The Return to Songwriting

The past few years have been so focused on recording and mixing music that I have had less time to actually write it. Of course there were songs here and there that would pop up, but I never felt like I could or should take the time to finish them until I had released the ones I was already working on.

That's all changed now. I can finally focus on creating songs...not embellishing, not tweaking, not recording...just writing the very basic elements of songs. I think I must have a lot of pent up music that is just waiting to be released. Over the weekend I had the house to myself and was able to spend a lot of uninterrupted time just writing and recording. In just a day and a half I was able to able to lay down all the main components of a song ("Come And Gone") that until now had only existed on paper. I am very happy with the results. It's a great song. The recording sounds pretty awesome. There are still things I would like to add and clean up, but it is pretty much a complete song. It just needs to be finished and mixed.

When I had gotten to a good stopping point on that song, I had to figure out what to work on next. With so many pieces of music in my head and lyrical ideas floating around, there are a million places where I could jump in and start working. So I went back and listened to a series of short low quality audio clips of song ideas that I had recorded into my phone and random times over the past year or so. One particular clip stuck out to me as a simple yet poignant little chord progression with a nice melody. So I pulled out the acoustic and started strumming. The idea for the theme of the song came very quickly and the lyrics followed. Soon I had a completed song. It is a very simple song and did not take long at all to record. It's called "You Can't Go Home" and I am loving it. It sounds great as it is, but will benefit from a better mix as well as a few embellishments such as a slide guitar solo and some backing harmonies.

All in all I am very excited about these songs and I can't wait for people to hear them. It is hard to be patient and wait until they are finished.

But it just feels so good to be writing songs again. And what makes it better is that I think I might be writing the best songs I've ever written.