How to Write One Song

There’s really no exact way to do it—it’s not like putting together IKEA furniture. It’s just about getting started on the right path.

if you really wanted to write songs, you could find some time to get better at it.

What do you care about? What do you talk to your friends about? Whatever is on your mind is a good-enough topic for a song,

It would be weirder if you never made sounds that were at least somewhat pleasing to you.

I want to be a person who encourages more humans to do that—to have some private moments of creativity, whether they share their creations or not.

And once I listened to that version, the one I liked, it sounded like nothing I could have ever imagined without going through the process of it sounding wrong to me.

How about the way that you answer the phone when somebody calls you? Is that your signature? Is that a song? I like the idea of giving ourselves permission to knock down a lot of intellectual barriers and rhetorical cages when we think about songwriting.

maybe, like me, you’ll discover that you’re often better off learning how to write without much concern for what you’re writing about. And through that process, you’ll discover what is on your mind.

“Process” is also the only name I know of for whatever series of contortions and mental tricks we have available to lose ourselves in when we create.