I had a gig with my band and some special guests Monday night. It went very well, thanks for asking! But I was stunned, as I’ve been before, by a songwriting habit of mine that once again got the better of me. I don’t think the consequences were too bad, as I’ll explain below… but I was disappointed in myself.

About a week before the gig, after a band rehearsal, I started practicing my vocals and bass parts at my studio, by myself. When I do that, I usually use a click track (metronome) to keep me honest. I quickly discovered that almost three quarters of the songs we were going to play were in the range of 90-110 beats per minute (and most of those were closer to around 96-103!).

This wasn’t a complete shock… because that is my comfort zone and I know, if I’m not conscious of it, that most of my songs will land there. I’ve worked with enough writers to know that this ‘comfort zone tempo’ thing is ubiquitous with songwriters – even though different people have different tempo comfort zones, almost all writers I’ve met have them.

Becoming acutely aware of this several years back, I determined to write more songs at tempos on both sides of my zone. And I did – for a while. I’ve obviously backslid.

In a set or an album, this can be a problem. If all or most of the songs have similar tempos and feels… it can be deadly. Fortunately for me, the songs we played Monday night were in a variety of different feels – pop, rock, latin, funk, rockabilly, ballads that were on the uptempo side (for ballads) – even when the tempos were similar.

Although I do believe listeners subconsciously know it when there’s too much of the same – tempos, keys, feels, etc. – I think we succeeded in disguising the tempo similarity from most of the audience. (All? I’ll never know.) Because of the varying feels, individual songs felt slower or faster than the previous or following ones, … even though sometimes they technically weren’t.

I think I got away with it at this show. But I’m not pleased with myself. It’s very important to me that my songs not be predictable and one of the easiest predictability traps to fall into is… the one I fell into. Writing too many songs in the same tempo range.

It’s not that I need to force myself to write at different tempos or even to stop writing in my comfort zone. It’s more about paying special attention when I get an idea that’s out of the zone – especially one that’s at a faster tempo. There are always plenty of ballads in the world.

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