Category Archives: Inspiration

Lyrical

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I used to really struggle with writing lyrics. It felt so important, with a such need to be significant that I usually stopped before I began.

Along with “starting with the end in mind” I’ve been using a cool technique that I learned in a songwriting workshop that Richard Adoradio and Kenny Schick put together back in 2006.

The process is simple. Get a timer and free-write without stopping for 2-3 minutes. When I say free, I mean completely free. Write whatever comes into your mind and don’t stop until the timer goes off. What you write for these 2-3 minutes does not matter. The point is to get into the creative mode and to get past the inner critic. Don’t filter, don’t analyze, don’t evaluate. Just write.

Once the timer goes off, work on the actual song lyrics can begin. The “stage has been set” for focusing on a theme and what feelings are to be conveyed. Rarely do I use anything that I came up with during the free-write. It was just a means to getting ready for the real stuff.

Now days I can usually finish a song’s lyrics in one sitting, as long as I stay open to the idea of it being done.

Thanks to Kenny and Richard for the great tip!

Start with the End

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“Start with the End in Mind” was a phrase that I heard from time to time over the years. I thought it sounded good but I had no idea just how useful it could be when applied. It wasn’t until I started working on the Music Sketches project at the end of 2016/beginning of 2017 that I found out first hand what it could mean.

Up until then, writing songs had been a difficult and arduous experience. I was lucky if I got one whole song together in a given year. Then I tried applying this idea of starting with the end in mind, as if the song was already done and that the process was easy and (dare I say) fun. I just focused on the idea and feeling of what it would be like if I had already finished the song. Before I knew it I would have a new idea which would lead to another new idea to another and so on. Within a few months I had over 50 song ideas recorded. These were full song ideas with chord progressions, melodies, grooves, hooks and sometimes lyrics and vocal parts all recorded and posted on YouTube.

It was a huge realization for me, that all those years I had been the starting with an end of difficulty, confusion and futility. Good to know.

Inspiration

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I love the feeling of being inspired. That feeling of possibility is so fun, free and full of hope, hope for something new. It can happen in an instant, in any number of ways and can become the basis of a whole new direction in one’s life.

In the past I thought inspiration was something that just happened to us if we were lucky and that we needed to really treasure those moments. But now I feel it’s a choice. I can invite inspiration by being ready for it and welcoming it through seeing it as a choice.

I get to choose how I feel in any given situation. That is the one thing in life that I can control. In the past I mostly felt things in a reactionary way, responses learned from previous life experiences and assumptions. Lately, I’ve been trying to ask myself on a regular basis “how do I want to feel right now?”.

Right now, I chose inspiration.

Creativity

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I love making new songs. I love the feeling of getting a new idea and imagining where it can go. Often I’ll get next inspired through studying a scale or chord voicing. It can be one or two notes that triggers something in my mind that that will later blossom into a fully formed song. The biggest factor in this process is in me being open to “hearing” the idea in the first place. It’s almost like having a net out in the water to catch fish, but this net is in my mind, open to catch ideas.