I find that if I wait for inspiration, songs come few and far between. The most likely possibility in the great sea of impossibilities to even conceive of coming up with a song (I have written or co-written over 60 songs, not all of them keepers, over the years), is to hold a guitar in my hand, and to start exploring the fret-board. This is a method endorsed by both Jeff Tweedy and Keith Richards. You want to write a song? Keep a guitar, or your preferred musical instrument of choice, close to hand, pick it up, and play something. Jeff has written vividly about his daily songwriting practice, and at the peak of Keith's songwriting experience (1965 - 1972), he always had a guitar in hand, he'd often go to sleep with a guitar lying by his side.
This all became real again for me a couple days ago. I was feeling kind of lousy, I had a "Mojo-Deficit," low energy, a bit surly, Jimmy Dumps was wrestling with Sunny Jimmy, and Dumps was winning. I was not in a good or creative mood. I decided to go to our rehearsal studio, alone, just to "goof around" with my guitar. I was thinking I'd just work on my gear, maybe put on some new strings, tweak my preamp settings, adjust my amp, try to refine my "tone." Searching for tone, it's kind of like searching for the Holy Grail; a never-ending quest for some mythical perfection. Ask any guitar player you know, they will tell you about their journeys in the pursuit of tone.
I set up my guitar rig, but then ignored it. I sat on a large, leather couch in the studio, and just started banging away on my guitar. It's an old timer, that beat, old acoustic guitar has been with me for decades. Funny. I just accidentally started to strum in a very aggressive way, a strumming pattern that was "new," and I kind of found a groove in the strumming. I also put my fingers in unlikely configurations on the fret-board. Was it agreeably musical? Maybe. I wasn't thinking, just doing. And then once I got a groove going, picking out unlikely notes, I just started singing off the top of my head. Words, with no fore-thought, just materialized out of the air, and tripped off my tongue.
About 30 minutes later a gnarly, freshly-hatched song emerged. I am always surprised when that happens. Is it any good? Who knows? Will it actually make it to a band rehearsal? The jury is still out. But, the makings of a real song did appear out of the lethargy, and gloom. I was inspired, after the song appeared. There is a lesson there, embedded in the experience of just doing it. Sometimes, you do it, and then figure you will make sense of it all sometime later, down the line.
