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Let's talk about the real reason why your songs do not stand out. Why it feels like when you listen back to your music, it just feels like another bit of music that simply exists. Nothing bad maybe, but also nothing remarkable.
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And the first thing to say is that most songs aren't terrible.
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Right, but most of us probably aren't struggling with terrible songs. Maybe you are, and if so, that's okay, because that's fixable too.
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But usually, usually the pain is not, oh my goodness, my songs are terrible.
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Instead, the pain is closer to something like,
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I know deep down there's nothing remarkable about them. It's just another song with nothing about it that contributes anything special.
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And I don't know about you, but for me, I wanna pursue making something special.
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I'm not exactly thrilled with the idea of like, yeah, let's crank out average song after average song after average song that has nothing remarkable about it. Nothing in the lyrics that would make people go, oh wow, or nothing in a melody that would blow somebody's mind or something. Maybe it could be a chord progression thing or something done musically, oh, that's an interesting chord to have in there, whatever it is.
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There's different ways to make things remarkable.
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But that's kind of a pain that I feel like isn't talked about enough,
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which is the pain of average, just average. Like knowing the song is fine, right, you could go play it at a coffee shop and like, you know, it'd be fine. Everybody would forget it five minutes later, but nobody would boo or throw a tomato at you, literally or metaphorically. People wouldn't talk about you after you left,
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saying, oh, that was rough, huh?
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They might just be like, yep.
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Oh yeah, that person did a song, cool.
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And the reality is that by definition, most things are average, right?
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If you are familiar with bell curves at all, you know that just like definition, whether it be an intelligence, athleticism, anything,
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by far the most people are towards that middle, that average, that's simply how it works. Height, height would be a great example, right?
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The vast majority of men are from like five, seven to six foot, like somewhere in there. Cause I think average height for a male is like five, nine or something. So the vast majority are like within two inches or three inches of that. That doesn't mean there aren't people that are seven feet tall, but there's very few people who are seven feet tall and there's very few people,
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men specifically that are five feet tall because of how bell curves work, right? The shorter or taller you get, the more it's a remarkable thing. If you're five, nine or close to five, nine, that's most people, most guys who are watching this, which last I checked my audience is like 95% male.
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I wonder if that's changed. Maybe I need to check that again. But last I checked, I was like, wow, I don't know why. I don't cater to men at all, but all right.
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So anyway, the pain is often not, oh my goodness, my song is terrible. The pain is, oh my goodness, I feel like this disappears into average. It's just another breakup song. It's another song that somebody could hear, be like, yeah, it was pretty good and totally forget that exists. Now, of course, it's worth mentioning, no matter how great a song or music is,
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always, always, probably the majority of people are still gonna feel that way because there's taste.
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There's also, you know, those of us who aren't like, the advantage you have when you're huge is you can do anything and people will still worship you for it, right? So once you are the Beatles, you can put out whatever you want and people will be like, it's amazing because it's the Beatles, right? They just presume that it must be amazing. And then, you know, most of the rest of us are struggling in the opposite direction, which is the reality that, you know, oh, if you don't have enough followers on YouTube or whatever, people just assume that you can't possibly be very good because all the world would know your name, right?
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So there are those realities to acknowledge, right? But I'm talking about if we get rid of all that and we just try to like look at our own music, honestly,
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and you still have that feeling of like, yeah, there is no reason that somebody would really resonate with my song above some of the other songs that are out there.
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And I think one of the core problems, which is what we're gonna talk about today, is not talent. You'll see your theme here. I'm gonna harp on like enough with the talent thing. Talent is super overrated. It matters, of course, but it's super overrated and we can't control it. So it's just not worth worrying about. And by the way, all the people who think, oh, well, I'm talented, so I don't need, those people are never as good as they think they are. Never, never.
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Like literally have yet to meet somebody that thinks they can get off on their talent and they don't need to learn things or they don't need to get better or improve because they just have talent. None of those people are, end up doing anything remarkable. It's usually just delusion.
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But for all the rest of us that acknowledge, yeah, of course I can improve. And my talent is what it is.
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That's not the problem, right? It's not that your favorite artist has this thing that you don't have. There are a few exceptional people that maybe that's true of.
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But for the vast majority of us, songwriting, music in general, is a learned skill.
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Talent matters. It is not the be all end all. It's not even the most important thing.
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So the real reason that songs and music often doesn't stand out is simply because the person stopped when it was good enough.
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Good enough is where great music, great anything goes to die.
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If you think about anything great, a great athlete, a great business,
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a great author, anything,
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whatever your job is, if you're not full-time songwriter or musician or whatever,
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whoever you can think of who's like, they're great at that.
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Those people, I guarantee you, were not people that were like, "Ah, good enough."
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Right? Like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant,
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Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, I'm throwing sports things out there.
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They didn't get to where they were because they're like, "Ah, good enough." They had this maniacal drive to get better.
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Now I'm not saying we all have to go that far with it, obviously.
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Maybe don't give up everything else in your life the way some of those people did.
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But once we start with a good enough phrase, "Oh, it's good enough," already we've kind of started to lose that battle.
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So something that strikes me is even very respected songwriters,
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people that were supposed to be like, "Oh yeah, they're all-time great," which may or may not be true. And sometimes they are all-time great, but in a specific category of songwriting, but some other elements are not very good. For instance, I noticed a trend where a lot of the great songwriter types that were all supposed to be like, "Oh yeah, they're amazing."
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Most of the time, musically, it's like, "Okay, I get it." They did something really interesting musically, they just, 100%. A lot of times where it's still, the songs are like, "Hmm, is it though?" And where I don't think we'll still be listening to those songs in 100 years is the lyrics.
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If you watch interviews of very respected songwriters, they will say things that to me is just like wild, which is, "Oh yeah, the lyrics don't really make sense, I just put together words that sound good together."
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But it doesn't really make sense.
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And sometimes they'll even be like, "And that's what matters." No, it's not, no, it's not. Of course, that would be insane to say what matters. It doesn't matter whether the dialogue in the movie makes any sense, it just matters if it sounds good coming out of their mouths, that's insane.
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The entire meaning of your song ends up being in the lyric. So the lyrics don't make sense. I'm sorry, the song's not great.
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It can be something that a lot of people like. It can be something that because the music is so catchy or interesting or whatever, that people really like it. It even, in some cases, people insert their own meaning into meaningless lyrics and then it becomes,
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everybody's perception of the song is much greater than what it actually is because they insert this meaning. I like Nirvana, to be clear, but this happens with Nirvana all the time. Where it's like, no, he literally said he just shrinks together random poetry. If you look at the lyrics, that is very obviously true.
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I mean, it smells like Teen Spirit, most of those lyrics make no sense, not at all.
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But because of Nirvana, you have to be like, "Oh, it's great." Look, I like that song. I'm not trying to hate on that song, but it's not a great lyric. It just is not. And to pretend it is, is just, I mean, even Kurt Cobain would disagree with you and yet people will insist because for some reason, boy, do people get passionate about, every single thing about an artist I like is amazing, which I've never understood because my favorite artists, I see the flaws in them, I see the flaws in myself. We should be able to have an honest discussion about, I love this, but that doesn't mean it's not flawed.
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But anyway,
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to me, we should never be saying, oh, it's good enough.
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And oh, well, I mean, the lyrics are fine.
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It's good enough.
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We should always be pointed in a direction that is trying to get better, not only within a song, right? Within a song, like an exercise I like to do that if you think will be helpful, steal it. I think it's great. I literally will have in like a Google doc, I will highlight green or not highlight green. I'll change the text color to green to indicate, hey, this line is like, it's good. It says exactly what I want to say and the way I wanna say it, like a feels good coming out. It makes sense.
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It's lyrically efficient.
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Awesome. And then I know don't touch that line. It's done. But then there are other lines where I don't have that because it's just something off about it. Maybe I cringe a little bit at the lyric. Maybe I just feel like, yeah, there's gotta be a more beautiful way to say it or more efficient way to say it or just a way to say it that feels that or maybe this doesn't need to be said at all. There's a bunch of different problems that can be in there. But that would be an example of like not saying it's good enough on a per song basis, right? Which is gonna help all your songs be better. But also at a higher level, choosing not good enough for yourself.
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Or because it's kind of two different things that are connected. There's how great a song is and how great a songwriter is.
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So on an individual basis, we can put a ton of effort into getting one song amazing.
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But all the other songs, you kind of just phone in and then it's like a quarterback who has one great year. Are they a great quarterback or are they just a average quarterback who had a great year? Those are different things, right?
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And to me, greatness is not like a destination, right? If you treat it that way, we're already in trouble because that's when we're saying good enough. I'm a good enough songwriter.
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This song is good enough, which by the way, of course at some point you literally do have to say this song is good enough, but it's the tone of it, right? Like, ah, it's good enough. It's very different than like, yeah, it's like I wouldn't, I don't know, even know what I would change. Like this is every lyric, every part of the melody, the different song sections and the way they flow together, like everything is just right.
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But that's not good enough, right? That's like, yeah, this is exactly what it needs to be.
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But treating greatness, not like a destination, but a direction that we choose to move in, I think is the way to go. Because the second we think we've made it, we're toast.
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That and we cannot control where we are.
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We can control where we're going, right? How talented we are, we can't control at all. How good we are currently at singing, at melody writing, at lyric writing, at coming up with our knowledge of music, our current knowledge of music theory applied to songwriting to make our music a little more interesting. All of that, you and I cannot control where we are today with that. We can't control it, right? The past, our decisions in the past dictated where we are today. We cannot change that. The great news is what we choose today
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is the direction we go from here.
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So we cannot choose where we are today, but we can choose where we're going.
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A quote that's always stuck with me. My university president used to always say,
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"You will never be tomorrow what you are not becoming today."
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My wife doesn't find it as mind blowing as I do. To me, it's a perfect example of it's very simple and it's even obvious. And yet almost everybody lives as though that is not the case, right? It's always like, you know, be slave to the moment. And no, no, no, you have to think about, it's today's decisions that will make you the thing you will be tomorrow. And that's the thing we can be worried about.
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We still shouldn't worry about it. We should just do something about it. But that to me is the first layer here, right? It's just the decision that we are not gonna say good enough on an individual song level. And we're not gonna say good enough for us as an, "Oh, I'm good enough at writing that. I don't need to work on that. Oh, my knowledge of music theory is good enough. I can write, it's fine."
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That's the first thing. That's the first thing. Because attitude is exactly how one becomes average forever.
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And again, if you're average today, if I'm average today, we can't control that. That is what it is. But what we can control is the decisions we make that determine the direction that we're going in. I can't control how great I am today or lack thereof. I can control roughly what path I'm on to how great I will be five, 10 years from now. And so can you.
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Whether you decide that's good news or bad news, I guess is up to your mindset. I think that's great news.
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So average is crowded by definition. We mentioned that already. That's just how bell curves work.
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The average male height is five, nine. I think the average for women is five, three? Is it five, three, five, four? I don't know. I'm a guy. So I know the guy number better than I know the girl number.
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But by definition, that always makes it such that the vast majority are roughly five, nine. So probably like 60, 70, 80% of all guys are like five, seven to five, 11.
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That's gonna be the same for, like the law of averages. This is always going to be the case. So if we want to create something remarkable, if we want to be on a journey to becoming somewhat remarkable in this craft, which hopefully you care about. Otherwise, why are we even here? Why are we even here? If we don't wanna be really good. What's the point?
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(Soft Music)
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We need to care about the things where the average creator doesn't.
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So I would say the average songwriting's like point of view,
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especially among like the YouTube crowd for sure.
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But also even like professionals who are maybe good, some of them are overrated, some of them are like, they are amazing and what most people who are speaking about songwriting now. Actually slight adjustment to that. Most of the people who are like genuinely great, like there's a mix. I'm going a little bit off of things I've seen from like Rick Beato's interviews. Sometimes you'll see like, where they're talking about like, yeah, of course it's important to understand theory and music and they almost, Rick Beato gets accused. I think mostly not appropriately with like being a music snob or whatever. There's maybe some truth to that, but like also he just has standards. Now I don't agree totally with his standards. I think he undervalues lyrics and maybe overvalue some other things that I don't value as much or whatever. But that's a separate discussion than like, is it being a snob to just be like, hey, maybe we should try, if we're gonna do a thing, if we're gonna be a songwriter, maybe we should, I don't know, care about songwriting. I'm just like, oh, big ask.
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So where so much goes wrong now is sort of the accidental application of the 80-20 rule to art. And I'm a big fan of the 80-20 rule. If you're not familiar, it's basically the idea that in most things, 20% of the work gets you 80% of the results.
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Right, so in the business world, when you're trying to be efficient, right? The 80-20 rule is an efficiency rule. So if you're trying to be efficient, if that's what you're optimizing for, 80-20 rule is great,
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because that's what's gonna get you, right? So for instance, probably all of us, maybe not, but certainly I think it is fairly easy to write a song in an hour. I've done, I call them song sprints. I'll set a timer for an hour and just be like, I'm just forcing myself to start and finish a song.
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It's not really that hard. The hardest part is the lyrics. Usually I try to leave at least half an hour for the lyrics. Now, how good is that song when I'm done? Almost always. A lot of times the music is like, it's pretty simple because it's not that much time to do something more than just something very simple, right? And I have the lyrics hanging over me, but it still can be simple, but very good.
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And usually I come out of it thinking, okay,
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it technically is something that's like, yeah, it's done.
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But the lyrics almost always are like, that's where the huge weakness is.
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And you may be like, well, Joseph, why would you spend 10 more hours just getting the lyrics just right? It's already done, right? You already did the 20% that gets 80% of the results because we're craftsmen.
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We care about the craft. We wanna make it actually good. And if you wanna be average, sure, just do that over and over and over again. Write a song in an hour, write a song in an hour, write a song in an hour, and your song will sound roughly like everybody else who writes a song in an hour. Or an hour and a half, on average. And by the way, I say this every time, but I'm gonna say it again, because there's always gonna be somebody. There's nothing wrong with writing a song in an hour. If, if it's truly done. If you look at the lyrics, you look at every element of it, and you're like, this is, I wouldn't change a thing, then great.
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But we shouldn't be maximizing for efficiency. We should, and I say this as an efficiency freak, by the way. I'm a total freak about efficiency generally. But when it comes to our art form, I do wanna get better at like, say, writing a song. I wanna get to my lyrical standards faster.
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But the key thing there is not, I want to write lyrics faster. It's I want to get to my lyrical standards faster. That's a very different thing, right? If I can learn to consistently get to my, like the standards I have lyrically, which is like, I care about lyrics deeply. If I can do that in half the time, great.
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If in half the time I lose even 10% of the quality, not worth it. Not worth it. I want it to be just right across the board. That's the attitude that we should have.
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80-20 rule is great if we wanna write average after average after average song. And once in a while, maybe get lucky.
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But just like our favorite athletes or whatever, if you think of like the all-time great in almost any department,
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they are usually only like 2% better than the person who's like, you know, very good, but you know, certainly not like not a Hall of Famer or anything.
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If you've ever been somebody who, well, you've been through school, so maybe you know. I would say that like the effort difference between a C student and an A-B plus student is about the same as an A-student to an A student.
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It just requires disproportionate effort to go from like a 90 to a 95 compared to like a 70 to a 90.
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Like 70 to 90 is probably maybe a little bit more effort than to get from 90 to 95, but the closer you get to 100, the more effort, the more diminishing returns you have.
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And essentially what my argument here is, is if we are craftsmen, if we truly care about making something really, really good,
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then we don't play the game of like, oh, well, I've hit diminishing returns, so I'm just gonna stop.
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As soon as I hit diminishing returns, I stop. As soon as doubling the amount of time I spend on writing this song doesn't get the song to be doubly good, I'm done.
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Now, this is not to say, oh, we should workshop forever and never finish the song, because this is always a straw man that somebody brings up. Oh, well, Joseph, are you saying we should tinker on a song indefinitely? No, just have, this is why I do the whole green text thing for lyrics, right? It's the idea of like, once you can listen back to it or say it out loud, read the lyrics, and you're like, yes, this is good. Don't keep working on it, right? Having that threshold in your head of like, yes, it says what it needs to say, it's done.
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Like, don't conflate that with like endless tinkering. No, that's not the argument. The argument is, for instance, I like to talk about the cringe test.
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The cringe test is very simple. It's basically, if there's a point in your song where you're either reading your lyrics or maybe you're playing a recording of your song or you're playing your song live for somebody and you inwardly cringe a little bit, like that line's about to come up, that melodic spot is about to come up, your pre-chorus is about to come up, you don't feel very good about, and you inwardly cringe a little bit, listen to it. It's almost certainly correct. There's probably something wrong. And a lot of people will be like, no, I'll just throw the song out there. Don't worry about it. No, do worry about it. Are we craftsmen or are we just maximizing for efficiency? Are we just, are we maximizing to put out as many average, underwhelming songs as possible? Is that what we're trying to do? Is that the goal?
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Like, we stand for resoundingly average. We want to pump out as many songs that are completely and totally forgettable as possible.
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And again, this is not a comment about how good we are or aren't currently, right? It's just a directional thing. Because you and I, again, cannot control how good we are today. We can control the direction we're in.
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So we can somewhat control that probably 10 years from now, five years from now, you and I can be much better than the people that we're currently peers with simply by giving a crap. Like, it honestly can be that simple. Just being like, you know what? I actually care about the craft of songwriting.
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Imagine that. I'm not somebody that's like, oh, let me write a song as quickly as possible. Because songwriting is like this secondary thing to like me as an artist. How many people know somebody like that? I know so many people like that, where I can tell like, it's all about them as an artist, not like the art, which is like, I think you've lost the plot. If you're talking about like who you are as an art more than like the art itself. Like, what can the song do for me? Oh, not what can the song do for you. What can you do for the song? Not to go all JFK on you, but anyway, two main points.
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Took a while to get here, huh?
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First one is care about every layer.
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This is the first area that a lot of songwriters go wrong.
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And by the way, a lot of people, this is just like a general, in general people,
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like in general, almost everyone is average at almost everything, right? So if we wanna break out of that, if we wanna break out of that,
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one way is just people ask that we are amazingly talented. Maybe, maybe. The other way, which we can't control, as I said, the thing we can control is improving, improving intentionally.
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So for instance, musical foundations.
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Now, if you haven't been following me for a while, you might be like musical foundations, what the heck is that? Basically, that's my way of saying chord progressions because I think that seeing a song as just a chord progression of melody and lyrics is extremely reductive and not helpful because chord progressions are usually very simple. Most people think like, oh, like a measure of G major and a measure of D major. Like if that's how you see music already, already we're losing ground here because that's the most simple possible way to analyze music and to write music. There's nothing wrong with it. It is a helpful tool, but to see a song as simply a combination of a chord progression and melody and lyrics already is putting at us a huge disadvantage. So what is a musical foundation? Basically, it is all the music that's not the melody.
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And I just find that thinking in terms of musical foundation helps you to think more about like the baseline is very important to the overall experience of the song. The piano part is very important to the overall experience of the song. There's a big difference between a piano part that implies a chord progression with a really interesting riff and one that just plays basic block chords. And if you just think in terms of chord progressions, the default is to just do block chords. There's nothing inherently wrong with block chords, but we probably don't wanna be limited to that.
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I like to talk about Cottage Colonial Castle. It's the idea that look, you can build a cottage that is amazing, S tier, right? You can write a simple song that is amazing.
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Most basic chord progression, the whole song's built on two chords and it'd be awesome. That is a real thing. It is also a real thing that you can have a freaking castle, which is a really sophisticated, musically interesting song. It has a lot of depth and maybe the lyrics have like tons of subtext to them because they're so well-written.
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And that can also be amazing.
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The problem is a lot of times, especially when it comes to foundations, when people refuse to learn any music theory, which by the way, music theory is just how music works. It has nothing to do with sheet music. But when people say, "Oh no, I don't wanna learn anything. I don't wanna learn that." It's like, well, you're limiting yourself. It's just going to be harder to be able to write at a cottage, colonial and castle level.
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And to me, we wanna maximize how many great songs we can write. And anybody who can build a castle can also build a cottage, right? But if we are only capable of building cottages because we barely even understand basic chord progressions,
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we still don't even know what a key is, or even just we're limited to just thinking in terms of chord progressions,
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we're limiting ourselves, right? And if we really care about every layer, why would we limit ourselves? Because there's essentially three basic layers to a song, musical foundation, melody, and lyrics.
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If we say, "Oh, I don't wanna learn music theory." Already, we've shot ourselves in the foot for our musical foundations. We've said, "Of the three parts to a song, I don't really care about one."
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What else would we even be saying? Of course we're saying that, right? You're not willing to learn something that literally helps you understand how music works at a deeper level, that it helps you to bring intentionality to the music that you write, beyond just like, "Hey, G and C and D all sound good together."
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So that's one way to care about every layer, melody, right?
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There's a bunch of ways that we can show more care to melody.
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One is simply just like practice improvising melody more, because a lot of times, melody is mostly improvisation. So getting better at improvisation, and specifically improvising melody is a great way to go. Consider, I'm a big fan of you record, even if it's just on your phone, that's fine. You record your musical foundation that you've written. So that when you're writing your melody, you are not forcing yourself to play and write at the same time. You let your whole brain just think about,
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writing, improvising that melody. And a lot of times what's great about that is sometimes, a lot of times my musical foundation is built on a piano part, because I'm more of a pianist than anything else, so, and I really like piano as a basis for songs. So often that's what I do. I can then turn around and use the piano again to write the vocal melody. And I find that generally I write better vocal melodies with a piano than I do with my own voice. There's a lot of reasons for that. I talk about that in other episodes. This is already going long, so we'll move over that part quickly here, but.
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And then there's lyrics.
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Boy.
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Lyrics is the big one, right? I mean, I always ask when I do live events, I always ask, or pretty much always ask, which one of these layers, like when I did the Finish a Song Challenge, I always ask people which one of these layers do they think they struggle with the most?
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And probably like 50% of people say lyrics, and the other 50% of people I think are just wrong. (Laughs) Because some people will be like, oh, melodies. And I listen to their melodies, and then I see the lyrics. And it's like, no, lyrics was the correct answer. The vast majority of people, lyrics are the main thing where it's weak.
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There are some exceptions, but I do find that, I don't know, I would venture to guess 90% of songwriters. The biggest return on investment you can do is get better at lyric writing.
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But, yeah, learning to write better lyrics. Learning, there's a bunch of things we could break down here, right? But, and the goal of this is not to get in the nitty gritty. But the prerequisite to writing great lyrics is to care about great lyrics.
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So we can start there. Anybody who's ever said, oh, people don't pay attention to lyrics.
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So I don't really put that much effort into lyrics because people don't even notice, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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You know what I notice about every single one of those people? They all have forgettable at absolute best lyrics.
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Is it because they're bad? Is it because they're untalented? Is it, no, no. But they already said, I don't care about lyrics. The prerequisite to write great lyrics is to care about great lyrics, to care about lyrics.
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So it starts there. The lyrics are what your song means, whether you want it to be or not. Like, just objectively, lyrics are actual words that tell people what the song is about. What the music feels like can add subtext and it can alter tone a little bit. But very literally, your story is your lyrics.
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Anybody who pretends otherwise is just lying, right? Of course, the lyrics are the only objective thing you can point to where it's like, the song is about X.
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And then finally, our musical journeys we take people on. This is another one where, you know,
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so many people are like trying to do plug and play with song sections. And there's not necessarily something wrong with that. But there's so much more to songwriting than just like, oh, I need a verse and I need a chorus. And then my big decision is do I have a bridge or not?
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Like, well, let's take Bohemian Rhapsody's, one of my favorite examples of this. There's no verse, there's no chorus, nothing. It's just like four distinct, I think it's four, distinct sections.
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And if Queen got in a room and is like, well, we have to have a verse and a chorus and we got a, the big decision is we have to decide if there's a bridge.
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Then we wouldn't have that song.
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And there's lots of other songs like that. Right, that simply would not exist if one went into a song, assuming the premise that every song must have a verse and a chorus, or even that every song needs to be some version of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus.
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Right, you can have two bridges. You can do what I like to do a lot when it is right for the song and the story, which is to have a finale, which is basically a part that only happens at the end of the song that is kind of wraps up the main point of the song and usually is like the biggest part of the song. So usually I make it so that the chorus has like some room to get even bigger and more epic. That way it like is saving for that climactic finale, which by the way, almost every movie we ever watch that we love is that usually, right? There's like, F low and then the very end is like, boom.
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Anyway, I'm not saying you should do that. I'm saying just again, caring about every layer is thinking, how do I grow? How can I do something better in every layer? And a part of it is that musical journey. Reject the premise that every song just must be some combination of verse and chorus.
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A lot are and a lot should be, right? There's nothing wrong with verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, nothing at all. But to assume the premise that every song must be that and we're just playing puzzle pieces is not a good premise to start with.
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Which by the way, all of those song sections are made up and you know how they ended up getting made up? Somebody decided to revolutionize songwriting. Well, actually they probably didn't even think about it. Right, the first person to write a chorus, I don't think they were thinking, oh, I've created a new song section. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Now choruses are everywhere. We just assume, oh, every song has to have a chorus. Choruses didn't even exist, like, I don't know, 200 years ago, like there was maybe some semblance of ideas of a chorus, but chorus in its current state is a relatively new development. Much less like pre-choruses are pretty new. Post-choruses are maybe for the most part, like the last 20 years.
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And yeah, I'm sure there's examples of like two songs in the 50s or whatever, but these things change. Right, so we don't have to be confined to the rules, these arbitrary rules somebody else made. All right, point number two, this one's going long.
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Pursue the final 20%.
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We kind of already talked about this, but it just, we have to make this point. Back to the 80-20 rule, just as a reminder, the 80-20 rule is that 20% of the effort gets 80% of the results, which means that 80% of the effort sometimes is in getting the final 20% of the results.
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Applying the 80-20 rule will get average song after average song.
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If we say, no, it is worth spending 80% of my time getting that final 20% of my song just right, making it so that cringy lyric isn't in there and instead there's an excellent lyric. Fixing that one part of the melody that just always feels a little off or doesn't fit our voice very well if you're recording your own songs. Or the bass line is just, there's something about it. It feels just off, but maybe changing one note or two notes or playing around with it, maybe totally rewriting it all of a sudden makes it something that feels excellent.
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As we said earlier, boy, in all things, just because again, the nature of bell curves, at some point it does take disproportionate effort to get 5% better, but that's also the only way to become actually great at something and to get past resoundingly average.
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So I can't determine for you what your determination is. It can only determine for me. So for me, I've decided a long time ago that I'm pursuing not just doing the same average thing.
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I love it. I love it when I get a comment from sometimes people I know, sometimes fellow songwriters are like, "Wow, your lyrics are like, phew, just, they use different words, right? Sometimes they're just so beautiful and well-thought out and sometimes it's regardless." Like it's not, it just, when I get those comments, that is like the moment of like, yes, good. That means I'm at least on the right path.
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I don't do it for the comments, right? I just wanna be, to me, it's like we were blessed with this ability to be an artist, to make music. Why would we not make the most of that gift?
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The way I can make the most of that gift is not worrying about how good I am or am not. What I can worry about is whether I'm pursuing becoming better and that's what you can control too. And I think you can control more of it than you think.
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So again, I can't determine whether, you know, you shut this podcast off five minutes in because you just wanna be told that you're talented and amazing and, you know, it's all just subjective, bro, and it's fine.
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But if you're still here, hopefully that means that this has resonated with you in some way where you're like, yes, I feel the call that I, like, I want to get better at this. I want to serve my songs. I wanna make every song as good as I can. I'm not maximizing for efficiency. Efficiency matters, but I'm not maximizing for it. I'm maximizing for quality, not quantity.
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I wanna be done with a song when a song is done, when it actually is doing exactly what it needs to do.
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Because the craftsman keeps going where everyone else decides the difference no longer matters. Oh, it's diminishing returns. Oh, nobody will ever notice that random line in the second verse. Okay.
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That's the difference between, that's the difference between the all-time great athletes
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and the ones that we don't even remember their names now.
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That's the difference. The all-time great ones always were like, no, every detail matters. I'm gonna take 50 more shots every single practice than everybody else.
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Everybody else is gonna be done with practice. I'm gonna practice another two hours. And again, I'm not saying we have to be that maniacal. And there's other things to do besides practice. We can increase our knowledge. For instance, music theory would be great. It's my favorite example, just because it's one of the most impactful things you can learn and anybody's told you different, it's just a liar.
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It will help you to understand how to compose music at a deeper level and bring more intentionality to it beyond just like, oh, these courts sound good together. It will.
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So there's lots of things that we can do, bringing intentionality to the craft.
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You know, we don't have to have mamba mentality about it. That's not necessarily what I'm saying.
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But at least to have some desire to pursue being better at the craft that we allegedly care about, I think is very important. Because that's all we can control. We can't control where we are, but we can control where we're going.
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But that being said, no song will ever be perfect.
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And the point is the pursuit, right? It's like the pursuit of happiness, right? You can't, it's not a thing you have. It's not a thing that you can have and keep. It's something that you can simply be oriented towards.
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I choose to be oriented towards pursuing becoming better and better and better and writing better songs tomorrow than I write today. And I hope that that's something that resonates with you as well.
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So speaking of this, as I've been talking about a lot recently, because I've always felt this way. I just, for some reason was shy to go in this direction. And now I'm like, you know what? No.
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If we aren't recording our songs, like, what's even the point? Like to me, it's a great travesty. If you write a great song and it literally dies with you because you played it for five people at a coffee shop, they're not gonna remember it. They're not gonna keep it alive. You never recorded it. You never created a definitive version of it in recording form. And now it just dies with you. So what was even the point? That would be like if every great artist burned their art on their deathbed. They're like, burn up all my art so that no one can ever appreciate it again and nobody can be moved by it 500 years later. That's what we're doing if we don't record our song.
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So that's why I've been harping about that, right? Some of you are probably, I haven't gotten any emails about this, but I can almost sense the like, well, wait a second. I thought we were talking about songwriting here. We are. To me, it's ultimately about songwriting. I just think in the modern era, a fundamental part of songwriting is actually recording the thing. And if we don't, what are we even doing? What are we even doing? Cause it's not like this unattainable thing anymore. We're not in the fifties. We're not in the sixties. We're not in the seventies. We're not even in the nineties. We're in 2026.
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So we can do it now without breaking up, like spending a million dollars or needing a record company or any of that sort of stuff.
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So anyway, I'm doing another live masterclass. Again, totally free. You should come. I'm calling it the world-class music gap.
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And basically, basically this is something that is
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important to me because there are many tragedies that can be involved. Maybe you already are writing fantastic songs, but then you go to record the song or somewhere in the production, or maybe even in the mixing mastering of the song that happens.
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When you hear your song back, you feel that disappointment. Like I feel like it's a great song, but when I hear my song and my favorite artist song next to each other, I think not even in the same stratosphere,
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not even the same zip code, like just totally different.
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And it may be that the recording or the production, right? The arrangement, or maybe the mixing mastering job that was done on it didn't do service to your song. And then some people are in the opposite camp, right? The song sounds great maybe, but the low key, like the songwriting is not there. So who cares, right?
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I mean, pop music proves that to some degree you can just like have amazing production and people don't even notice how bad the song is because there's a lot of people that don't, McDonald's is the most popular burger, right? Need I say more, right? That's why we don't talk about popularity here. Can't be controlled and to me that's not the pursuit. If it is the pursuit, then yeah, you should just
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crank out as much slop as possible. And maybe that will work. I don't think it will, but regardless,
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it's gonna be this Thursday, 9 p.m. Eastern, totally free. You should come even if you can't come live, which we'll do like Q and A after, if you have any questions or need help with anything, whether it be related to the world-class music app or not, by the way, like if you have any question at all songwriting that you've been wanting to ask. I know sometimes, I think sometimes people leave comments in YouTube asking questions or whatever, but I don't usually have time to get to questions and comments, right? I don't even have time for all the email questions that I get.
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I obviously have to serve the people in front of me. That's my obligation not to, you know, a random YouTube comment or whatever. But if you are that person, if you want an answer to a question, come to this and you could get an answer, even if you haven't gotten an answer wherever you may have posted it before.
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But so yeah, this Thursday, 9 p.m. Eastern, teaching free live masterclass, world-class music app. And I'm gonna show you the five main gaps I think there are that most often stand between you and a song that's finished and recordings that actually hold up beside the artists you admire.
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Because I think that's what we all want, right? Or at least the person I'm speaking to, this is what you want, right? Without spending a bazillion dollars going into a music studio, you wanna listen to your favorite band song and then listen to your song or feel like if, slight story here, with some of my old music, my dad did a slideshow that he put together for like a family reunion thing and it's like, I don't know, something like that. And to me, with my old music, it was very noticeable right away that like, oh, one of these songs is not like the other. And I don't even think it was a song quality. I think it was a little part of it. I wrote the song when it was like 18 years old or whatever, so it could use some work. But for the most part, it was the other elements that got in the way with a little tinge of the songwriting itself, right? So there was an obvious gap to me, where it's like immediately it almost took you out of the slideshow in my opinion. Nobody said this to me, but I felt that way. Whereas like one of these is not like the other.
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We wanna remove that gap, right? So with the last EP that I just made, when I finally, like I could listen to my favorite band's song and then mine and be like, somebody could put these both in a playlist and nobody would bat an eye. Oh my goodness, that's what you want, right? At least to me, that's always what you want. You never want something else to get in the way of the song, whether it be the mixing, the production, the recording or what. So that's what this world-class music app is for. I probably belated the point, but you should come. Even if you can't come live, register anyway, because you will get a link to the replay.
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Totally free, no reason not to come. So I hope to see a bunch of you there. And especially if this episode resonated with you, essentially we were talking about, we kind of dove into the songwriting gap a little bit, right? Like what is the gap between our songs and some of the great songs that we love? We kind of addressed the songwriting angle of that in this episode. So if that's something that resonated with you, certainly, certainly that masterclass is for you. So I hope to see you there. Registration is down below.
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And really easy URL for those of you on podcasts, I'll put it in the show notes as well, but it's just a worldclass music app.com.
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That's all it is. Go to worldclass musicgap.com. No hyphens, no anything. Just the words worldclass musicgap.com. That's where you can go to register. Again, register even if you can't come live, so that to make sure that you get the replay link.
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All right, go out, create something that stands out because you are pursuing.
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We will never, we should never feel like we've arrived, but we are pursuing, becoming better and better as songwriters every single day.
