Combating Writers Block
After having gone through a few months of writing songs with Emily Zisman, we have had our share of inspired and uninspired production sessions.
When writing Whoring For Hanukkah, we found the songwriting came incredibly easy. I think this was due to a few factors.
A new process
WFH was the first song that we co-wrote together (previous collaborations have been producing one of our own individual songs). Getting out of our respective ruts proved to be very beneficial, as we could bounce ideas off each other and receive direct feedback on these ideas instantaneously. This pair process took the song in a very different direction than either of us would probably have written it.
In the moment, it is very difficult to separate yourself from a lyric you just came up with. But this separation must occur if you are to receive feedback without taking things personally. In the end, I think we were able to avoid several lyrical pitfalls by simply being free to reject an idea as long as we could give a reason.
A focused goal
By simply focusing ourselves on a specific goal (in this case, it was to write a funny holiday song), this limitation actually expanded our creativity. We were required to think within these narrow confines, looking for potential story avenues.
A focused style
Because we needed to write and produce WFH very quickly, we had to focus the production. So we decided to write in a gypsy style, which Emily could emulate quite well in her singing style and I had previous experience on violin. In fact, it was only later on in post-production that we decided to bring in anything else other than a tamborine. This genre limitation further limited our scope, allowing us to spend all of our creative energy on the lyrics.
A great concept
One of the very first things we came up with was the title “Whoring For Hanukkah”. This really helped us with the whole song, as the title gave us the exact framework that we needed to write for. The concept lends itself to an outline quite well:
Woman loses her job, has to make money to buy presents, decides to become an amateur prostitute, and starts to enjoy it.
From that, it was fairly easy to figure out how to progress the story in the verses and bridge. The time was mainly spent coming up with a few lyrical gags and rhymes to tie everything together.
A deadline
The power of pressure played a large part on the end-result of the song. I’m sure that, given another couple of weeks, we could have fleshed out some of the lyrics and music better. But we were operating on the 80/20 rule – 80% of the song is written in 20% of the time. For this project, getting a song written at an 80% level was good-enough for us. If you believe the metaphor, than this decision cut our production time to just 20%!
Luck
Though I would like to think that luck isn’t a part of it, I need to be realistic and say that neither of us are songwriting professionals. As such, we’re going to operate less efficiently than a well-tuned songwriting team that has been going on for years or decades. Hopefully luck will play less of a role the longer we collaborate.
So here we are writing for upcoming songs like Peculiar and December. Though we are still working well as a songwriting team, it isn’t going as smoothly as with WFH. Why might this be? Certainly, the concepts of the songs haven’t been as strong as WFH. And we haven’t set any deadlines for completing the lyrics. And we didn’t limit our genre to anything. As a result, our creative energies are divided up between several different tasks, and the songs haven’t “gelled” yet. I don’t want to say we have writers’ block, but we need to practice and exercise our co-writing process a lot more.
Chris Bolton adds his ideas for overcoming writers’ block in this CD Baby post.