Songwriting journey

Earlier this year, my brother proposed an endeavor in which we would each write a song a week and show it to the other. We are both musicians, but neither of us has a lot of experience with writing proper “songs”, so to speak. Given that we both have a lot of love for various types of songwriting, we’ve talked before about wanting to develop our own songwriting skills.

I thought this sounded like a great idea, but logistically it hasn’t ended up happening yet. My brother got busy with some other important things in his life, and without a partner to share progress and “compete” with, I didn’t really have as much drive to go it alone.

Fortunately, I at least managed to write one song. The music for it takes inspiration from early Beatles music, especially Nowhere Man. I intentionally tried to keep the music simple to keep my focus on the lyrics.

Writing lyrics was definitely the less familiar process for me. I tried writing some in high school, but I was never very good at it, and I mostly stopped trying by college. Trying again now, I seem to have some better ideas about how to start, but I definitely wouldn’t call it easy for me. I think writing words that will fit well to a song is a whole different skill set than either music or prose.

One problem I’ve written about before is my hesitancy to start learning new skills. Lyrics and songwriting fall into that category of new skills I find daunting to take up. Nonetheless, it’s something I’ve been telling myself I want to get better at for a while now. And there’s no other way to do it but to keep trying. Hopefully my brother and I will have a chance to restart our project sometime soon.

Have you attempted any song or lyric writing? Have you ever been unsure how to acquire a new skill? Have you ever tried to learn a new skill alongside another person like that? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.