HOW TO STRUGGLE AS A SONGWRITER

05/29/26

Alright! Time to brush off the cobwebs. 

Hello all! It's been a bit, I apologize. Time has gotten away from me a bit the last couple of months. Something in the air has taken the wind out of everyone's sails. The campus hum has turned into a groan. Even Spring Break felt long and tedious. 

With finals, everyone collapsed. The groan fell silent, not because it had been resolved, but because everyone was too exhausted to do it any longer. Thankfully, the semester is officially over. Time to start anew. 

With that being said, I'm ready to start writing again. I'm ambitious. There is much to be created. Much to be absorbed. 

Yet sometimes ambition is not enough to actually make you pull through on something. Our topic for the post touches on just that--in more ways than one. I haven't been able to make myself sit down and write in quite a while. Clearly. The last post I made was in early March (not including the previous "2112" post, which was written for a class). I'm not going to make some elaborate excuse for myself. I was just too damn lazy and burnt out from school to write. That's writing in two forms: blog writing (the easier of the two) and music writing. 

As of late, under the same circumstances as blog writing, I've been struggling to be a songwriter. I have much less ambition to sit down and write songs as I used to. It seems as though most of what I want to write just isn't in my head. Ideas come and go like clockwork, slipping into oblivion as soon as I pick up a guitar. Or ideas begin where I want them to and end six miles down an unmarked backroad with no way to get back home. Unproductive songwriting has plagued me for months. I don't know if I fully understand why I'm in this position. Even as influence hits me I find a way to brush it off and get distracted with something else. I've gone against my anti-Instagram reels philosophy. I'm utterly ashamed. The drive has been gone for a while. Momentum from this past summer has come to a screeching halt. Writing for a new band doesn't give me enough push to write music either. I have a million projects I want to start, tangling everything into a nasty knot of ideas that can't be untied.

Sometimes I find it a million times harder to write when you're actually sitting there focusing on it...

A few months ago, Sami and I sat down to write a song. She basically forced me. I toyed around with some stupid little riffs and chord progressions for a while. I wasn't eager to write and felt out of practice. Half-jokingly I came up with a progression that actually caught my attention. And thus it began. We wrote into the early morning, finishing the first verse and a potential pre-chorus. Long story short, I actually had a lot of fun writing, for the first time in forever.

That was in March. We've played it once since that night. As I mentioned in the editors note at the end of my previous post, I've been grinding school up until last week. I still don't understand why I haven't been able to come up with anything noteworthy over the last few months. Every time I try to write anything, I spiral away from what the original idea was until I give up. I think my problem is that I focus too hard on the whole song instead of writing bits and pieces after sitting on the main idea for a few days. Then again, I usually forget about what I write and it becomes yet another riff lost in my camera roll if I sit on it for too long. My preferred method of writing has always been to jam with a band with a simple riff or idea and see where it goes. Having not been in a band for nearly a year, I haven't had the opportunity to do so, therefore I am incredibly unproductive.

Unproductive is an understatement. Time consistently gets away from me, not because I have so much going on, but because I have nothing going on. I fill that time with internet shit. Time that I should be filling with creative endeavors. The doom scroll has taken over yet again. I set an hour of screentime on Instagram, but it ultimately lets you in due to the ignore feature. I'm placing fault on Apple's poor choice to let you ignore the popup when it comes to locking out apps, but I should be placing the blame on my lack of discipline. I need to sit down and write more than I am. Ditch the phone for a guitar. I also need to start a f**king band. Soon enough young grasshopper.

Still, the question remains...why? I seriously don't know. The answer to the ever-ominous question cannot be found. There's about a million different possibilities and explanations that I don't want to begin to name. We'll blame it on something else.

Yet, there is still hope for me. I started writing a new track after stumbling upon a catchy riff in A that I'm probably ripping off in some way, shape, or form. New experiments with tone, pedals, and noise are underway. It's time to begin anew. It's time to rekindle the pursuit of our creative endeavors. Time to consume less of the bullshit and more of the beauty that surrounds us. Ah, pretentious as always. I'm back baby.

"Jai Guru Deva, om." | See you in a few...

Cheers,

Jack