Building Canals: On Songwriting

I recently finished a recording of a song called cocoa. It's the first one I've completed with a vocal performance, and the first I'd call truly done. I started it during the lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic, building an instrumental (and later a concept) around a field recording of my mother preparing hot cocoa for me. It took shape slowly, across long intervals of creative stalling and spurts, while I juggled many other projects (I'm a little ashamed it took me five years to the very day, but creative pursuits aren't always linear and that's fine). I'm not sure how much I actually like the final product, but I know I don't hate it. I don't think it's pushing a sonic envelope or sitting at some high watermark of intentional craft, but firsts can matter for other reasons. It was important for me to get something out, to finish, to have a anything at all to stand on and move forward from.

With a bit of distance in the reflective wake of finishing something, I'm considering how I might structure a more intentional approach to craft and point it at what I'd like to do next. I'd like that consideration to incorporate an honest appraisal of my abilities, strengths, weaknesses, desires, preferences, habits, cognitive style, and more. I'm curious what I could bring to the songwriting process if I make it my goal to take the largest step I can manage between the completion of this initial work and a next effort (of course without circling the drain with the kind of perfectionism that would protract it all into another five-year process).

Instrumentalizing idiosyncrasy

Thesis: my primary instrument is my own nervous system.

What do I know about myself? I think a great deal about everything. I am highly sensitive, aurally and conceptually speaking. I like to explore with ability; I will do as much of everything available to me as decently as I can. I can have bursts of hyperactivity with long reprieves in between for coalescence of ideas. My cognition is associative to a degree that sometimes borders on apophenia, but at its best it weaves compelling, unexpected, indirectly perceptible thematic ties. I like collaborating a lot of the time.

Some of the same traits that give me range also make me annoying to myself on occasion. I do not always have a strong bias for engaging creative activity. I don't always communicate in ways that can be understood or felt well… I know I'm not for everyone. I am terribly distractible at times and very focused at others; there's a bifurcation that mostly points to ADHD or hyper-fixation as attractor states and I need to strategize exploits to make those modes or any in-betweenness operable. I am unlikely to explore productively at length without some payoff matrix or feedback loop that converges on usable outcomes.

I can be a directional perfectionist, but that's far from deterministic. Sometimes I fixate extremely to the detriment of overall productivity. Other times "good enough" is exactly that and I refuse to explore further even when I think it likely that deeper effort would improve something. Collaboration, critique, and clear evaluation frameworks can be salves here, but I also value control too much to be an ideal collaborator with surefire consistency.

Accordingly, my songwriting system needs to be designed around those realities. My strengths and weaknesses are not moral verdicts. They are structural constraints. My goal is to let the strengths run while putting rails around the weaknesses so the whole thing still pushes songs out instead of everything just swirling around in my head indefinitely.

Operating atop idiosyncrasy isn't just about theoretic or cognitive approaches to songwriting; it concerns the practical in equal measure. If the goal is to output real songs that resonate, it's not enough to accommodate my inner workings. I also have to map what lands as part of the listening experience. That means intentionally monitoring and investigating other listeners' subjective experiences and listening closely when they tell me what stands out to them. It means seeking both casual and critical feedback frequently, honing in on signal, and folding that back into considerations that inform process.

Although I am in some ways early in my songwriting journey, a number of throughlines have already surfaced. Listeners have highlighted themes like baritone vocal delivery (especially how it's less expected alongside modern pop sensibilities and arrangements), and layered textures and approaches to stereo space that give arrangements depth. People take note of an especially percussive approach to rhythm that brings a powerful sense of motion to compositions. A few have spontaneously remarked that cocoa evokes images of the same environment in their minds, converging on a specific flavor of nostalgia connotatively carried by instrumentation, sound design, and other elements of the sonic palette.

While I'm obviously aware that all of these elements are present and their inclusions are intentional, some of the specific effects they've had on others' listening experiences are not purposeful, nor are they things I would've guessed at first. I'm not even sure I necessarily agree with some evaluations or that I even wholly enjoy some of the elements that draw others' attention, but I'm still able to take it on faith that there is exploitable signal in the feedback and tension there that can add to a kind of reverse-engineered, self-reflective taste.

Differential generative capacities

My mind and my words tend to greatly outpace my hands in generative capacity.

I produce a lot of ideas, tie them together, remix them, and can scaffold temples from thoughts and language (I didn't say they always stand upright). I enjoy elegant solutions to dense conceptual puzzles. I like the constraint of casting my pet ideas as molds to shape the building blocks of a system. I can then trace paths through the resulting maze, where structure emerges from a blend of semiotic connection, clever invention, and organic assembly (like water flowing downhill).

The flip side is that my tendency to produce tangible outcomes through manual processes other than writing is inversely low-volume. I tend to prune concepts by way of mental modeling and defensive pessimism, dimensionally limit my real-world experimentation, and put forward a few tangible solutions to compare and advance. I naturally choose considered elegance over brute force or breadth and that is not always what creative output needs. It's antithetical to the pottery class parable that stresses quantity of production as the most reliable path to quality, but I naturally value work smart over work hard under conditions of manipulable uncertainty.

Rather than trying to become a largely different kind of person after a decades-long personal and professional history of creative output, I can assume my tendencies will remain somewhat baked-in if they haven't changed by now (the needle has moved, but not some immense distance that portends an eventual grand shift in my nature). Resultantly, my theory of songwriting should treat cognitive productivity as my main fuel source and then build mechanisms that convert that fuel into creative output without overextending me in weak dimensions. The question is not how do I think less? but rather how do I let my thinking do more of the heavy lifting while the system passively handles output?

Structure and substrate

Charlie Kaufman's deconstruction of crazed auteurism in Synecdoche, New York seems central to how I think about an important part of the creative process. Protagonist Caden Cotard's conceit is to pour the entirety of his twisted angst, selfhood, and the world around him that informs it all into his ludicrously grand and absurdly realistic theater production. The MacArthur Fellowship he's received may validate his creative ability by proxy through its "Genius Grant" reputation, but practically speaking from the eyes of an uninformed observer in the diegesis, the guy's an absolute fucking kook with a mess of a life on fire. Without the colossal warehouse to contain the manifestation of his ideas and realize his work inside, he would perceptually remain a kook.

It seems obvious to me that my creative success or failure with grander ideas hinges on securing a "warehouse" of my own. The ideas need to flow into something expressive that isn't just language. The executional distance to human performance in the chosen medium is also often too large to be tractable given the volume of my cognitive creative impulses and comparatively meager average manual productivity. I am trying to build a workable sink for neuroses and narratives. Maybe over time, a more elegant model emerges with canals, levees, moving locks, and modulated flows; something that orders and organizes chaos and entropy.

It is crucially important for me to understand the difference between pouring water into the apparatus and watching it behave beautifully versus trying to construct the apparatus out of water itself. I suspect I've been trying to accomplish the latter more as of late and I intend to stop.

Takeaway: find a good "warehouse" to work in. Find a good sink to throw ideas inside where they can clump together and assume naturally stable shapes to engage in further play.

Evolving the writing approach

1. Structure first: coloring inside the lines

The conventional approach and my initial one goes something like this: part to whole, then color inside the lines with sonic ideas and other parts that make sense. Arrangement structure constrains ideas, ornament adorns foundational structure, sometimes the mutual interplay changes things along the way. It's all rather intentional and relatively linear, repeatable, predictable, yet still uniquely challenging and variable a bunch of the time.

For me, some of this changes from song to song, but in general this method is too dimensionally reductive given my limited productive capacity. It requires a lot of organic experimentation to drive results that work exceptionally well while still feeling surprising. That kind of open-ended trial and error is exactly where I lose steam.

In other words: a pure structure-first approach does not fully harness my associative mind and it leans heavily on behaviors which I do not reliably execute.

2. Motif and concept first: solving the puzzle backwards

I'm interested in making some macroscopic changes to my writing process and exploring different tactics. I can collect and log conceptual and sonic motifs that will eventually constrain structure through how they most naturally assemble and complement or contrast with one another. I can treat songwriting as a puzzle solved both backwards and inside-out, working from a globally formless yet locally characterizable solution set to determine the shape of the maze, how the turns are juxtaposed, what surfaces the motifs show up on, and how their quality is affected.

This lets my cognitive capacity stand in for the productive kind. My music starts to make itself around and between broader ideas. I do not know exactly what it will sound like at the start, but I can listen carefully to make sure it works. I get to use my ears like my audience, a collaborator, or a critic and still surprise myself while scratching my other real itch: linguistic and conceptual play. I get to have my cake and eat it too.

In this mode, structure is not a prefab cage I drop fitting ideas into. Instead, form emerges from the way motifs interact. My ideas are not loose anymore nor are they rigid, they become the molds for the building blocks, and the song's architecture crystallizes around their intersections.

Recombination and reinvigoration

One of the more concrete tools here is deliberate recombination of known inputs. I can get additional variation by taking my favorite established inputs and swapping intermediary outputs and recombination mechanisms. The aim is fresh yet familiar outputs. There is something special about achieving timelessness by making what is old feel new again.

For instance, I can define formulas based on recombination of specific influences, genre interpolation, instrumentation, sonic palettes, performance techniques, production workflows, arrangement styles, content (conceptual, lyrical, narrative), vocal delivery, and more.

The important part is not the exact recipe but the fact that it is a recipe. I can predefine these assembly lines and treat them as reusable compositional operators. I can take these down to a more granular level too: e.g., sound design, processing chains, synthesis… the list goes on.

For a given song, I can plug a new emotional or conceptual motif informed by my real-world subjective experience and narrative into one of these pipelines, see what falls out, and play with it until it's hitting right and even surprises me in some radical ways that yield special moments. The "new" quality comes from which motif I introduce and how I tweak the parameters, not from reinventing the entire stylistic frame.

Engineering serendipity

From the outside, this might look like forcing happy accidents. But that phrase does not quite describe what I am actually seeking to rely on in this new paradigm.

What I am really doing is designing a process that surfaces latent stimuli which converge on euphonic consonance while also carrying deliberate conceptual or emotional connotations. The form might accumulate variance because it has a strange pattern of appearing as an end before becoming the means before once again becoming the end, but the shuffling is carefully designed into the process.

I expect to find these moments and I'm surveying for them in advance. Like an archaeological team that hypothesizes the yield of a planned dig, I can have a solid idea of what I expect to find and still be quite surprised. However, the character of the discoveries and the process that shapes them are important.

Surprise should be frequently present, but it will live inside or emerge from a search space that I have architected with deep intention. My job is to design that space and then curate and manipulate the outputs it throws back at me.

Maturity, limits, and self-knowledge

One nice thing about aging (temporally and creatively) is that I've tried enough things to know what I am naturally quite bad at and unlikely to improve upon without deliberate workarounds. There is a kind of maturity that trades the promise of infinite potential for acceptance of limitations and a level of self-knowledge that leads to real efficacy.

I am not going to become the person who happily runs fifty takes a day for six months straight just to "see what happens." I can do that occasionally in some pursuits, but it is far from my default. I am not always going to communicate my ideas in the simplest way for others. I am going to overthink… I guarantee it. I am going to oscillate between being distractible and entering deep fixation. I am going to care about control.

The theory, then, is not about purging those traits. It is about routing around them and along with their grooves, using them as fuel. I can carve out time for apparatus-building and alternate that with separate, short, discrete sessions for pouring water into the system. I can collaborate where my weaknesses are most costly and protect my need for control where surrender would point me to shutting down. I can accept that my brain wants to build temples of thought and then make sure those temples have doors an actual song can walk through.

I am hoping that this kind of maturity improves my productivity in the years to come, creative and otherwise. Even if my raw energy declines a little, the efficiency of the apparatus can increase. That's the benefit I expect from compounding self-knowledge and practice. Some might even call it wisdom.

That is my personal theory of songwriting right now: a way of turning an associative, overthinking, intermittently focused brain into a working compositional engine. It will change, but at least it gives me something solid to pour water into for the time being. I'm happy to get back to work with that sketched out.