So I’m under a whole lot of pressure to get a bunch of material written to start working on another album, with a new group. I was doing great and came up with four new songs over the past weekend, and then I hit a giant brick wall of writer’s block. And so I call upon the Teeming Millions for assistance.
I’m not looking for lyrics, or anything like that. I am looking for new ideas for songs - any kind of songs. A lot of the time I start with a title and use that to define the focus of the tune. Other times I just start with a situation, and explore the drama inherent in that. Or examine the viewpoint of a character, and their motivations.
Humourous ideas are good too, as are cynical ones.
I’m not even sure this will help - sometimes only writing through the block helps, and sometimes it’s just about taking some time and not trying to write at all. But before it comes to that, I wanted to give this a shot. Trying something new and all that…
I write poetry and I’ve had a couple of ideas in my head for potential poems (or discarded ones) for a while now that you’re welcome to use if you want:
**My father worked on the election for JFK, going door-to-door, etc. Soon after, he became disillusioned with him and actually went so far as to wish him dead. Then Dallas happened. Not having learned his lesson, Dad turned his annoyance on RFK. Boom. So Dad was half convinced that he killed the Kennedys and still felt guilty about it decades later. We all laughed at him, but he took it just seriously enough never to wish death on anyone again.
**When pavement cracks and they fill the cracks with new tar, the resulting lines look like foreign scripts–especially Arabic. I just think that’s kinda neat. The tars are made from petroleum, probably from the same region as Arabic script. That’s even neater.
**When my grandmother was dying of Alzheimer’s, she forgot everyone except her two oldest children. All men became “Phil.” All women “Mary.” Makes it easier to remember names that way, I suppose.
