There's a certain songwriting attitude that I see come up in different forms over and over and over again that I think is just unbelievably destructive and has to stop. Let's talk about it.
Hello, friend. Welcome to another episode of the Songwriting Theory podcast. I'm your host, as always, Joseph Adala. I'm honored that you would take some time out of your busy day to talk about songwriting with me. You can be listening to anything else, but you're choosing to listen to a podcast about songwriting. I'm glad that songwriting as a craft means enough to you that you would take the time to do that. If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free cheat sheet, 20 Different Ways to Start Writing a Song. If you've been stuck and you want to write a new song or you feel like your songs are starting to sound the same, this is a great guide to start off with. Because I think one of the best hacks for actually getting creatively... Well, not getting creatively stuck is really just changing up how we start. Sometimes it's not that you have no new ideas, it's that you just keep trying to get ideas from the same well and that well has dried up. You need to let the rain fall and not draw from that well so that the well can refill.
So maybe your well right now is a little dry when it comes to coming up with guitar chord progressions. But if you just try to come up with a bassline instead, you try to start with a really cool symbol that you find intriguing or a song title, there's many different ways that you can start a song that might reinvigorate you creatively. That is a well that you haven't drawn from and therefore it is flush with ideas. It's filled with water to stick with the analogy. So be sure to check that out, songwritingtheory.com slash free guide.
So in this episode, we are talking about this destructive songwriting attitude. I think because just very recently, I kind of put together that there's like a few things that I hear come up over and over and over again.
That always bother me because I feel like it's misguided and destructive to feel this way. Even if some of them are certainly understandable.
And it just dawned on me that the root of all of them, I think is actually the same.
I saw them as three separate things, but they're really not. They really all come from the same similar attitude. And I think the similar attitude is the part that bothers me and I think it should bother you as well. And honestly, if you're somebody who's been a listener to this podcast, this probably isn't going to apply to you because you probably would have decided to go away from this podcast and go to listen to somebody else's podcast who tells you like write a song in three seconds and it will be just as good as the greatest songwriters of all time and blah, blah, blah. You probably would have gone to somebody like that a long time ago who will just give you a pep talk rather than try to hold all of us accountable to try to get better. Which is what I try to do and hopefully we're successful. Hopefully you and I are becoming better songwriters every day because we got to want to become better. Otherwise, what are we even doing? So the core attitude that I think needs to stop is cutting corners and doing the bare minimum.
And I think this is one of those things that nobody who does this thinks they're doing it. But we're going to go through three examples of things people say that are an indication that their core attitude, even if they don't realize it, is actually exactly this, to cut corners and do the bare minimum.
Which I shouldn't have to explain that somebody who cuts corners and does the bare minimum is sort of by definition somebody who doesn't really care.
If somebody from my job said Joseph does the bare minimum on my review, I probably wouldn't be getting a raise or much of a raise because that is never a compliment. It's never a compliment. Say the people who built my house did the bare minimum. Right. Technically my house stands, but there's barely enough plugs to get by. The kitchen is barely big enough to get by. The walls were built just well enough, but it's all bare minimum. That's never a compliment. That's never a good thing. People who care about what they're doing never do the bare minimum. In fact, if your boss at work accused you of doing the bare minimum or your teacher in school accused you of doing the bare minimum, that is never a compliment. It never comes with a recommendation. I recommend this person because they consistently do the bare minimum to have success.
And yet I think this is an attitude that sometimes we accidentally find ourselves having when it comes to songwriting. So we're going to talk about three forms that I see it take really often. The three different things that I hear over and over and over again that I think the root of these things is really this idea of cutting corners and doing the bare minimum. The first one, which I sympathize with the frustration part of this, but I do think the underlying attitude of this is cutting corners and doing the bare minimum. And that is when people say, "Nobody pays attention to lyrics. Lyrics don't matter." Or some version of that.
So lots of people don't care about anything in a song, but some vague idea of when I sort of allowed a song to passively enter my eardrums, did I find myself in a better mood because I had heard it? Or did my feet actually start tapping? Or did I notice that I started to slap my knee? Or did I bob my head? Therefore, I like the song. So just to start, a lot of people, most people like songs or most things based off of basically nothing. There's a lot of great stuff you can do and anything you make that is going to go unnoticed.
You know, a ton of people, right, listen to Pop Radio, which has a ton of songs. I'm not saying all songs. Some of them are really good and some of them are okay and a lot of them are resoundingly average. And some are just awful. Just awful. With no redeeming qualities. There's nothing interesting musically that's going on. It's the most overused chord progression ever. Just over and over and over again. We've all heard a million times. Nothing fresh at all. The lyrics are terrible and cringe and embarrassing and rhyme too much or don't even make sense. Nobody even knows what the lyrics are about going back to the "nobody pays attention to lyrics" idea.
And it is true that a lot of people listen to songs or listen to Pop Radio and they don't notice any of that. Just like a lot of people go to movies and they're like "ooh pretty explosions" and that's kind of the end. Those people are always going to exist.
I've said this before but the most consumed hamburger in the world every year is the McDonald's one. Nobody would accuse it of being the best one though. And the same thing is going to be true with movies. Very rarely in any art or any craft is the most popular thing going to be actually the best thing.
Sometimes that happens. There are windows where the best movies are also the most popular movies or the best songs are the most popular songs. But very often that's just not going to be the case.
And it also is true that music is usually what gets people sort of in the door. If people don't like your melody and just how the music makes them feel, they're never even going to take the time to notice your lyrics because you lost them with the fact that your melody bores them.
That's absolutely true. Even for people who deeply care about lyrics like me, that's true. If your lyric is brilliant but the music bore me to tears, I probably will never even get to the point of noticing that the lyrics are really good.
But lyrics are usually what gives a song staying power, that makes a song be something that somebody's still talking about years later. Lyrics are usually the thing that gets people there. And again, not always.
There, but something to return to before we get to the core of this, which I think is that this comes from the attitude of cutting corners and doing the bare minimum. But there's going to be a percentage of people who won't like your song if the lyrics aren't good.
I don't know what that percentage of people is. I would get something like 20%. Maybe it's slower. Maybe it's 10%. I think it's more like 20-25%.
There's nobody who is going to be like, "Oh, your lyrics are really good. I hate this song." Right?
So you are reducing the amount of people that could like your song the second you have this attitude of, "Not enough people care about lyrics. It's not worth my time."
Because there, yes, is a large percent of people that don't pay attention to lyrics, don't care, and you could totally phone in your lyrics, and they would like it. But there's also a percentage of people that because you phoned in the lyrics, you had them with the music, and then you lost them with the lyrics. That's going to happen. And nobody dislikes a song because, "Oh, the lyrics are too good." Right? In all of human history, that has probably never happened. And if it has, that's not somebody that you probably care to be listening to music anyway because that's absurd. It's absurd. Like, I would like the movie, but the plot was too good and the characters moved in me too much.
So, but back to the core idea, how this connects to the core idea. Who cares? Who cares?
Do we care about songwriting so little that we only want to put time and effort into what the average person notices? Or to use a term sometimes seen as condescending, and I think it does have condescending origins, but it has a legitimacy to it. Normies. Right? We're all normies about something. Right? There are some people that know the ins and outs of football and have watched every college and pro football game for the past 20 years because, you know, maybe they were a college football player. And then there are people that are normies that are just like, "Yeah, I want to watch all my teams' games most of the time." I don't really understand how plays work, but I know what the penalties are and stuff like that.
Same thing's gonna be true with movies. Anything. Right? There always are people that are sort of normies. Right? The people that just kind of go to a Star Wars movie and they're like, "Oh, yeah, cool explosions." And then there are people that like care about the lore and the characters and all that. For everything, there's gonna be... everything's sort of like a bell curve. Not everything, but a lot of things. Right?
So there are always gonna be tons of people with whatever you're doing that don't notice cutting corners or don't notice that your lyrics aren't very good and you clearly phone them in. There's always gonna be a huge percentage of people that don't notice that.
But by definition, if we say that, "Well, the mathematical equation of how much time I'm putting into lyrics versus how many people actually notice and care doesn't quite work." Because I figured out that, let's just say, you can save half the time it takes to write a song by phoning in the lyrics, but you think that only 10% of people you're actually gonna lose because you didn't put time into lyrics and you're like, "Oh, that equation makes sense."
By definition isn't that cutting corners? By definition isn't that doing the bare minimum? You're basically saying that I only care about an element of my craft if a certain percentage of people notice. I only care about it if it actually affects the popularity of the song.
That's the core attitude. Right? And I'm not saying, again, I'm first in line to understand the frustration of you put a lot of time into a lyric and I'm certainly a believer that not all lyrics are created equal. There are a lot of lyrics that you can tell when you find out, "Oh, yeah, the band just wrote the lyrics on the fly or the singer basically improvised lyrics." You're like, "Yeah, I could tell. They're nonsensical garbage. They mean nothing."
And then there are lyrics that are well-crafted, that just speak to you and have deep meaning and they have interesting metaphors and the words that are used feel very precise and well thought out, and it's just more moving and poetic. Of course that exists.
But this is something I've said before. I think a part of being any type of artist is understanding that a part of your job is to care about elements that a lot of people aren't going to notice.
And this is something that I think connects to any type of art. Any type of artist. Let's take movies, because I like using movies as an example because it's probably the thing that basically everybody can relate to. There are tons of things in movies that you enjoy that the person who made the movie cared about that you have never once thought about.
That doesn't mean it didn't affect how much you enjoy the movie. Let's say, for example, camera angles and lighting.
You might have never once in your life thought about the camera angle that's being used in a shot and how it affects your perception of what's going on in the movie. For example, a camera angle always angled up to really make the villain seem extra menacing and large and bigger than life because the cameras are always looking up at the villain. Or what the color scheme sort of of the movie is. Is it a blue and a red? I don't think that's the thing. But is it a yellow and brownish? All of these things affect the film.
And especially when you put them all together, they affect the film fairly significantly. But most people don't notice that. Most people don't notice that. That doesn't mean it doesn't matter. And if the movie maker decided, "Oh, camera angles will just not think about it at all."
The color scheme of the movie, we will not think about at all. The details of this costume, we won't think about at all. If they phoned in every part that they thought, you know, only 10% of the audience is going to notice, and it will save me 50% of my time, then you'd end up with a crap movie. And maybe a lot of people couldn't articulate why it was like, "Man, it felt like the costumes were just like glorified cosplay costumes. They look cheesy."
Or maybe they wouldn't even notice that. They just would be like, "Man, I didn't like that." But they don't even know why. This is something I think all of us sign up for when we decide to be any form of artist or just somebody who makes anything at all.
If you've ever used software ever in your life, you have no idea how good the code is. No idea. Most of the time. The code could be total crap. It could be horrible to work with. But you don't know, and you don't care, until it doesn't work. If you click the Buy button on Amazon and it doesn't work, now you're ticked. You're probably frustrated for the rest of your day, because you're like, "I spent 10 minutes trying to buy something on Amazon. I wanted to give Jeff Bezos my money, and he said no." And I'm annoyed, because he wasted 10 minutes of my time, because the stupid button didn't work. Now all of a sudden you notice.
But in anything you do, you have to not be afraid of doing brilliant things or putting time and effort into things that a lot of people aren't going to notice. It doesn't mean those things don't matter. And at the end of the day, if we care about the craft, we don't just do the bare minimum.
We don't just do the bare minimum. It's disingenuous to say, "I care deeply about my song." But I also will do no more work than is absolutely necessary to have a decent amount of people like my song. Those two things don't go together. They just don't go together. Idea number two. Another one of the things I hear that I think connects back to this cutting corners and doing the bare minimum.
Songs shouldn't take much more than an hour, or some other version of this. For example, somebody on a livestream, I think they said something like, "10 hours on a song?" And they were just like, "What? That's insane!"
And I remember thinking, "To me it's insane that you think it's insane spending 10 hours on a song." Just for frame of reference, I have a friend who in the 80s was paid extremely good money by Sony to be a songwriter. That literally was his 40 plus hour a week salaried job that he was paid lots of money for. He had to do one song a week. So if you do some basic math, that means that on average he was expected to write one song every 40 hours.
So if a professional songwriter being paid gobs of money is expected to write one song in 40 hours, and I'm not saying that every song should take 40 hours, I would never say that. Some songs should take half an hour, some songs come together magically. Some songs need more work.
If you listen to your favorite artists, they almost certainly have the two extremes when it comes to stories. Almost every artist that I've ever watched their interviews, there will be the song that came together magically, and it was a magic moment, and it came together in 15 minutes or half an hour where they woke up, and in their dream they just heard this song, and it was basically gifted to them. That exists, for sure.
But it also exists songs that just aren't working, and you put them on the shelf for like a year, or years, and then 10 years later you come back to the song, or you spend months and months just trying to get one part of the lyric to work. You know it's not working, so you just, you know, once in a while they'll spend an hour trying to get it to work, and you're just trying to workshop maybe one line, or one small song section that has four lines. That happens.
Every single songwriter and every single artist that you like, I guarantee you, has both of those stories.
And probably most of the songs are way closer to the second story than to the first.
Because there's a reason that they like to tell the story of the magical song that came together. It makes a great story, right? But it's also the exception.
That's why it's a great story, right? People like exceptional in stories, and we all know deep down that the idea of having one of your best songs just kind of come together in half an hour is a beautiful magical thing, and it totally is.
But this idea, that song shouldn't take much more than an hour, two hours, or five hours, or even ten hours, is another one of these where it's like, based on what? Shouldn't you care about making the song the best you can? And of course, one of the hardest things I think in art is knowing when to call it good, or good enough, or, you know, because obviously the other shame exists. Somebody who's like, "I'm gonna dedicate 50 years of my life to write one song, and it's gonna be the perfect song." And then they end up overthinking it, and it actually ends up being a crap song, and it would be better off writing more songs. Of course, right? So there's an art to this. There's absolutely. Absolutely. Where you gotta know, because, by the way, just a bonus thing. This is a philosophical episode, so we'll add a practical thing in here. What I personally have started doing that I find very helpful, when I'm writing lyrics, I tend to have one Google Doc, which is sort of where I store all the different lyrics I've written, which usually now I hand write, and then I'll put them in the Google Doc. And this is just like all the, like, I might write 30 different versions of a first verse, and then I end up piecing it together, and then changing the wording, and then editing that sort of compiled take, if you will.
But then I have another document that's just the current, like, if I were to record this today, these are the best lyrics I have. This is sort of what I think the first verse would be, the second verse, of course. And when I think this line is exactly as it should be, I wouldn't change a thing. I literally change the color to green, so I know mentally, like, don't touch the section, it's done. Right? You're good.
At least for me, I find that very helpful, for like, okay, I know that the chorus is good. Stop obsessing about it, stop trying to tinker with it, it's good.
And we could have a whole episode, probably 30 episodes, about how to know that, and I think that just comes with time and practice. But let's talk about a story to illustrate this.
Let's say a dad builds two bookshelves, one for his son and one for his daughter. He spends 20 hours on his daughter's bookshelf, and one on his son's. Which one did he put more effort into? Which one is probably better?
The 20 hour bookshelf he built for his daughter, or the one hour bookshelf he built for his son?
And before you at me in the comments about, like, oh, it's different because songs are in your head, and there's not a physical thing to a song and a bookshelf's physical. You're still building something, you're still crafting something. Of course, with anything that we make, anything at all, there's a degree of put more time and effort, and you can have a better result. At some point, is there diminishing returns? Yes. At some point, do you just need to call it good? Yes. At some point, might you actually end up over tinkering and you actually start to make the song worse? Also, yes. All of those are perfectly real and legitimate.
But to go in the opposite direction and just deny outright that there's any correlation at all between quality and time is asinine. It's ridiculous. And we know it's ridiculous for anything else. If I told you, oh, the scriptwriter just... every single script that he writes, he just writes it in a night, calls it a day. Versus another scriptwriter that takes his time over three weeks or six weeks or whatever. On average, we all know that the six weeks one is going to, on average, be better. That doesn't mean no script can be written in 30 minutes and be great, or three hours, whatever I said. Of course, that can be a thing.
But there also is a degree of the more time and effort you put into a thing, the better results. The 20-hour bookshelf, on average, is going to be better than a one-hour bookshelf. Or a 20-hour sculpture better than a one-hour sculpture. Now, again, is your average person going to notice your hour song if you just wrote a first draft in an hour versus all the work that you're going to put into changing it into... and evolving it into a better song in the next 19 hours? I don't know. But you know.
And a part of art is, again, you've got to be not afraid to put extra effort and to do brilliant things or try to do brilliant things or at least try to seek doing brilliant things. Be pointed in that direction, knowing that a lot of people are going to miss it. This is just the plight of anybody who makes things.
So, then we return back to... when it comes to, you know, "Oh, people won't even notice that you spent an extra five hours on lyrics and made them better and tighter and the wording a little better and you upgraded some of the words and the verbs are a little bit better and you use more precise words. Oh, people won't notice that. Who cares?"
Again, do you care about having success, whatever that means to you, from the least amount of work or do you care about writing a great song or trying to write a great song that you can be proud of or trying to write the best song that you can? Or whatever that song is you're working on, say, "I want to make this the best that I can."
Because back to the co-worker or whatever other analogy, everybody knows who do you want to build your house? Who do you want making the next movie in your favorite franchise, if you're an MCU fan or a DC fan or the Monsterverse fan or whatever other franchise are out there? Maybe you're a Barbie movie person.
Who do you want to make the next movie? Somebody who cares deeply and is going to put their time into it and they want to craft something as good as they possibly can or somebody who's thinking, "I will do the bare minimum to make a successful movie." Who do you want to make it? Of course you want the first person to make it. So why would we not do that with our own songs? Don't we want to do our own songs justice?
So another thing on this, something that I think a lot of people realize, but the difference between a B student and an A student in effort is hugely different. We're seeing another way. For you to get straight Bs versus for you to get straight As, I guarantee you. Let's just say Bs is 80%. I know that's a B- but just keep it simple. 80% versus 90% for As.
In that case, that is 10% more for As, which technically would be 1 eighth more because you're taking 80%. So it's 1 eighth more. I guarantee you that it does not take 1 eighth more effort to get all 90s in your courses versus all 80s. And anybody who ever has had different classes or sees what they do versus what somebody else does to get straight 96s in every course versus to get 86s in every course knows that it's probably closer to double the work for the same person to be an A student versus a B student. Because there's a certain level of you can't miss when you're going to be an A student. If you want a 96, you can't afford any test that you missed four questions because you need to be consistently at above 96% to average that.
And this is true across all things, right? To be the greatest maker of movies, director, to be the greatest quarterback, to be the greatest whatever requires a lot more effort even though the results at some point, the results are seemingly just a little bit more.
Right? At the end of the day, the person who got straight Bs and the person who got straight As were probably hired by the same people. Right? The difference between an A student and B student in percentage is not that big. The difference in effort is huge. Huge.
And the same thing is going to be true with your songs to get your songs from like 80% like, Oh, it's pretty good. It's pretty good to 90%. I would never tell you is one eighth more work.
It's not. It's not to get into those 90s to get and obviously, you know, we're not going to talk about how you would grade a song in that way. That's not really the point. But like, if we could do that.
You have to accept that with all things, there's diminishing returns at some point where to get your song to be a 92% to a 96% doesn't take 4% more work. It doesn't. It takes more work than that. But again, if you care about the craft of songwriting, if you care about academics, to go back to the academic analogy, that doesn't matter. You're willing to put in that extra work because it's not all about this math equation to you of how can I do how can I get the most results out of the least amount of effort, which is the attitude of somebody who doesn't want to be great or somebody who doesn't really care. Right? Back to the work thing, your coworker who does the bare minimum by definition is like somebody that you wouldn't really want to work with or you wouldn't recommend. It's never a compliment to do the bare minimum. Song should be no different. Last idea.
I don't want to learn music theory. It's academic knowledge.
You may notice these are maybe the three pet peeves I've mentioned the most over the course of this entire podcast in the podcast history.
And as I said at the beginning, I finally realized, you know what? My real issue with all of these things is actually the same. They all come from the same core place. Cut corners and do the bare minimum.
Because really what somebody's saying when they say, I don't want to learn music theory, it's academic knowledge.
Help me write a great song without having to do that. What they're saying is, I don't care enough about becoming a better songwriter to take the time to learn music theory, any music theory.
And of course there's different versions of that, right? I've talked before about just like I sympathize with the lyric thing. Right? It is true that it takes a lot of effort and a lot of people aren't going to notice and it is frustrating for sure. Music theory can be the same way. There is a lot of music theory that's not that useful for songwriting. There is some music theory that's super useful for songwriting and then there's some music theory that kind of depends on your style of songwriting and how deep you want to go into core progressions and making really interesting core progressions if you even care about that. So certainly there are varying degrees of usefulness and also most places that teach music theory are like elitist black and white color scheme, classical and just like the most boring website ever created. So I understand why people immediately are sort of turned off by it because it kind of has that like elitist music vibe to it very often unfortunately. It really is not that as we've talked about a lot. But again, I sympathize. But you know, I've given this analogy before. If somebody came up to me and they're like, I want to write a book. I care deeply about telling a great story and writing a book. And I'm like, oh cool. Have you, I don't know, looked into different ways to sort of make a story structure. Hero with a thousand faces, otherwise known as the hero's journey or Mark Carmen or Dave Harmon, whatever his name is, the story circle or whatever. You know, having just done any research into how to write better or for example, I saw a post recently that I think is really good. Very simple. It just shows how for sentence structure, if you have every line be like four words, four syllables, it quickly feels boring. But if you just change it up to have a sentence, that's five words and then two words, and then sort of almost run on sentence that gives a musicality to it. And it just is more interesting to read. It just is.
You know, I don't know the psychology of it, but it's one of those things that anybody who read the two would be like, oh yeah, the first one I was bored to tears after one paragraph and the second one just had a flow to it.
So if they said, oh, I don't want to do any of that. I just want to write my book. Immediately my first thought would be like, oh, so you don't really care, right? You just, you don't really care. You just are pretending to care.
I mentioned this before too, but if you're newer, maybe you haven't heard this. It's not so much a story so much as a thing that I've just noticed over time and I can't help but be amused by it.
Whenever somebody finds out I play piano or sees me play piano for the first time or whatever, very often what I hear is, oh, I wish I played the piano. Nobody ever says, oh, I wish I hadn't quit my piano lessons. I shouldn't say nobody. I probably have heard that once.
Or I wish I had taken up piano lessons and practiced every day for 10 years and went to a lesson once a week for 10 years. Nobody ever says that. And before you say, well, Joseph, of course, they wouldn't word it that way. There's too many words, blah, blah, blah.
I'm that guy that usually I press people. I'm like, oh, Alaska follow up. So like, did you take lessons and you quit and you wish you didn't almost always it will end with a little bit of a question.
I think the person kind of sheepishly admitting that like that really wouldn't have wanted to put in the time it would take to learn piano. They just wish they magically knew how to play the piano.
Which, of course, if I could magically know how to play the bagpipes, I would do that too. I don't even know how often I would use it. But if I could just have that ability, wouldn't we all choose that? Right? If we could just snap our fingers and have all the knowledge we wanted about any given thing, would there be anything we wouldn't want that for? As a really dark thing. So we really wouldn't want to know. But you know, like, like, if you could snap your fingers and learn even an instrument you have no interest in, why would you not? Right? You don't have to use it. But maybe one time in your life, it will be funny or you there'll be an opportunity to do it. Why wouldn't you take that? But the reality is that a lot of people want the benefits. You know, I want to write great songs, but I only want to learn things that I can learn immediately during a 10 minute video. Right? I want to write a great book, but I don't have to learn anything. I just want to do it. Or some people are worse. I want to write a great book, but I'm not even willing to write the first page of the book. I'm just going to talk about the book forever.
You can only benefit or you can only get the benefit of knowledge that you work to attain. We can like it or not like it, but that's the truth. Right? We can only benefit from knowledge that we work to attain.
Now, certainly you can shortcut that to a certain degree, right? For example, certainly if you like grab my music theory guide or the guide about keys, songwriter theory.com slash keys for the keys cheat sheet. And then you check out the music theory guide, songwriter theory.com slash music theory guide. Those sorts of things will help you by a just talking about the stuff that you really actually need to know or the stuff that's going to be most helpful. And also just, you know, somebody telling you what you need to know and then also teaching you it in the way that is most helpful applied to songwriting. Of course, that's going to help. So certainly shortcuts can be taken. For example, recently I was on a coaching call and the person was asking about a very specific thing like writing melodies. Should I go take a writing melodies course from a college? And my answer was probably not.
And I would say the same thing to somebody with music theory. I personally took a year's worth. Music theory one, music theory two in high school. Most helpful, great music thing I've ever learned in my life. But I still wouldn't actually recommend for people if they want to learn music theory. I wouldn't tell them to like go back to college. I don't think that's the right way to go.
Because there's other ways that are going to shortcut your knowledge and aren't going to bother with all the stuff that admittedly a college course in music theory is going to teach you a lot of stuff that just doesn't apply to songwriting. Doesn't really matter. It's a chord you're never going to use anyway. That stuff exists.
But we all have to ultimately at some point make choices. If we don't want to learn music theory, that's fine. Just know that your ability to intentionally write more interesting chord progressions or do more interesting things musically is going to be forever curbed by that. It is. Can you accidentally do some really cool music theory stuff? Absolutely. Absolutely. But you're never going to be able to do it intentionally. You probably won't be able to do it as consistently. And there's going to be exceptions to this, right? People that are super musically talented and can just hear things and it's perfect. And they can do crazy things just by ear. Those people exist, but that's the minority. Right? For most of us, that's just not the reality. Knowledge is going to help. It's the same thing for lyrics or anything else.
And at some point we just have to admit we got to work for the knowledge and maybe even some of the knowledge we work for won't end up being useful, but some of it will be. And again, we can choose to cut corners and do the bare minimum. But do we really care about the thing if we're doing the bare minimum? In the core thought to me, whenever somebody's like, Oh, I don't want to learn music theory. It's like, okay, so you don't want to learn something that is slightly tangential at best to songwriting. In some ways it is directly applied. Certain elements of it anyway. That's fine. Right? You can, we all can make our choices. And if you're somebody that just is like, you know what? I just kind of want to write for you.
I don't want to write a few songs for fun. I don't really care about the craft of songwriting. I just want to like write a song or two and be like, Oh, see, I did a thing. That's cool. Totally cool. Right? Then maybe it's not worth it. But if you really care about the craft of songwriting,
then this is something that you should want to learn because we're not about cutting corners and doing the bare minimum of learning in order to write songs. Can you write every single song you ever write? Can you write a million songs off of one chord progression? Yep, absolutely you could.
Should you? Should you want to? Is the whole Jeff Goldblum, you know, you were so busy asking if we could that you didn't stop to ask whether you should. And I think that is another central part of these things. Nobody pays attention to lyrics. Lyrics don't matter. Songs shouldn't take much more than an hour or whatever number you have in your head. You know, songs should be quick. It shouldn't take me much time. I don't want to spend time crafting a song and spend an hour just trying to get one line right. I don't have the time for that. And I don't want to learn music theory. It's academic knowledge. Or just I don't want to learn music theory because it will take too much time or whatever other reason. All of these, the core belief that that's coming from is you want to do the bare minimum to have whatever you consider songwriting success. And to me, that's just a it's just losing formula.
Anybody who cuts corners in any other job is not somebody you would want. No, none of us want to be living in a house or an apartment where you find out that the people who built it cut corners and did the bare minimum that you better hope that that tornado doesn't come through with that hurricane doesn't come through because they did the bare minimum to keep that building standing with normal weather patterns in your area. So if you finally get a storm, that's just a little bit more. Oh, boy, we're nobody wants that.
Nobody wants that. You don't want your favorite movie franchise or your favorite book franchise being taken over. And yes, that is a thing, by the way, before he's like, it's not happening with Wheel of Time, right? Brandon Sanderson took it over, because the original author died happened with the Dune franchise because the original author died in his son and somebody else sort of kept it going. You want that in the hands of people that aren't going to do the bare minimum.
So for your own songs, I feel like we should feel the same. We should feel the same. Because if we're going to do the bare minimum, that's the last point here. If we're going to do the bare minimum for the craft that we're supposedly passionate about, this is our passion. This is the thing that we care about, that we're not being paid to do it. We just do it because we care about it deeply. If we phone that in, if we cut corners and do the bare minimum for that, what on earth do we do with the rest of us?
For that day job that maybe you just do for the money, how much more do you cut corners when it's something that you don't care about at all outside of a paycheck? And that's the sort of thing that has the scary world to live in, right? If your passion, your supposed passion is something where you're looking to cut corners, like we're in real trouble if that's the case. We're in real trouble if that's the case. On the day where I want to cut corners on my greatest passion, that is the day that I will go on some retreat to try to figure out what is wrong with me and how I can fix my life. Because boy, where does that leave us? We just don't have a passion? I think that's where that leaves us, right? We're not really passionate about anything. Because if you're passionate about something, you care about it disproportionately more than other people. It's something you care deeply about and you're not worried about doing the bare minimum because you are going way past that. You're trying to be great. You're trying to do something awesome. You're trying to just make yourself proud if nothing else.
So, I know most of you listening, probably this doesn't apply to you because you probably wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't agree with basically all those things I say because you've heard some of these things before, or all of them before. Maybe just in a different way. But I think we all just need to be on a lookout for ourselves, for each other about, you know, do we find ourselves cutting corners and doing the bare minimum when it comes to songwriting? And maybe even accidentally being in a place where even though it is truly our passion, we just didn't even notice that we kind of started to let this lazy attitude in. Because I certainly think that it can happen to anybody. You know, if you are somebody that you feel guilty about some of these things or like, "Oof, I feel like he just added me. No need to name call." You know, this can happen to anybody, right? This doesn't mean you should quit songwriting because you don't really care about it.
You know, passions sometimes, you know, you get in a rut and you start to get frustrated and sometimes we just get off track, right? It happens to all of us. Now something to worry about. Outside of, it is something that we probably should want to fix. So if this is something where you fit into one of these three sort of phrases, maybe it's time to reconsider that. You know, what's the root? Where's that coming from? And is that a problem that maybe we should address and fix and we should move past it? We should work to craft great lyrics regardless of the fact that our wives or mothers or whoever else won't notice, won't notice that you put a lot of time and effort into the lyrics. And we'll be like, "Oh, that's nice, honey, no matter what." You know, or your friend. By the way,
I understand when it comes to music, sometimes your music friends or even your fellow songwriter friends are going to be the worst and most discouraging people to talk to, especially if you put a lot of work into lyrics.
Because a lot of songwriters and especially musicians are people who are so engrossed in the music side that they very often undervalue the lyrics because of course they do. Just like a filmographer, somebody who, you know, all they do is camera angles and zooms. That's what they notice when they watch a movie. If you've ever known a drummer, right? I've known several drummers. I notice they hear songs totally different than me. Sometimes they don't even notice melody, which is nuts to me. All I hear, like, melody is the first thing I hear. Then lyrics, then the piano, and then the guitar. Those are the things I do, right? So of course that's what I notice first. Drummers notice the drums. I didn't notice drums at all in songs. Like, I knew they were there, but I never thought about what drums were doing until I had a drummer in a band and I sort of saw the light. Bass guitar, same thing. I kind of was just like, ah, bass guitar, just do the low note of the chord and it's fine. So, look, when it comes to lyrics, sometimes the most discouraging people might be fellow songwriters and certainly fellow musicians.
That might happen. Still doesn't make it not worth it.
So hopefully this was encouraging, not discouraging, but, and if it was discouraging, discouraging the right things to be discouraged, not to be discouraged about, but to be discouraged from. Because I think we all need to be discouraged from falling into these things.
Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for watching. I appreciate every single one of you, and I will talk to you in the next one.
