Staying un-stuck

For reasons beyond my control, my songwriting group is only meeting once this month. And that's tonight. The good part of that is that everyone, including me of course, had extra time to prepare a song following the current guidelines; i.e. write a song in 3/4 time. And I have one. In my estimation a pretty good one. And I also have a rewrite of last month's song, ready for a second round of critiquing. What's a guy to do? Which brings me to the point. Once a month isn't enough.

I've been sitting on these songs, practicing them so I can sing them correctly, and at this point both are almost memorized. I could probably do either of them at a gig without too much trouble. So the question becomes, what am I going to do with the criticism I get from tonight's group? The more set a song becomes, the more difficult it becomes to make changes based on feedback. When we only meet once a month, it's too easy to let things set up.

When we work alone, as many of us do, it's easy to work in a vacuum, writing for ourselves, and to hell with what anyone else thinks of it. And that's fine for making records that we want to keep in the basement. But if we want our music heard and appreciated by anyone other than our mother (hi mom!) it's essential, or at the very least extremely valuable, to get objective, outside feedback from someone, preferably before the song has had a chance to "set up."

So we either have to meet more often, or I have to wrote more than one or two songs a month...time to become an insufferable overachiever?

Comments

[John Raymond Pollard]

Yes, once a month is too infrequent.

[Morry]

Thanks for weighing in, John.