https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX8IRmy5ymA

Really good advice here.

Top of the mornin'...

I watched it....and, I agree with most of his comments.

Depending on one's song writing goals I don't necessarily agree that having friends/family listen to a new song is the best way to get an objective opinion about one's new song write effort.

IMO....
Many song writers think just because they wrote it or they spent so much time writing it that it's a masterpiece.
A song's merit or quality (lyrics/musicianship) is determined mainly by unbiased listeners.
What's a good song to one may be vapid and cliche to others.
It's a subjective thing to be sure.

My suggestions to anyone would be to just keep writing, accept any criticism (good or bad) and use it to improve on one's skills.
Have the courage to cull the crap and move on to other ideas.

Yes...I've s/canned about (15) of my own songs because of underwhelming subject matter or just loss of interest.

Carry on....a good day to all.

Yup... kind of agree....

I have folders that I set up for each new year to hold my songs.... they are simply named for the year in question.

On occasion, I go back through them to see if there's anything in there worth working on again. Did that for a bit this morning. And while they are filled with ideas..... most of the ideas should probably be deleted.

Ha...yes...the fact that we had song 'ideas' does not mean they are good song ideas.

(As an aside....I just finished my personal DVD Anthology with intro narration and pics. (01:56 long)
Only (29) songs out of about (50) or so survived the cut for this anthology edition.
I do have many others too that would warrant further revisiting but I may not live long enough to flesh them out to my satisfaction and re-do the anthology project :))

Back to topic....

What makes aa song understandable is what I would say is the most interesting aspect. rhythms come from different places but nobody seems to talk about where particular rhythms come from. That would be interesting to force your friends to be interested in. That is one aspect of the music schools that frustrates me. They spend no time at all on an overview of well-recognized rhythms having come from certain era's, locations, islands or things like that. I think Celebrity is stupid and rhythm by influence of a place or time is much more interesting to me. Especially in instrumental music. If you can read the separate rhythms in poly it is almost like listening to a story. And you can form your own musical persona personality because you are a witness to that.

+1

John Fogerty, in his recent book, said that the most important aspect of song writing was the ability to recognize when your product is crap. There seems to be a lot of both elegant and crude ways of saying the same thing. But in the final analysis, IMO, one has to be able, as he said, to separate their good stuff from their crap.

Perhaps the decision is easier for the more prolific writers while those like me who struggle to produce a dozen songs a year find it harder to toss the crap

Bud

You can put makeup and lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.


Referring to taking a crappy song and spending time and effort to give it a first class production job. Underneath all the nice sounding production, the song still sucks.

That is why writers should try at least one http://FAWM.org event in their musical life. When you write 14 songs in 28 days, you tend to lose that unhealthy jealousy for your songs and you can easily say, "man, that one stinks!"

I don't need to write 14 songs in 28 days to know that some of my songs suck!

Of course you all will never hear them

Amen brotha!