creating doesn’t always mean that you have to cast yourself as the creator.

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.

it’s strange how adding words to paint a clearer, more specific image often muddies the image you’re trying to expose.

Take the time to play with your words. Allow yourself the joy of getting to know them without being precious about directing everything they are trying to say. It’s still you! The decisions are still yours.

At this point, you’re not committing yourself to anything. You’re just creating building blocks.

I think it’s important to stress that you should actually overdo it in terms of coming up with lyrics and words you like whenever you have the energy and time. Writing more than you need is almost never going to make a song worse. Sometimes every good line doesn’t make it into the song you’re working on. But that doesn’t mean you have to throw

already I’m loving the way some of the scenes are being drawn—the phrase “sunlight writes” makes me think of a hidden world, full of mystery and clues, and alludes to an idea that the natural world might have intentions, might be trying to tell us something

Clichés can be helpful, sometimes even necessary. You might eventually be able to use them as larger building blocks of songs, which can be enlivened and twisted into more interesting shapes by placing them in fresher contexts or even through repetition.

The worst that can ever happen when we spend time with ourselves being creative is so low-stakes, I can hardly come up with an example other than the mild frustrations we’ve already identified as stumbling blocks.