FEED ME – GREAT SONGWRITING NEEDS CONSTANT INSPIRATION

​Do you feel like your melodies sound dated when you’re writing a new song? Are you in a songwriting rut? It happens to us all. We start rolling and write a bunch of songs we really love, and then one day we wake up and everything starts sounding the same. Every new idea we create seems familiar. And worse, those ideas may sound like melodies we heard years before! That’s the most horrible part. There had been times I wrote a brand new song and played it for my artists and they showed me the “original” version of that song. I was very sure I hadn’t copy, and when I was so frustrated of what is happening, a psychologist friend of mine told me that human brain tend to keep the audio in the memory for an unbelievable amount of time and no matter if we remember it or not, when we want to write, subconsciously we might write the melody that we don’t remember and we are not even aware of the fact that song ever existed or we ever had heard it. But it already is registered in our subconsciousness. 

Getting out of the rut. So, how do we get our “freshness” back and stop banging our head against the wall? Let’s think about when we first started listening to music. We couldn’t get enough. We bought the latest records and wore them out listening over and over to our favorite songs. We identified with the words and the sounds. We became those songs. And when we started writing our own songs, we drew from a deep well. The words and music we absorbed during all of those listening hours were filtered through us and came out of our guitar or piano and pen in a new way. Don’t let that feeling to go away.
 
Ask Stephen King. If you want to get back to this inspired fresh writing, it’s really very simple. You must be inspired again! As famed author Stephen King says in his book On Writing, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” And basically, that what all my writings in this series are about. To concierge the reads to read more books and write more songs. It’s actually impossible to be good at writing for very long if you are not constantly listening to new music and being inspired. So, if you are feeling like you are in a rut with your creativity, I challenge you to find a new record that inspires you. Sing along to it. Strum the chords on your guitar or play them on your piano. Let it soak into every cell of your body and remember why you love music so much. Your writing will thank you.

Author

Hangi Tavakoli is our in-house established and professional music producer with 20 years of experience in songwriting, music production, mix and mastering. He has written and produced more than 5,000 published songs to-date, including some major hits in international scale.