How to Write a Song

Just be like compost

Apr 18, 2025

Earlier this month we celebrated the completion of our Spring 2025 City Kid Song Circle with a joyous concert showcase. It was the experience of working for three months with the other participants that inspired these reflections.

Songwriting feels a bit like performing some arcane ritual. I don’t really know how it works, but when I hold my guitar just so, or sit in this chair at precisely this time of day and open that notebook, sometimes the glimpse of a new song comes into being. And other times, it doesn’t.

Songs are this strange medium that attempts to take the infinite possibilities of sound, and draw it into some sort of finite and harmonious order. Of course, if you sub “sound” for “paint” or “words”, the same would be true for painting or poetry (and so on for any other art form). But unlike a painting or a poem, songs cannot be grasped in an immediate totality. The lyrics and chord charts are really just instructions.

The song has to be played to really be a song, and just as soon as you play it, it’s gone again. It can only be grasped in its unfolding and when I listen to a song, it traces what it is invisibly upon my self. A beautiful song (like this one by Leonard Cohen) in its passing moments has become a part of who I am. Its harmonious order becomes a harmony in my own person.

Given the remarkable inwardness of songs, it’s not surprising that people so often resort to mystical or spiritual images when trying to explain how they are written. Songwriting is like discovering something already in yourself—a capacity or power that is given shape by the music. Why do I feel so compelled by this change of chords or string of words? It is because of how they express something already in me.

[C]reativity comes from that indescribable ethereal space from which we summon meaning and impulse. The swirling sum of our experiences manifests itself in conscious and unconscious ways. —Dan Mangan

A close friend of mine (also a songwriter) often talks about his “song seeds”. Song seeds are the little ideas, words, phrases, and melodies that for some reason just feel right in the hands or on the tongue. It’s these little ideas that may, in the end, grow up into a song.

It’s always tempting to judge a song seed. How can something so small and incomplete have any meaning or value? But of course, seeds are not incomplete. They are these amazing creatures that always already have everything they need in themselves to be what they will become.

All a seed needs is a nurturing environment, and I like to think that songwriting is just about becoming the kind of environment that encourages them to grow. We are the environment that song seeds require, watered by our time and brightened by our attention. And there really are as many different ways to do this as there are people.

[The Artist] is only the precondition for his work, its maternal womb, the soil or, in some cases, the dung and manure, on and out of which it grows. —Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals.

At our song circle meetings, Andrea Cormier talked about how she would spend 15 minutes each morning with her song seed for an entire month before it grew up into itself. Lucas Tennen would, by contrast, iterate and iterate and iterate, writing and rewriting verse after verse until, from an accumulation of materials, the song would appear. Darrel Cameron shared about how he would take a seed of a song as far as he could, and then let it rest silently for some months before coming back with a new perspective to try again.

As I attend to beautiful music, I experience that beauty in the motions of my own self. The music changes and leaves its mark upon who I am. And this self-made-beautiful is both the source and the environment that new songs need to come into being. I gather seeds from my encounters with the Beautiful, and the only thing needed is to trust and attend to the coherence that is already a part of who I am.

So we can write songs when we trust the process that is simply an explication of what we already hold in ourselves. When I sing, I reveal myself (and the world) to myself and to you. And when someone receives it, maybe they will be moved to share something too?