On songwriting, creativity, and personal experience...

Someone elsewhere remarked that he was getting tired of all of his songs being about the same broken, now long ended relationship and wondered if others had confronted similar issues...


I think a lot of us find our songs chewing over sometimes troubled pasts.

I have to say that writing has seldom come so easy that I had the luxury of turning away the muses... I write what comes -- and if only a few bits and pieces come, then I'll try, sometimes heroically, sometimes doggedly, often futilely, to try to flesh the song out by force of will and intellect... but that dogged effort often translates into doggy lyrics... the kind of thing that doesn't necessarily stop you in your tracks because it's bad --but which nonetheless often fails to light up in the listener's mind.

If the only inspiration that comes to me is another broken hearted threw-it-all-away swim in bathos, even if that was exactly what I wrote last time... I go ahead and write it and do the best job I can finishing it out if there's any spark there at all.

The way I figure, writing is a natural process and, like other natural processes, you don't stop in the middle just because you don't like what's coming out...