How to Write One Song

by Jeff Tweedy

But how do you make a song do that? How can you be sure you’re making that connection happen? I think that to get there we have to start with ourselves. And to connect with ourselves, I believe, requires an effort to tune in to our own thoughts and feelings through practice or habit.

That’s kind of having an ego in a nutshell. It’s there to build you up. And protect you. To protect your idea of yourself as smart, and handsome, and someone who should be taken seriously and never be laughed at. Your ego wants to conceal your insecurity and your fear. And that’s why it can be such an unwelcome intrusion when we’re trying to create or perform. You need your human frailty to be at least somewhat visible if you want to connect on an emotional level—if you want things to feel real.

the end, learning how to disappear is the best way I’ve found to make my true self visible to myself and others.

I’ve found that most people who have a fulfilling life in art are, like me, the people who work at it every day and put the tools of creation in their hands frequently, who not only invite inspiration in but also do it on a regular basis. Instead of waiting to be “struck” by inspiration, they put themselves directly in its path. Pick up a guitar, and you’re much more likely to write a song. Pick up a pencil

My sincere wish is for people to be able to foster a little more license to create in their own lives.

I’m convinced the dreams we have for ourselves go unattained from a lack of permission more than any deficit in talent or desire. And I’m going to stress again that when I say “permission,” I mean the permission we withhold or give ourselves to pursue those dreams.

And I look at the artistic gift as more about communication and the ability to be oneself. And not just about being able to execute a piece of music perfectly. To me, showing up with a reliably open heart and a will to share whatever spirit you can muster is what resonates and transcends technical perfection.

If your goal is to write songs and have it end up being your day job, there’s really no substitute for a work ethic.

having the truth exposed. A truth always comes out in art. I think comedy finds it, and I think good songwriting finds it. I believe that all art is about this truth, which is almost invisible at most other times, when we’re less aware, locked in the drudgery of our day-to-day existences, until art breaks through and points it out to us.

I’m not trying to write a self-help book, but here’s what I’m getting at: In writing songs, I have found something that overwhelmingly makes me a happier person, more able to cope with the world. Can this be transferred to anybody, regardless of talent level, regardless of their individual gift for creativity? I absolutely think it can, and I hope I’ve already convinced you.

you have to stop thinking that you’re going to make something great, or something that might make you famous. You have to stop thinking about anything other than what happened when you were a little kid, and you laid on the floor, and you drew. And you lost yourself in that drawing. And in the end, you absolutely loved that drawing because you made it yourself. And the drawing got hung up on the fridge regardless of how good it was, because your mom loves you and everybody loves you. Why can’t you be that kind to yourself?

We have thousands of years of evidence that songs help us live and cope, and they teach us how to be human.

Becoming a part of the continuation of that rich human activity is all up to you. An endless flowing river of song. And you get to add your voice. No one ever drowns. Dive in.

One of the ways we narrow our daily language is by creating more expected, more manageable pairings of words in our speech patterns. For example, we tend to use the same verbs with the same nouns. We tend to use the same adjectives to emphasize the same nouns.

Clichés can be helpful, sometimes even necessary. You might eventually be able to use them as larger building blocks of songs, which can be enlivened and twisted into more interesting shapes by placing them in fresher contexts or even through repetition.

Come up with ten verbs that are associated with, say, a physician, and write them down on a page. Then write down ten nouns that are within your field of vision.

Stealing Words from a Book

Cut-Up Techniques

Take the time to play with your words. Allow yourself the joy of getting to know them without being precious about directing everything they are trying to say. It’s still you! The decisions are still yours.

I honestly believe that making the decision to open yourself up to what might be within your work that isn’t completely intentional is a brave act of acceptance and every bit as revealing and artful as any art that claims to be a fully realized vision.

Don’t let adjectives make you think you’re being poetic. An “impatient red fiery orb loomed in the whiskey-blurred, cottony-blue sky” is rarely going to hit me anywhere near as hard as “I was drunk in the day.”

Of course, it’s strange how adding words to paint a clearer, more specific image often muddies the image you’re trying to expose. The problem is when they are used to spice up a vague verb or noun instead of replacing that with precise language. There are so many great words. Find them!

Here’s a list of ten adjectives related to outer space set against ten nouns that just popped into my head.

For this, I have one simple exercise. Have a conversation. Find someone you can talk to with some degree of ease—friend, relative, drive-thru attendant—and ask them to interrogate you about your life, how you’re feeling, what you fear. Record your conversation somehow. Let a little time pass and go back to it. Ideally you could take the time to transcribe at least your side of the conversation.

Now, look at what you said off the top of your head without any premeditation. Were you honest? Did you surprise yourself with any of your answers? Have you ever heard anyone sing any of the things you said?

Here’s a quick look at how you can use almost any snippet of conversation as a catalyst to generate some ideas.

One thing that I like to do and that I find scratches the same sort of itch that crossword puzzles can get to is writing freestanding rhyming couplets. “Freestanding” meaning that they are unattached to any poem or song.

Just taking two rhyming words and connecting them can be very satisfying, especially when you’ve freed yourself of the burden of the architecture and logic of an entire poem or lyric. As an example: when Gwendolyn speaks to a county police plastic cup of beer held between her teeth

Woody Guthrie’s most famous bit of writing advice, and one that I think has been echoed by many other writers of all types, is, “Write what you know.”

While I agree it’s important to be truthful about what affects you in your day-to-day living, I’d like to offer a solution to the stultifying feeling that our lives aren’t worthy of songs being written about them: BE SOMEONE ELSE.

I’m just saying it’s worthwhile and helpful to consciously step outside of yourself from time to time and write from some “other” point of view.

Even after I had made peace with my voice, I still had the strong impulse to write with the voice, life experience, and gravitas of other artists in mind.

written from the viewpoint of an insect at a picnic.

Writing from a bug’s place in the world allowed me to be honest, in other words.

I think it’s a helpful trick if you can get yourself to see the world from a new angle every once in a while.

Look around the room you’re in right now. What is the clock seeing from its perch on the mantel? Have you ever imagined what it’s like to be a rug? How about a vacuum cleaner? Chaka Khan? Or maybe YOU could try your hand at writing a song in Johnny Cash’s voice? That’s the beauty of ...

In my opinion, it’s more important to be a good listener than to be a good musician.

But even being able to confidently sing along without looking at a lyric sheet is valuable if you want to get a sense of how songs are paced and why certain song shapes are recurring and satisfying.

also spend a good deal of time listening to new records, and old records I’ve never heard before, in an ongoing search for songs that inspire me to write my own. A big part of that inspiration comes through the process of taking them apart enough to figure out how to play them on an acoustic guitar and sing them to myself.

I have a favorite game I play to not just combat procrastination but also challenge the feeling that I should work only when I know it’s going to be “good.” This exercise helps keep my definition of what a song is, or can be, open and forgiving enough to allow pleasant anomalies to flourish. It’s a simple game. Basically, the whole gist is to set a timer for any amount of time you can spare (I think five to ten minutes is perfect) and tell yourself that whatever comes to you in that amount of time is a song. I even like to record what I come up with into my phone at the end

recommend learning to improvise a bit.

So bang on a table and blurt out something primal. Play one chord and narrate your day so far. Just put something into a recorder. You’ve created something that didn’t exist before—how freeing is that?

The important element here is that you find some way to sidestep the part of your brain that wants perfection or needs to be rewarded right away with a “creation” that it deems “good”—something that supports an ideal vision of yourself as someone who’s serious and smart and accomplished.

Basically, you have to learn how to have a party and not invite any part of your psyche that feels a need to judge what you make as a reflection of you. Or more accurately, the part of you that cannot...

What I feel like I can sense is that they never got over having to sound bad to get good, and that they never really learned to embrace the joyousness of sounding “bad.” Actually, I think it’s a skill that one would more likely relearn than learn. Kids are, in my experience, usually able to commit to creating in a way almost completely devoid of judgment. I love watching kids sprawled out on a carpet drawing or coloring. To me, it’s the ideal creative state, and it’s what I strive for more than any other aspect of what I do. It takes some work, and it takes tricks like the ones we’ve been discussing, but I’ve found it for myself, and it’s worth it.

Another thing you can try is a different instrument.

When I come across chord pairings and passages of chords that are surprising or new to me, I often play them into my phone without the vocal melody or with a new vocal melody added to obscure the source.

By the way, I’d like to add that you don’t have to do any of these particular exercises—though without the daily-discipline component, you might just have to be happy with writing a few songs a year that come to you in intermittent bursts of inspiration.

I’m even willing to say that the songs you don’t know you want to write are better than the ones you’re picturing.

How these mumble tracks end up as finished “Grammy Award–winning” lyrics is a process I think anyone could figure out with a little practice. To me, the key is to surrender to the nonsense and write down the first words that come to your mind as you listen back to what you’ve recorded. It can take some repetition, but eventually it stops sounding like gibberish and it starts feeling almost like you’re translating from another language—or even better, like you’re taking dictation. Once that step is out of the way, I sit down with just the words on the page to see if there is any sense at all to be made out of the raw translation.