mind has been doing with those ideas while you think you haven’t been thinking of them.

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