“The vast majority of the time, I get a verse, or a chorus, and that’s it – the rest is work. And you have to learn to do it to be great. But you can learn how the mechanics work, and you can get better at it.” – Steve Earle

There’s something about songwriting… I keep expecting it to become easy to write a good song.  And it rarely is. Fun, yes.  Easy, no. It’s fun in the way that doing something enjoyably challenging is fun. And getting a good result is big fun!

But no matter how many songs I write, putting the whole thing together into a coherent whole is going to require some real brain work.  Not digging ditches kind of work, but work nonetheless. (And understand that to me ‘work’ is not a dirty word.)

So I’m often trying to make my expectations more reasonable.  I don’t mean being ‘realistic’ about how good a song can be; I believe in shooting for the moon there. But just because I may have written a pretty good song last week or last month doesn’t give me any kind of a pass for the next one(s). That’s not bad news. But I, immaturely, still sometimes hope and want it to be easy.

As skill and experience is gained, some aspects of songwriting get easier. I have more tools at my disposal with which  to pick the lock, if you will. But each new song is a new, different lock – and its own unique combination has to be found.

And then I can go here: ‘If I was really any good, this wouldn’t be so hard’… a statement that, whatever my level of talent and accomplishment, or lack of it, is patently false. If there’s one thing that many of the greatest writers in history agree on, it’s that you’ve just got to put the time in, put your back into it, and chop that wood.  No getting around it!

There’s no consistent correlation between how much time and detailed work a song takes and how talented a writer is. Or how good a song can become. It just takes whatever it takes. Some writers have to work longer and maybe even harder than others to get there. But what matters is the end result.

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