My relationship with & approach to songwriting

My favorite part of songwriting is writing lyrics. I do love finding a melody that embodies the words, but painting with words is extremely satisfying. Sometimes it feels like a miracle when my words find their melody.  When I begin a song, I try not to direct my lyrics too harshly; I simply herd my natural thoughts gently into a melody and corral them in my syllable count (or squeeze in as many words as possible---if it needs to be done, it must be done).

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I also love that in poetry and songs, you can say whatever sweet, blunt, witty, empowering, funny or observant thing you want to say to somebody, but you can say it in a way nobody else has thought to say it. It is exciting and feels like a contribution to language.

Every song I have written (all 6 dozen or so) is personal to my life or people in my life. Every song I've written, I created on the edge of my bed, right in the moment- whether it was in a moment of reflection or of me crying my eyes out. A few songs were born in my brain while I was unloading the dishwasher.

 

When someone asks me how I write songs... I say that, honestly, they come to me. I don't push it. I don't sit down and tell myself to write a song. I don't try too hard to create "perfect" art anymore like I did when I was younger. My most formative songs are the ones I wrote in 10 minutes (most of the songs here) - the ones that feel like a God thing. I normally have one melody line/phrase pop in my head, then the rest of the song concept takes form and surrounds the initial line when I sit down with my guitar. There is no "perfect" outcome---writing is about honesty and embodying the beauty of varying personal (and unsurprisingly universal) experiences. I just write, and the melody happens naturally. The sentiment dances with the phrasing and note choices. I think a lot about how our cadences differ when we talk about different subjects - this is the same with how I evolve melodies for phrases!

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Sharing songs feels intimate and vulnerable, like I am transformed into the listener's best friend- telling them the feelings I am scared of or struggle with, or telling them how happy I am, or how unsure I am, or how self aware I am, or of the patterns I notice in my life. This is perfectly encapsulated in Anna Nalick's lyrics: "2am and I'm still awake writing a song, if I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to...These words are my diary screaming out loud and I know that you'll use them however you want to."

 

The sentiments in my songs are not something that leave me, though, as I make them into music. Instead, they remain a part of my inner spectrum, my soul's landscape, accessible at any time. Music is a way to seek peace in what I feel, to make sense of the world, to capture moments like a photograph and hopefully keep people company sometimes. Songs I wrote years, or even more than a decade ago, make as much sense to me, if not more, than they did when I wrote them. My favorite and most Stephanie-encompassing original songs visit me and simply have me represent them. If I have thoughts too excursive or elaborate, I put them on my writing page rather than form them into a song.