In August last year, I released my first record, a five-track EP entitled ‘The Start.’ This was a pretty momentous occasion for me, something that I had been working towards for so many years, and it should have felt really incredible.
It did, at first anyway. It was special to share my music with more people, and I was proud of the record I created with the help of so many wonderful people.
Not long after, though, the joy and excitement of the release wore off. Recently, I realised why I didn’t feel quite right. My EP was filled with songs I was proud of. Songs that I had been fine-tuning for literally years. I wrote four of the five tracks on the EP at least two years before the release, and only one of the tunes (the title track) had been written more recently, in my first term in I Heart Songwriting Club in 2016.
It became something incredibly ironic – my EP was titled ‘The Start‘, but as it turned out, it felt more like the end of a chapter.
For a little bit of back story, I worked on cruise ships out of the US for about 11 months, from November 2016 to October 2017. Just before I left was when I joined the I Heart Songwriting Club for the first time. I will admit that I don’t think I was the greatest group member back then. I didn’t stay on top of the tasks, and I let every excuse under the sun get in the way of just creating.
So, I spent one full term in the club before I left for my cruise ship contracts. For four hours a night, six days a week, my band and I were playing music in nearly every style imaginable. Occasionally we snuck in an original or two. Getting to be full-time musicians and travel the world simultaneously probably should have been enough inspiration for any songwriter.
Not this one, though. I can count on less than one hand how many songs I wrote during those 11 months.
However, I was doing a lot of recycling! I was playing the same old songs over and over and over again. Refining them within an inch of their little song lives until the joy of the creation was nearly completely gone.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for recycling.
Coming back to old songs with ‘new’ ears can be wonderful. Refining a piece and putting all those finishing touches on it is satisfying. But, in my experience, if recycling becomes your only creative outlet – if you are only playing or perfecting the same songs all the time – it gets frustrating.
I wrote Francesca a message not long ago to thank her for creating this wonderful I Heart Songwriting Club community because it had gotten me back to creating. As someone who can get lost in all of the options, a theme to write to has been freeing. I’m so strangely happy with my music right now. This is not a place I have been in for a long time. In simply creating, I found the joy of writing again.
If you are sitting there just like I was, sick of recycling the same old songs (even if they’re great), I encourage you to create something. Anything!
If you’ve used up all of the excuses in the book, do something different.
Join the club! Just create something, sometime, somewhere.
As Ernest Barbaric puts it: “Create. Not for the money, or for the fame. Not for the recognition. But for the pure joy of creating something and sharing it.”
