Goal Met: Write a Song

I’ve been playing guitar for years and in the last five or so I’ve been mixing in vocals and learning new songs but they’re all someone else’s song. I’ve always wanted to write my own songs but never really went through the process. I did have a notebook (electronic) where I jotted down ideas, snippets of a verse, a few chorus lines, even just some ideas or rhyming words that I thought might be interesting. However, I never really did anything with it.

I decided that one of my goals this years was to sit down, sort through these ideas and come up with at least one full song. It was a struggle sorting through those notes to find ones that spoke to me and even more of a struggle to fill in the rest of the song. I watched some songwriter videos on YouTube and studied the structure of a lot of my favorite tunes and as inspiring at they were I still struggled to write a song that flowed the way I wanted it to.

The first song was one I wanted to write for my daughter for years – from the viewpoint of a father telling his little girl that no matter what happens she will always have a home with him. I had a handful of lyrics I’ve written over the years and with a little cleanup and polish I had a few verses I thought were pretty good and the chorus was where I struggled then in my notes I saw a line  that just said ‘flying or falling’  and from that line the entire chorus was born and the name of the song ‘Flying or Falling’ (This turned out to be a common theme as there are a LOT of songs on Apple Music with that title) – the bridge came easy as well, I think once I had momentum on this song whatever creative blocker there was just vanished.  Since my voice was in rough shape due to an ongoing fight with some sort of illness I wasn’t happy with the vocals as they were – however in my other goal of researching AI and various tools I found a site that lets you upload a melody and create a song using AI singers to ‘cover’ your song and while it was a long process of trial and error I finally got something I thought was the exact sound I was going for- they even added a full band accompaniment which was really awesome.
 

A few weeks later I wanted to work on another song – feeling inspired from this one. I had just one idea jotted down in my notebook “You say we’re like ships passing in the night, we’re on the same sea’ and I built an entire song from that idea weaving in elements of being lost at sea, the light finally breaking and being able to navigate again. I mixed in references to the sea and nautical terms but tried to not overdo it and this song came really easy to me because it was just me talking to my wife after she had a hard day really – just in lyrical format. I wanted it to be a slower tempo song with some piano work (of which I am not very skilled at all) so I worked out the melody line on guitar and then had the AI transpose it to Piano and went with a female singer because after a few hours of trial and error trying to get it right whatever combo I hit gave me something haunting yet powerful. I really love this song and am proud of it and my wife cried when she heard it (well to be fair she cried at the song for my daughter too)

I gave them both the songs as a valentines day present which went over well. My son wanted to know where his song was, so I’m working on my magnum opus – a song about dinosaurs dance battling in space.