I’ve been really struggling for over a year now to get beyond a series of 4 or 8 bar loops and snatches of one or two lines that might have a hook in them but never actually putting it all together. So I was inspired lately by listening to the Joy of Songwriting podcast in which they said (paraphrasing) “Always finish a song – even if you toss it immediately – just finish it”. I was also very inspired by the excellent blogpost on Song Structuring from Michael Crockett and thought stuff it – I need to JFDI.

….so i started browsing through old notebooks and trying to sort out the scraps of stuff that I had put together in the past – and in one of my old notebooks, I came across this:

And I thought… “this sounds interesting, maybe I can work with this and complete it.”

Firstly its a bit rambling, not sure what the story is here, second some of the rhyming and scanning is very haphazard and thirdly, I don’t have a melody, or chord progression for it. But I do like quite a few of the lyrics and there’s a ‘message’ in here somewhere that must have been in my mind when I wrote this 4 years ago.

So I’m starting to wrk on this. I think the verses are reflective and questioning so call for a minor key and I’m settling in on a B Dorian type of feel so A/Bm/C#m/Bm/A (VII,i,ii,i,VII) feels kind interesting especially as it allows me to use a nice A shape pattern on the middle 3 strings. And I can find a melody that seems to work OK as a starting point:

So the next steps are to work out what this song is really about, complete the other verses and decide if it needs a chorus (I’m thinking switch to the A major key) and bridge? and then finish it. My target is by the end of this week (1st April 2022) so I’m putting a time box around it to incentivise myself.

Lets see how it goes….