How to Write One Song

by Jeff Tweedy

Here are the three main items I have on a daily mental checklist. I’ll note that these are all tools I use to write many songs over time, but they’ll work just as well if your purpose is to write just one song. 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 On most days I manage to get all three checked off to some degree without much of a struggle. But I feel generally satisfied and that I’ve maintained my work ethic even when I’m able to knock only one off the list. It doesn’t take much: If you keep it up for any length of time, you are going to accumulate a lot of material for songs, even if you’re able to set aside only five to ten minutes a day.

Yes, I still have goals and desires. I want to finish albums and be able to provide myself with new songs to perform, but the feeling I get when I write—the sense that time is simultaneously expanding and disappearing, that I’m simultaneously more me and also free of me—is the main reason I wanted to put my thoughts on songwriting down in book form to share with everyone so inclined. It has to be the going and not just the getting there when it comes to songwriting, or any artistic endeavor, really.