Skip to main content

Is Your Songwriting Inspiration-Dependent?

Is Your Songwriting Inspiration-Dependent?
Is Your Songwriting Inspiration-Dependent?

by Kapa Freeman

Talent may be keeping you from your songwriting goals, but not in the way you think.

There's an idea in the songwriting community that's really harmful. It's the idea that you have to have "talent" to write songs that people love. I know, because I used to think that too. It was crippling.

When you run into negative feedback on your songs, you feel like you should quit because you "Just don't have the gift.". We get this idea because hit songwriters make it look so easy, but watch any documentary on a hit songwriter's life and you'll see how many bad songs came before their good ones... and how many drafts went into the classic ones.

Talent can actually be a songwriter's handicap if it's not combined with skill.

The talent-only songwriter essentially relies on inspiration to give them songs that people connect with, but inspiration can be a crutch... a pretty unreliable crutch... and it comes and goes when it pleases. And when you don't have it, you simply can't write a good song without it.

Why?

Because you can't control it. In other words, depending on inspiration is basically writing songs on accident. Great songs aren't written on accident. There's an exception to every rule, but do you really want to bet that you're going to be the exception?

The alternative to being a talent-only songwriter is being a skilled songwriter. The talent-only songwriter writes great songs on accident, but a skilled songwriter writes great songs on purpose.

  • They know how to write lyrics that connect emotionally.
  • They know how to format melodies to make them memorable.
  • They know how to combine the two so they flow naturally.
  • They know how to use harmony to make a chorus explode.
  • They know how to use rhythm to ramp up energy.
  • The skilled songwriter has full control over their songwriting process.
  • They don't wait for inspiration to give them permission to write a great song. Inspiration takes orders from them.

Talent will only take you but so far. Skill will take you as far as talent can take you, and far beyond.


Check out all of the posts related to Music Marketing: 


Kapa Freeman is the Founder and Songwriting Coach of The Intentional Songwriter, whose goal is to help musicians become publisher-ready songwriters so they can access songwriter-only income streams that pay more money for less of their time.

After taking an "assembly line approach" to songwriting, Kepa added consistency to his songwriting and went from song rejections to publishing deals over the course of a year. Now he uses this same approach to help musicians go from beginning to publisher-ready songwriters in a matter of weeks.

https://www.prosongsonpurpose.com/




Tags:

Popular posts

"Spirit of God" by Joel Lane: Surrendering Hearts of Stone to the Holy Spirit

What dead places in your life need breath? “Spirit of God” by Joel Lane is written as a plea for the Holy Spirit to move among us, and shows us that our best response to spiritual dryness is surrender. It is the first release from his debut EP “Have Your Way,” recorded with Zac Carpenter of the worship collective Coming Kingdom. The song opens with a bold claim: “You make dry bones come alive.” Maybe you’re familiar with that kind of spiritual dryness. A marriage gone quiet. A prayer life that is running on habit, with routine words that sometimes make you wonder if they go up any higher than your ceiling. A heart that stopped feeling much of anything. Joel doesn’t ask God to just patch things up. He asks God for more: “Take our hearts of stone, breathe on us.” That’s a pretty brave prayer. Will you pray it? Ezekiel stood in more or less the same place (read Ezekiel 37:1–11). God sent him into a valley of scattered, bleached bones and asked a question that sounds impossible: “Can the...
More >>

"He Knew" by Krystal Dawn Land: The Cost Christ Chose Before the Cradle

Jesus knew everything, and He came anyway! Let’s go back to the birth of Jesus, a newborn lying in the manger, part of a larger plan and fully aware of where His path would end before He came to earth. Krystal Dawn Land’s song, “He Knew”, opens with a question that stops you cold, especially if you consider how you would respond: “What if He knew? What if He saw? What if He knew the pain He’d face to give it all?” This isn’t idle speculation. The song walks through the full arc of Jesus’ story, “from the cradle to the cross” , and insists that nothing that happened caught Him off guard. He saw the betrayal coming. He saw the doubt, the walking away, “some would not believe, some would walk away.” And still, as Krystal sings, “He did… He knew all along. He still came… to right every wrong.” That kind of foreknowledge changes how we read Isaiah 53:3–5, where the prophet describes the Messiah as “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows.” Jesus wasn’t ambushed by suffering. He wal...
More >>

"Send Me an Angel" by Josh Orange: Grace for the Struggle at 5 AM

What if help is one honest word away? Josh Orange, a folk-rock group from Sydney, Australia, wrote “Send Me an Angel” in about thirty minutes. Structure, lyric, the whole thing arrived at once and became the spark for the band’s sixth studio album. Some prayers work that way. They don’t wait for polish. The song opens at 5 am. A man puts his feet on the floor and asks Jesus, “for the strength to begin.” He doesn’t ask for much. He works for his living, and he isn’t proud of his sins. Then comes the plea: “Come help me Jesus. Send me an angel.” Sound familiar? You’ve tried hard, opened the door, and done it again. Gordon Burke, the lead singer of Josh Orange, sings about running all the way to Nova Scotia, and the further he went, the darker he got. Distance never fixed it. Ask yourself, where have you been running? Listen closely and notice what he never does. He never cleans himself up first. He prays with “blood on my boots,” and he prays honestly. Scripture says that’s the right w...
More >>