How to Write One Song

by Jeff Tweedy

It really is a choice that’s being made. And if you recognize that you’ve made a choice to play Candy Crush for forty-five minutes or dive deep into a YouTube marble-racing rabbit hole, then maybe you could choose to spend that time strumming a guitar and finding a chord progression that inspires you instead. Or spend forty-five minutes freewriting. Frankly, even that much time isn’t necessary. You don’t have five minutes? You don’t have three minutes? How long is a song? Three minutes? Obviously we’re going to get into more nuanced instruction later, but for now, pick up a guitar and bang on it for three minutes. There, you’ve essentially written a song. That’s honestly something that could make you feel better. Pick up a guitar and scream your fucking head off. That’s going to make you feel better. And it’s going to make you feel like you did the one step that you didn’t think you’d be able to get yourself to do.

Also, do you think everybody who writes songs started off great? That their songs were great? That is definitely not the case. You have to sound bad to sound good, even if you’ve written five hundred songs. Being willing to sound bad is one of the most important pieces of advice that I can give you. Writing a song will teach you that it’s OK to fail. And more than that, that it’s actually good to fail, and that you can come to appreciate the gifts of failure. Failure can be a kind of pain that you shouldn’t let go to waste, at least as long as you’re in the proper space mentally. It will help you deal with rejection in a lot of other areas of your life.

Stockpiling Words, Language, and Lyrics—doing exercises like freewriting, writing poems, refining, and revising, all of which I’ll talk about in the next section Stockpiling Music, Songs, and Parts of Songs—making demo recordings, practicing, learning other people’s songs, and writing parts for songs in progress Pairing Words and Music—writing lyrics to a melody and searching for matches between stockpiled demos and lyric sets, poems, and freewriting

You may note an absence of “family time” or any other types of normal activity. While I do condone “family time,” the sad truth is that “family time” is really “not-gonna-happen time” when it comes to my output, and the time I spend with my loving family produces very little in terms of pure songwriting material. Feel free to have a life. But don’t complain to me when it takes you a month to finish your first song.

(Yes, I’m a crossword puzzle nerd/addict, but it sure beats the hell out of when I was an addict addict.)

Keep the Language Simple That being said, I think it’s important to make the point that I’m not talking about expanding your vocabulary. I mean, that’s always a nice thing to do in the name of self-improvement. But fancy multisyllabic words aren’t going to make a lyric better, and are very often the type of thing that breaks the spell being cast by a melody when I listen to music. Like, “How long has this guy been trying to shoehorn ‘plethora’ into a tune?!” In fact, I would say that most of my favorite songwriters consciously stick to common, simple, and precise language, but they don’t use it in a common and simple way within a song or melody. I’m thinking of people like John Prine, who didn’t use a lot of big words or flowery language. But when he did, I believe he always stayed true to the song and what needed to be said, over any desire to make himself sound smart or poetic.

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!

The processes I’m pushing can be used over and over, and they’ll never result in the song you’re picturing. If you use the exact same process I used to write “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” you won’t write “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (Again)” or even “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (Tokyo Drift).”