I was convinced to write one song
I’ve alwayswanted to write a song. Or rather, I’ve alwayswanted to be the kind of person who could write a song, a songwriter, because I thought that being able to write songs is really cool.
Thanks to Chicago’s own Jeff Tweedy of Wilco fame, I recently learned that I am indeed a songwriter.
And you are too.
Tweedy’s new book, “HowtoWrite One Song,” has elements of a classic how-to, including steps and processes that, if followed, will result in the completion of a song. But it is also a more comprehensive call to be observant and engaged with the world at large. It is a celebration of making to be creative and open as a route towards, dare I say it, happiness.
I’ve had both time and opportunity to write a song before now. I learned to play guitarwell enough to strummyway through Bob Dylan and theGrateful Dead in high school, and later played drums in nonlegendary, late ’90s Chicago indie rockers Quiet Kid. Our claim to famewas opening for the opening act for the opening act for the openers for the headliner atMetro on aWednesday. I thinkwe hit the stage at 4:45 p.m. to an audience of nine.
My reasonable proficiency on a couple of instruments and handful of years playing in a band resulted in precisely zero songs. My friend Jamie was Quiet Kid’s exclusive.
Tweedy, on the other hand, declared himself a songwriter at age 7, before he’d written a song, and has spent the rest of his life proving it. The opening section of “How to Write One Song” conveys Tweedy’s central thesis that a songwriter is not something you are, rather writing songs is something you do. The rest of the book is an engaging look inside Tweedy’s particular process written in a clear and accessible fashion that leaves you both ready and eager to take a shot yourself.
As demonstrated in Tweedy’s first book, “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording With Wilco, Etc.,” Tweedy is a highly engaging companion with a voice that makes you feel like he’s sitting next to you, just having a talk, in this case about songwriting. He includes his rather clever exercises for generating lyrics, such as listing random verbs and nouns and combining them into a poem, an exercise I immediately tried to very fun effect.
For me, while the songwriting specifics are new, much of what Tweedy has to say are reassuringly familiar. Big picture, he’s outlining what is essentially a creative “practice,” a method for making something out of nothing. It is something I’m well familiar with when it comes to writing things like, say, aweekly newspaper column, but before reading Tweedy’s book, I believed that writing songs required some measure of “it”— whatever that is— to succeed.
But no. It’s similar to what I already do in this space, where I often get a notion, such as, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to try to write a song following Jeff Tweedy’s method?” And then roll around with that for a few days to see what thoughts come out that I can share with theworld.
Tweedy demystifies the songwriter process for us, and it’s a wonderful service to theworld.
Now, full disclosure: The song I completed is not good, but Tweedy makes it clear that a good song is not necessarily the point. The value is in the doing. If you do it long enough, eventually something good will come.
And even if not, the journey itself was worth doing.