I make music, write books, produce records and create things out of emptiness. I believe in coffee and poetry. Why I write? Because it hurts not to.

Nov 24, 2015

On Being A Songwriter

The world that exists behind the concept of ”being a songwriter” is so vast and great and ceaselessly fascinating that I’ll never live a life long enough to even come close to figure it out. It’s a simple dream: You’re younger, you find something that makes you forget about time and place, pressure and responsibilities, and you make the decision that this is what I want to be and do when I grow up. Some people find it early, others go looking all over the world for years until they later, maybe, find it after many cities, lovers, jobs and failures. There is no right way, there is only your way.

I was young when I found mine, but still older than my age because they called me ”an old soul”. I’d already tried out many versions of myself — loved some, hated some. But when I discovered music — when I discovered the craft of shaping a song — my being fell into place. The possibility of taking something as simple and complicated as unspoken feelings, thoughts, hurt, joy and lessons, and turn it into a well-shaped unmaterialistic thing such as a song, I let go of everything else. I closed the door and dedicated my whole identity to this new-found skill. Because that’s what it is — a skill. Something you need to learn, practice, figure out and always keep practicing. And that’s what I’d like to write about today. The craft and skill behind being a songwriter.

I am not a musician. I am not a singer. I can strum some chords on a guitar and I can humbly play chords underneath my songs on the piano, but I am not a musician. I just never got lost in the process of playing an instrument, practicing or perfecting my timing.

I am a writer: a songwriter. A story teller. An engineer of sort, crafting and puzzling together otherworldly things like feelings and melodies and crafting them into something thicker. Something you almost can touch and hold, but never really, because isn’t that the case with a song? Think about your favourite song. That song you’ve listened to over and over throughout your life, and that you always will have a certain feeling of ”home” in. Doesn’t it feel like you can touch it? Like you can hold it? Like it’s a real, physical thing that you own and know and that you carry with you, even if only in your heart and mind? But still it feels like something so much bigger than just a thing to hold … so much more and vaster than just another tool, like a phone or a knife or a car. It’s precious and fragile and airy, but still robust because it exists merely inside you and so no one and nothing can ever take it away from you because it’s yours to keep. And it’s not static because it changes some times, with the years, with the seasons, with the people you surround yourself with.

When I first started to write songs I was proud and excited with just having written any kind of song. Four chords on the piano, a melody that repeated itself to form verses and choruses, and a lyric that rhymed. As I studied more songs, more songwriters and wrote more and more music, that feeling of excitement for just anything grew into wanting to perfect it. The chase after the perfect melting of the lyrics and the melody, to fit unnoticeably with each other. A few hundred songs later you notice and learn that a song is not just a song: it contains a universe depending on the sound, the vibe, the genre, and you delve deeper and deeper into the possibilities. I am a fan of music and there is nothing more fascinating to me than studying how other songwriters and composers create their worlds. Like jazz. I don’t know jazz, never listened to it and definitely never played it, so to go in deep beneath the songs, the melodies, the lyrics, the productions, and figure out how they’re building this sound of jazz is breathtaking. How amazing is that, that you can create this feeling of ”jazz” from nothing, with a little (or a lot of) knowledge about some certain structures and rules?!

I’ve been writing music for ten years by now, resulting in a catalogue of songs that takes up way too much space on my computer. I’ve always been chasing the hooky melodies, the standard structures. The float, the flow, the lyrics. But I can slowly feel a happening this season. It might be something about the weather. The crisp air in this new town where I live now. It might be this loneliness, that I’ve never felt before, but still don’t want to pull myself out of. It might be just me, this somehow peaceful sense of calm I have found in my chest. I’m not worried. I’m not stressed. I’m quietly taking my time, doing whatever I might be doing. Making the bed, writing the letters, running the miles. I can feel a shift in mind and thoughts and it’s affecting the music I intend to write. Or rather, the music I will write doesn’t concern me as much as the process of writing it — the process in itself.

I press a key on the piano and let it ring.

I close my eyes. Hear a car driving off somewhere far away. A bird outside my window looking for food. Someone turning the water on upstairs. It’s all sounds. It’s all music, of sort.

I focus on my breathing, the air sipping through my nostrils feeding every vein in my body. I think about the books I’ve read, the poets I’ve studied, the people I’ve loved. I think about the roads I’ve walked, the darkness that befalls earlier each night at this time of year. I think about my family. My mom. My brothers.

And I think about myself.

Then I start writing.