Message to a Young Songwriter: Thou Shalt Steal
by Neil Dixon Smith.
There’s an old saying about the creative process: “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” For those out there who may be teaching themselves a few chords on a guitar or a piano with hopes of maybe writing a song or two down the line, I thought I’d riff on this idea bit. For to me, it’s a call to action.
I was once at a party with a circle of friends that included some musicians and after listening in on some shop talk I heard someone exclaim “I love music so much, but I could never pick up an instrument. I’m just not a creative person.”
At the moment I was stunned into a polite silence and just let it go. But internally I was screaming: What!?!? That is crazy! There are many, many pleasures of playing music. The mere physical action of making sounds itself is good enough for several lifetimes. And there are mountains and mountains of relatively simple but deeply satisfying forms of music out there that one could learn in a matter of months. If you love music and want to experience it from the inside, that door is always open to anyone. “Being creative” has nothing to do with it.
But I get it. In our world we put a value on artists who “create their own work”, whether it’s a local band or a national celebrity. And for those getting started this can be very intimidating. I think there’s also something like a “Hollywood myth” out there that the creative process is some sort of magical thing, reserved for mad geniuses. “Artists” are freak special beings who receive rushes of divine inspiration, and produce fresh fully formed visions as original material.
Now, I’m not saying there aren’t some serious freaks out there. But they are rare, rarer than you think. And I’m not saying that creativity doesn’t happen in rushes. I myself can relate that the best songs I’ve written came out all at once in a matter of minutes. But a car can’t drive fast unless there’s a road to drive on, and if you want to capture lightning in a bottle, well, you kinda first need a bottle. In other words, I could take advantage of a sudden idea, because I had already trained the hands to change chords in rhythm, and I already had a developed a sense for “what a song is like”.
I remember when I first started playing guitar, all my heroes were songwriters. All the ways a song could make me feel, or crack me up, or make me think, it all just seemed amazing. I imagined that songwriters all had notebooks, so I got a notebook and started transcribing lyrics to my favorite songs (eschewing lyric sheets, I listened and figured out the words myself, which made for plenty of awesome and seemingly authentic crossings out and speculative scribblings). I wanted to fill up my notebook that way, so I could then flip through it and imagine what my lyric book should look like. How many verses and chorus repetitions there should be. How many words should be on a line, on a page. Etc.
I was then hit by sudden rush of divine inspiration – I looked at the lyrics to a favorite tune, this time by counting the number of syllables in each line. Instead of worrying about “being creative” and coming up with something wholly new, I just focused on filling in new words to the same number of syllables, keeping the rest of the song the same. And when I sang back the new words on the same chords, in the same strum, something magic did happen – it didn’t really sound like the other song anymore. The new phrases caused the melody to change a bit. As far as the world was concerned, I had my first original tune.
All I did was write some new words that fit a musical pattern that I “stole”, but did I “write a song?”. Let me save you years of therapy right now: yes, I did. And more importantly, it got me going, it gave me a “way in”, a process by which to be creative. This practice helped me to see patterns in the kind of songs I liked, and over time I came to see how if you learn a pattern, then vary one small element to the pattern, something unique is sure come up. Which then led to new songs.
And then as I’ve learned more about the history of different styles of music, and read interviews with my favorite songwriters, you see that this is how it’s done, and that this is how it’s always been done. Learn music that you love, copy it with your own sentiment, repeat.
Great artists steal. What I love about that line is that there’s no half stepping it. If you dig it, take it, it’s yours. You can worry about the publishing rights down the line.
Neil Dixon Smith is a solo classical guitarist who performs for private parties and weddings, and rocks out on electric guitar in the band Más Trueno. You can check him out at neildixonsmith.com, and drop him a line at neildixonsmith(at)yahoo.com
