How to Write One Song

by Jeff Tweedy

Each song and each act of creativity, indeed, is an act of defiance in a world that often feels determined to destroy itself.

Maybe it’s a cliché, but you have to focus on verbs over nouns—what you want to do, not what you want to be.

inspiration is rarely the first step. When it does come out of the blue, it’s glorious. But it’s much more in your own hands than the divine-intervention-type beliefs we all tend to have about inspiration. Most of the time, inspiration has to be invited.

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 . . . etc.

inspiration doesn’t just happen—it has to be invited in, time and time again, through regular, concentrated work.

For me, and for most songwriters I know, writing songs is hard work. I don’t think that hard work is a struggle, though. That’s the difference. Working hard is a noble pursuit. I don’t know what else there is besides work. I talk about that a bit in my first book, too—that there was this notion that being in a rock band was a good thing to do if you didn’t want to work or get a real job. But all the rock bands you’ve heard of are the rock bands that’ve worked the hardest. I get that there are some areas of the music business where some bands were shafted, and there wasn’t a uniform fairness to paying off the people who worked the hardest. But it’s probably pretty unlikely that you’ve heard of the people who didn’t work at all.

Protect your inspiration, protect your ability to be inspired.

If you want to write a song, take a walk.

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,

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?

think one of the issues that we’re talking about is this idea that gifts are rare, that not everybody has gifts. I don’t know if that’s true. I’d like to believe that it’s not true. I’d like to believe that everybody, if allowed to pursue their dreams and passions, would have a gift for something. A gift for making somebody feel better, maybe. It just seems like humans . . . we’ve got to all be good at something.

We tend to use the same adjectives to emphasize the same nouns. Here’s an example of a noun and a noun pair that drives me nuts: “smattering of applause.” You don’t ever hear someone say “a smattering of . . .” anything else. But a “smattering of teeth” or a “smattering of heartbeats” are both wildly evocative pairings that immediately form images in my mind.