How to Write One Song

by Jeff Tweedy

A song that you can fall in love with, and a song that feels like it’s capable of loving you back. Can you teach that? I’m not sure.

I was a delusional seven-year-old, and I had stumbled onto some internal TED Talk–level trick of self-actualization.

I think the disconnect is more related to the idea of “being” anything when it’s the “doing” that’s most rewarding.

It’s soul-crushing, at any job, to aspire to BE something versus being driven by what you want to DO. Do you want to be a “star”? Don’t bother. You’re going to lose. Even if you make it, you’ll lose. Because you’re never going to be exactly what you’re picturing.

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.

to connect with ourselves, I believe, requires an effort to tune in to our own thoughts and feelings through practice or habit.

If we’re being realistic about what an end goal should be, creating something with no ambition other than to get something off our chest might be the purest thing anyone could aim for.

I’m a tree. I didn’t fit perfectly into any mold. I wasn’t made by a specific set of plans. The things that have happened to me in my life have taken away some of those straight edges and shaped me into a tree, shaped me into something less predictable, less understandable.

Primarily, you’re going to have to respond to the merciless interrogations that your doubts and insecurities are going to hit you with daily. Like “Who do you think you are?” and “Are you kidding me with this bullshit?”

I’m convinced the dreams we have for ourselves go unattained from a lack of permission more than any deficit in talent or desire.

Nobody makes good choices when they aren’t aware they’re making a choice.

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.

Being willing to sound bad is one of the most important pieces of advice that I can give you.

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.

Because I believe that you need to put yourself, consciously, in the path of your subconscious. To trust yourself that there are things you can get to.

But let’s just go ahead and remind ourselves that while it is important to aim at things we’d like to achieve, I truly believe, with songwriting, that being in the “process” has to at least be a goal if not the only goal.

It has to be the going and not just the getting there when it comes to songwriting, or any artistic endeavor, really.

And the song becomes a place. Where it truly is everything. Its own universe. The only place you can go to feel the way that song makes you feel.

And along with that music, I believe words contain worlds of words and meanings that are, more often than not, locked beneath the surface.

Our thinking and the way we communicate can be very rigid, and words just bounce off the surface tension of our overtaxed attention.

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

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!

Even if you don’t end up being a songwriter, I think sitting down from time to time to play with words in this manner can be oddly comforting.

Maybe not everyone can make a chord progression, but everyone can make up a story.

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.

Much of our ability to procrastinate, and to rationalize it, revolves around what we deem to be “ideal” circumstances in which to work.

Sometimes the words hang in the air in an almost physical way, as if they’ve taken on the properties of an actual object I could touch and feel if I reached out.

Then I read something somewhere about how Inuit carvers create. As I understand it, they take a walrus tusk or a piece of limestone, and they don’t think, “I’m going to carve an elk or a seal or an eagle.” They simply carve, and let the material tell them what it wants to become. They believe its essence was there all along, and that they just opened it up and revealed it.

A song will always love you back, but sometimes it just needs a little space.

It’s a song. So what? Well, fucker, here’s so what! Giving up becomes a habit. And the delayed gratification that comes from a song finished with some hardship is going to teach you more about writing songs than this entire book will ever be able to impart.

But I will argue that how you judge the art you make is nowhere near as important as the act of creation itself.

So you might as well try to find the joy in creating even a bad song or a bad poem or a bad painting or whatever art you need to make.