Demystifying songwriting
Sorry for ghosting you, I'm a tortured artist
This month I’ve been writing a song every day.1 This has consumed a surprisingly small amount of my time and yet a surprisingly large amount of my overall ability to do things.
This is actually the third time I’ve tried to do a month of songwriting – in January of 2024, I managed to write 15 songs in 30 days, half of which were decent. In October of 2025, I wrote mostly little fragments, got one usable song, and then devolved into writing poetry for the last two weeks.
But those were both before I did Inkhaven, which taught me that you well can pull a piece of art out of yourself every fucking day no matter how sick you are, no matter how late at night it is, no matter how insipid what you’re putting down on the page feels to you. So this month I’ve written and recorded a song every day. Each one has words, an original melody, and instrumental backing, and is at least thirty seconds long.
Before this month, the process of songwriting felt like a black box to me. I had no insight into how I did it, why it worked when it worked. But if you do anything every day for thirty days, you (hopefully) eventually figure out how to do it.
Now instead of waiting a year for inspiration to strike, I can sit down with my notebook while way too tired, and within an hour I will have recorded a song with two verses, two choruses, a passable melody, and guitar or piano accompaniment.
How do I do it?!
Approaches
I have three basic approaches to writing songs: lyrics first, melody first, and hook first.
Lyrics first results in the worst songs (not catchy, musically confused, often trite or too on the nose), but it’s still my most common approach because I’ve been writing poetry regularly for twenty years, and so sitting down and writing a poem (to a middling standard) comes extremely easily. Then I just kind of vaguely sing the poem to myself until something close enough to a melody forms, add some chords, and call it done. But the melody is usually pretty nothing, and is often accidentally derivative of my own past songs.
Melody first is something I’ve only tried for the first time this month. I’ll write a riff (usually on piano) and then vaguely sing some words over it. I usually end up liking the riff but feeling meh about the lyrics. Still, this means I have an element that’s usable for the future, even if I scrap the lyrics!
Hook first results in the best songs by far, but it requires a bolt of inspiration that can’t be relied upon to come. I expect I’ll get better at coming up with hooks on demand (and probably already have) over time. By ‘hook’ here, I mean at least one line or phrase with lyrics and melody together, that’s good enough to get stuck in your head.
Topics
I just write about whatever is emotionally salient in the moment. A park, a piece of art, looking out my window. And then of course, people – I’ve written a few songs about my boyfriend, one about my sister, but also some about friends I don’t know that well who just grabbed me in some way. And… one about my neighbor across the street, who I’ve never spoken to, but see every day. I have a parasocial relationship with her, it’s fine.
In the third week, I didn’t have to work, so I decided I was going to write a 25,000 word draft of my book (previously mentioned on the blog) in five days. So I wrote 5,000 words a day while also writing a song every day. Two of the songs from that week are about how I was burned out and sitting at a computer all day was torture. Perhaps not my best work, but I’m getting the practice in!
Style imitation
I’ve had a lot of fun trying to imitate other styles. Two of my favorite songs came about this way, one inspired by Phoebe Bridgers, one by Mumford and Sons. I also did some melody layering directly inspired by Sufjan Stevens’ The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us! I wrote a cringe white person rap in the style of Macklemore’s Same Love. I wrote a parody of my friend’s very good band that got me to experiment with dissonance and nontraditional song structure. I did a little fragment in a classical East Asian style.
The problem is, my ability to pull off different styles is limited by my musical ability. As the old saying goes, when all you have is an acoustic guitar, everything sounds like a folk song. I can imagine a sick electric guitar riff, or an erhu, or a full band coming in on the chorus, til the cows come home, and still all I’ll have is my voice and guitar or piano. Frustrating!
There are so many music skills it would be useful to have and not enough time in a human life to master them. I guess the skill I really want is writing / arranging for a bunch of different instruments; I don’t need to be able to play them all myself. I am very far from having that skill, but not impossibly far.
Editing songs
Between my last songwriting month in October and this month, I wrote three songs. All of them are good, but also I worked on each of them for several consecutive days before the final version emerged – they weren’t perfect the first time. Knowing that I’m capable of editing songs has helped me feel okay writing imperfect or even bad drafts, which is super important when I have to do it so fast.
The song editing process (which I haven’t yet had a chance to do for any of my Songhaven songs) is roughly:
Identify parts of the song that aren’t working well (whether in lyrics, melody, or structure)
(Ask for suggestions from my loved ones and then summarily dismiss everything they suggest because it’s not My Vision)
Mess around with the problem areas until they feel right
There’s also the step of adding instrumentation. My first drafts generally just have a single plonk/strum of chords. But in the editing process I’ve written piano parts for some of my old songs, and my boyfriend turned my chords for a song from this May into a gorgeous guitar part I could never have pulled off myself. These really help my songs feel like songs and not just little poems I’m humming to myself.
Can I hear your songs?
Not yet! But the goal is to release an EP by the end of the year. Pending the editing and arranging steps, which will commence after I’ve finished out this month. (And then the studio time, and like, possibly finding people to play the instruments my boyfriend and I can’t do ourselves. Luckily we know lots of good musicians, and also we can always just scrap the arrangements and go voice-guitar only.)
Also pending naming the fucking band, which my boyfriend still wants to call Tomato Tomato. This may prove the biggest obstacle of all.
So that’s what I’ve been up to, why I haven’t been blogging, why I haven’t replied to basically any messages for several weeks (sorry to all my friends and family). Also because I fucked up my hands by writing 25,000 words in a week, when I’m totally unused to using a computer, and now I’ve been avoiding typing.
But, you know, book and album both forthcoming, so, get your hopes up! If we haven’t released an album by December 31st you are legally allowed to kill me.
For complicated reasons, today is day 26.