Writer’s Block
Wendy Parr and Kato the Producer
One thing I hear again and again is how getting into a writing session day after day with new people is both exhausting, hard, not usually fulfilling and feels like ground hog day. I did a session with an artist who said, I have nothing left to say. I’ve been in sessions everyday for over a year, feels like I’m on a wheel - same people, going in circles.
Unsigned artists, long for opportunities to work with terrific writers, to find the best writer and producer for them. It is an ongoing search and challenge. Signed artists and writers struggle with the exhaustion of being in a session day after day, exposing their deepest, vulnerable self to new people. To the pressure of coming up with a hit.
I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of learning that happens from all of those cowriting sessions – seeing how other people approach a melody or a production, new ways of writing, and then when the artist has done this extensively and they hole up without anyone else, writing and or producing songs alone magic happens.
Then there is the partnerships - after working with many different collaborators the artist finds those one or two people, that just feels like such a great fit and that’s who they make an album with, those partners that click, is when the success and consistency happens.
So what do you do when you’re stuck?
Flip it! Always writing alone? Get yourself into a bunch of collaborations. Get energized by other people’s excitement, motivation and discover new ways of writing, approaching a song and getting into a creative flow. Always collaborating? Give yourself a discipline to spend time alone and see where your own heart takes you.
Shake it up! Always write with one particular instrument – try another instrument, grab a track off a Platform like beatstars and write to a production that isn’t your norm. Take a song that you’ve written as a ballad and find an upbeat, hip-hop track and see what it does to your melody and phrasing. Write melody first? try the lyrics instead.
Begin again! Go do something, anything outside of your comfort zone that has nothing to do with music - take a dance class, go surfing, shake up your nervous system, and put yourself in a beginner’s mind by actually being a beginner at something.
Bare your soul. Tell the story you haven’t told yet, expose the foolishness of yourself, where you feel imperfect, weak, shame - none of this is true, off course you aren’t actually weak, but there is some thing that has happened in your world that makes you feel this way. Tell that story, tell you truth - that song is going to resonate.
That artist who was exhausted and felt like he was living ground hog day… after our session he took break, went to Alaska for a month - shook up his world so he could come back refreshed and excited and with new things to talk about. You gotta live to have something to say about life.
In a rut? Go live life, have an adventure, get off the wheel of production and fall in love with living.
#writing #songwriting #writersblock #creativetips #creativeflow