Writer’s block is a real bitch. I’m try­ing to get some­thing new writ­ten before going to an open stage later this week, but I’m hav­ing a hell of a time. Noth­ing I’m com­ing up with feels inspired enough. Sure I could knock out another three chord trick, or four chord turn­around, but deep within is this nag­ging feel­ing that I’ve done it all before.

I fired up the key­board last night in an attempt to get the juices flow­ing. I nor­mally com­pose on the gui­tar, which usu­ally means I cre­ate a har­monic struc­ture first then flesh in a melody. Clearly it’s not work­ing for me right now so I thought I should approach it from the other end and build up a melodic struc­ture, which I find eas­ier to do on the keys. It’s also eas­ier to flip around in the var­i­ous modes. I’ve never really com­posed with a spe­cific mode in mind. Hav­ing an arti­fi­cial limit may help me from falling into the old ruts. Alas, two hours of tin­kling away have yielded nothing.

If I med­i­tate hard enough on the cir­cle of fifths like it were some man­dala, maybe I’ll reach an enlight­ened state where music just exists within me and all I have to do is play. Until then I must slog through writ­ing, dis­card­ing, writ­ing, dis­card­ing, writ­ing, discarding.

I think some of the prob­lem is attach­ing too much impor­tance to the work itself. Some­times when I’m sketch­ing my best work is done on scraps of craft paper. Quick one offs that I never expect to go any­where or be shown to any­one. I should try this approach. Just start record­ing and go. Who cares what hap­pens, just play. If there’s any­thing worth sav­ing I’ll have it recorded.

Tags: Songwriting, Writer's Block

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 3:42 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.