Right now, I’m in the middle of choosing songs for my next release, which sounds like a nice problem to have until you actually sit down to do it.
It means going back through my song demos. All of them.
Most were written for online songwriting challenges like FAWM and the RPM Challenge, where the whole point is to write and record a lot of songs in an allotted space of time. The rest are standalone songs written whenever something needed to come out.
Put together, it’s a hefty collection, and I’ve spent the past few weeks working through it with headphones on and a notepad beside me.
What I didn’t expect was how many of those songs I’d completely forgotten about. Finished songs, with verses, choruses, bridges and titles, that I honestly couldn’t remember writing.
Right in the middle of all this, I read an article by songwriter and educator Andrea Stolpe called The Catalog You Build While Nobody’s Watching. She describes going looking for one old song and turning up around 30 others she barely remembered.
Her argument in the article is that most songwriting advice covers the beginning and the business end, but hardly anyone talks about the long middle, where most of us actually spend our writing lives.
She also makes the point that one song tells you very little about yourself as a writer, but fifty songs side by side start to give you away.
She was right. Mine certainly did. Here’s what they told me.
I keep writing my way through fear and doubt
The first thing that jumped out at me was a lyrical thread I hadn’t consciously noticed. Song after song, across years and across different challenges, I’m writing some version of fear and doubt.
Doubt about myself, about where I’m headed, about whether any of this is worth it but thankfully, the songs rarely stay there.
More often than not they end up somewhere on the other side of it, with some sense of rising above, or at least getting back up from it. I never set out to write that story over and over. It just seems to be the one I keep telling.
Andrea talks about the emotional stance we take every time we come back to a familiar subject, and how you can’t see it from inside a single song. That’s exactly what this was.
On its own, each of those songs felt like its own moment. Heard together, they sound like one long conversation I’ve been having with myself for years.
Personally, I don’t think that’s a flaw. If anything, it tells me something about why I write in the first place.
My songs changed when my life did
The second thing was harder for me to sit with.
My earlier songs don’t have much grief in them. My later songs have a lot. Listening in rough chronological order, you can hear the point where loss moves into the writing and stays. This is especially the case around the time that Mara passed away.
I knew this in a general sense, of course. But hearing it laid out across the catalogue was different. It’s one thing to know you’ve been writing through grief. It’s another to hear the shift in the songs themselves, like a change in the weather you can only really see when you look back at a whole season.
What struck me most is that the fear-and-doubt thread doesn’t disappear when the grief arrives. The two start to overlap. A lot of the later songs are about finding a way through loss the same way the earlier ones were about finding a way through doubt.
Same writer, heavier load.
I really love a major 7 chord
On a lighter note, there’s the major 7 chord. I love that chord. Always have.
It’s warm, a bit wistful, and it sits somewhere between happy and sad, which probably explains a lot given everything I’ve mentioned above. But after a few weeks of listening back, I have to admit it turns up a little more often than it needs to.
There were stretches where I could almost predict where it was coming.
This is the kind of thing Andrea means when she says your catalogue starts telling on you. You’d never notice it writing one song at a time. Put forty of them in a row and your favourite chord starts waving at you.
I’m not giving it up, but I’ll be choosing it on purpose a bit more from now on, rather than letting my fingers go there by default. And when it comes to putting this release together, I’ll be keeping an ear out for too many major 7 songs sitting side by side.
I’ve written with far more people than I realised
This one was a bit of a surprise for me.
Going through the archive, I kept finding songs written with other lyricists. Far more than I would have guessed if you’d asked me beforehand. A lot of them came out of the challenges, where connecting with other writers is half the fun, and some of them I’d forgotten about entirely.
It made Andrea’s opening story speak to me even louder.
Her whole search started because a collaborator came looking for a song they’d written together. Somewhere out there, other people have memories of songs I’ve half forgotten, and I have memories of songs they might have lost track of too.
It also made me grateful.
Every one of those collaborations pulled me somewhere I might not have gone on my own, and I suspect some of my own habits were shaped more by other writers than I’ve ever given them credit for.
What I’d tell the writer who made these demos
If I could sit down with the version of me who wrote most of these songs (usually late at night, often on a challenge deadline), I think I’d tell him to keep going and to stop worrying so much about whether each one was good enough.
A lot of those songs weren’t meant to be released. They were just practice, almost like stepping stones to the next song.
They taught me a chord move, or a way of structuring a verse, or they just got a feeling out of my system so I could get on with my day. In her article, Andrea has a lovely way of putting it: some songs finished their whole job the day we wrote them. They’re allowed to just sit there.
The volume that those challenges forced on me is the only reason I can see any of these patterns now. Without the pile, there would be nothing to learn from.
I’m proud of this catalogue
The last thing I noticed wasn’t a pattern. It was a feeling.
After weeks of listening back, sorting and shortlisting, what I mostly feel is proud. Not of every song, and not because they’re all brilliant.
But because they exist.
For years a lot of my public life as a musician was built on playing other people’s songs, while my own writing was happening quietly in the background.
Nobody was waiting for these songs but I wrote them anyway, one after another, challenge after challenge, and the result is a body of work that sounds like me.
Andrea ends her article by saying the catalogue you build while nobody’s watching is the one that eventually tells you who you are. Mine told me I’m a writer who keeps finding a way through fear and doubt, who carries grief more openly than he used to, who loves a major 7 a bit too much, and who has had a lot of good company along the way.
That’s a pretty good thing to find out about yourself I reckon.
The songs that I’m writing now will be part of the pile I’m listening back to a few years from now, and I’m curious to hear what they’ll have to say. In the meantime, if you’ve got an archive of your own sitting on a hard drive somewhere, it might be worth a listen.
Not to judge it, but to find out what it’s been trying to tell you. I reckon you’ll be surprised at what you will find.
Peace,
Corey 🙂
You can read Andrea Stolpe’s original article here. It will be well worth your time.
