It’s not too hard for me to get sick of my own songwriting.  Sometimes it seems like the same ideas keep coming out, with similar themes in the lyric, similar kinds of melody lines and chord changes, similar rhythmic feels and tempos… boring!

At the same time I’m usually aware of and envious of songs with approaches other than mine – longer melodies maybe, differently placed rhythmically.  Or using different qualities of chords in ways I don’t, or different tempos and feels.  Or having an unusual approach to storytelling or the sounds in the lyric… and I want to incorporate one or more of those approaches into my own writing, to bring in something fresh, to grow.  It’s like wanting to incorporate a vernacular, or a larger vocabulary, into my speech.

So I often start by copying some aspect of a song I want to emulate – let’s say pushing myself to revise the melody of a song I’m working on so it has a less familiar shape.  Or moving to a faster or slower tempo or a new feel, which leads me to less familiar choices.

But what I find is that when I move out of my comfort zone and try to learn something new… at first I’m often just not that good at it.  The song ends up mediocre, not really usable… it doesn’t distinguish itself.  Why?  Because I’m just not fluent with this particular kind of thing… YET!

I have to remember not to lose heart.  Sometimes I have to write a bunch of songs in a different vein before the style absorbs into me, before it becomes a natural part of the way I write.

As an example, over the past few years I became interested in writing songs with longer melody lines – more continuous, with less pauses, less repetitive phrasing, and more small variations.  This kind of melody also happens to usually require a lot more words!

When I first tried to do this, most of my first songs weren’t really usable.  But as time has gone on and I’ve kept at it, stretching in this direction has developed into a more natural part of my ‘language’.  I’ve now incorporated aspects of this approach into some songs that work pretty well.  And, perhaps more importantly, it’s become part of my overall songwriting lexicon which is present in some way in all my writing.  I stretched out of a comfort zone and developed some new tools.

What’s the moral of this story?  To me it’s to remember to be patient when I’m trying something new.  As the song says, ‘You’ve Got To Crawl Before You Walk‘.

Please let me know your thoughts in the Comments section below.

(Here’s a related post, on comfort zone tempos.)