How to Write One Song

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.

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

you feel a little uncomfortable, maybe a tiny bit embarrassed even, you’re on the right track.

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.

I think that to get there we have to start with ourselves. And to connect with ourselves, I believe, requires an effort to tune in to our own thoughts and feelings through practice or habit.

“Have you ever heard a song and responded to it? OK, you know music!”

And that I’ve accepted the fact that it’s also impossible to make the perfect tree—there’s no perfecting it. There’s no reaching some conclusion that you’ve made THE tree.

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.

So do some freewriting. Write without thinking. I’m sure there will be some things that will surprise you, along with some nonsense.