Musicians can get writers block. I get it all the time, especially leading up to a deadline (like now). Common symptoms include:
- Repeatedly playing Stairway to Heaven or Nothing Else Matters on the guitar for no apparent reason.
- Listening over and over to previous work just so you can pick out every single little mistake.
- Listening to your favourite songs over and over, picking out all the clever bits that are so much better than your own work
- Drinking Coffee and eating Toast.
- Doing housework, running errands, catching up on paperwork, blogging…
The worst thing is when you can think of a hundred things to write a song about – but none of it just seems any good. My current ideas involve sick frogs, the IRD, and mismatched socks.
The other worst thing is when you give up on what you’re writing a song about and just try to come up with some good music and/or riffs. When you have writers block, everything always sounds too much like something else. Sometimes, it all just sounds crap. Sometime it doesn’t sound like anything because you can’t even come up with anything.
Cures for writers/composers block:
- Actually having feelings or opinions to write about. (Rumour has it you can get these by giving a damn – harder than it looks sometimes)
- Being almost at the deadline… and dropping your standards to write about things you originally thought were crap when you had a lot of time to think about it.
- Finding God (Christian bands NEVER run out of things to write about
) - Harnessing random fluctuations in the Time Space Continuum. (eg, open any random book at a random page and randomly point at something on the page and write about whatever that’s about. Also works quite well with like dream cards, the random button on wikipedia, or even your media player set to random. [I secretly suspect all those Christian bands just write songs by doing this with the bible!])
- Doing housework, running errands, catching up on paperwork, blogging… Sometimes stopping trying to compose and doing something else for a little while can give your brain a little time to stew things over and come up with some proper ideas.
I think I’m ready to get back to work now 
(Christian bands NEVER run out of things to write about
)
Haha. So true.
I listened to one of your band’s unreleased tunes. Pretty good! I like the tension in the melodic structure.
There’s also the stumble upon toolbar, hours of amusement
I’ve been writing a series of articles on creativity in music. The more I look at it, the more I’m focusing on ideas for overcoming writer’s/composer’s block. In short, they nearly always boil down to change.
Good music. I like what’s in the portfolio. Different enough from the standard tracks out on the internet, but still catchy.
I don’t write lyrics, because I can’t get past the first word
So anybody who can get a song is doing well in my opinion.
I find that sometimes the hardest part is getting started. To get over this I just need to force myself to do *some* work
I usually decide to work for some pre-determined amount of time, say long enough for one play through of an album. This might not work if you need to do audio work, maybe some other time measurement would need to be used in this case, like an old fashioned hour glass
quick bike ride.
your mind will bust out flying after that.
yeah, go and google-away some more time reading about mondegreens…)
grind on mentally challenging stuff like physics
i tried lyrics for a while, but i couldn’t keep the nonessential stuff out. began to resemble an essay or monograph.
i think a lyric (or business card slogan) writer must be satisfied leaving lyrics somewhat ambiguous. (and that’s not even considering mondegreens
you could record something ‘satanic’, but include the bible (or bits of it) in backward masking (perhaps in aramaic). will cause some heads to implode.
and if you’ve redone your older stuff, and still have the older stuff, maybe try mashingup the two?maybe some kind of common “essence” will popout? (i don’t have much to try this with, but i know the stones have older and newer versions of some songs, so if i was more of a music editor i could try some of those pairs…)
pretend you’re stealing your own lyrics and edit them as if to avoid being sued.