I used to be lazy about keeping track of the songs I’d written. When I needed to find them right away… sometimes I couldn’t.

Some years back, to put together chord charts and lyric sheets for a set or session, I’d have to go through practically every song I’d written in the recent past, chords and lyric, because I had almost nothing organized and I didn’t have a publisher to help me (I was that publisher).

This task was always a pain and, with the ‘encouragement’ of my band, I finally vowed to attempt to bring some order to chaos.

I write my songs using voice and guitar and keep track of the development of the melody, chords, rhythms, and lyrics in spiral notebooks – longhand; old school. So first I went through the notebooks and used a Sharpie to write, on the back of the front cover, the names of the 10-15 songs, or parts of songs, contained in each. (The front covers have the year and index – 2022A, 2022B, etc. –  written on them.)

The lyrics were the easy part. Before I rehearse or perform them I have to type them into my computer so I can print them. So I put them in a folder on the computer, with sub-folders by the year (‘TC Lyrics 2023’). Even when there are stray ones all I have to do is search the computer by song title.

The chord charts, used by my band or other musicians and singers when performing or recording, are a more complicated situation. Having yet to convert to the “charts on an iPad” approach, I still write the charts longhand. For me this is easy and seems to suit my needs, so I haven’t updated.

I bought a file drawer and lot of hanging files and alphabetically filed all of my hard copy charts and lyrics. This was a big improvement… but there were some hitches.

It started out great, but I got lazy about putting the papers back after using them; I’d pile them on top of the file drawers instead of refiling them. Soon it became hard to close the top!

As with most things, this method requires maintenance for it to work. That means putting the songs back in their files soon after I use them so I have the charts or lyrics right at hand, alphabetized, the next time I need them. I’ve gotten better about this maintenance, but it’s still a challenge.

Also, I’m fairly prolific (certainly my interest in generating new songs outstrips my interest in filing them).

My long-suffering band members kept what had become very thick folders full of my charts, and they were always asking me to go through my songs and separate them into ‘active’ (likely to be performed in the near future) and ‘inactive’, so they could reduce the bulk of the Yellow Pages-sized ‘book’ they had to go through every time we played.

Following their reasonable (and repeated) requests, when I went through everything and made a preliminary separation, I found that since I started this band we’d played well over (and I mean well over) a hundred songs of mine written in that period (I’d written more, but we can’t do them all!).

Since these musicians have been so patient and indulgent with me (to put it mildly), I finally completed the separation they requested (insisted on, actually)… which was better for all of us, including and especially me.

I immediately saw that I needed a second file drawer to have enough room for everything I’d written. So I got that (it took a while) and now I’m finally up to date: I have one file bin for the ‘active’ songs and one for the ‘inactive. Soon I will need a third.

Overall, my slow progress left a lot to be desired – I’m sharing my struggle (as I often do in this blog!).

But though my world of charts and lyric sheets can still get somewhat chaotic, the good news is that there’s a lot more order now and it’s usually easy for me to find my songs, certainly way easier than when I started this process. Now I’ve just got to continue doing the maintenance!

Tell me… how do you deal with this?

Let me know your thoughts in the Comments section below.

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