Song Club #59: Perfectionism

Writing songs you think are maybe bad.

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Perfectionism gets me within seconds of hitting on something promising when songwriting. I receive the gift of a catchy melody, or an unusual yet affecting lyric. Then, pretty quickly, I get tense.

I get tense and I try to ‘figure out’ the song. I try to protect the beautiful, newborn idea from being surrounded and soiled by other, lesser ideas by thinking very very hard about what comes next.

BUT in reality what I am doing is deliberately giving myself writers block, by side-stepping or ignoring the ideas that follow the brilliant lightning bolt.

This is not the way to write a good song.

Everybody knows it, but it’s so hard not to fall in this highly perfectionistic, cerebral trap. We make the mistake of thinking ideas belong to us, and therefore say something about us—good, bad, ugly, in between. It becomes anathema to let anything other than ideas we judge immediately as ‘good’ out in the world.

BUT trying to ‘figure out’ a song, leads to a song that feels like it was figured out—not felt. In trying not to let weird, bad, ugly stuff through we miss out on so much aliveness, so much resonance, so much of what makes a great song great.

And by the way, I’m not saying don’t draft, don’t sweat, don’t reconstruct.

I am saying, don’t try to write your final draft on your first draft by trying to think your way to the next brilliant moment. It doesn’t work.

This week, I’m sharing some ‘Entry Points’ around what to do when you find yourself in this perfectionistic trap.

Wishing you freedom to suck,
Lucy

‘Entry Points’