From iamdavidcook.com:
I Want One Of Those
I’m in a familiar place. I’m writing again, I have a thousand and one things I want to say, but I’m not sure how to make it fit. I’m afraid of not writing a good song. It’s strange because I don’t believe in writer’s block, but I often fall victim to something very similar, and that’s where I am right now. I have a system when it comes to writing, I also have a lot of bad habits, one of them being that after writing a verse I’ll decide I hate the song and I’ll toss it before it ever has a fighting chance to prove me wrong. I know I can write good songs, I think songs like Bigger Than Love and What Are You Waiting For are amazing songs, and I wrote them, so why am I so scared that I won’t be able to do it again? I sat down at the piano tonight and came up with ten different ideas and I found something wrong with all of them. I’m either going to have to learn to be patient, or learn some discipline. Billy Joel says he only writes when he has something to say, but then again some of the best songwriters in the world write habitually every day. The best thing in the world is when a song sneaks up on you and everything works on the first try. For example, I wrote the lyrics to Bittersweet Life in 15 minutes, I wrote What Are You Waiting For in it’s entirety in about 10 minutes. On the other hand songs like Steel City and Entertain The Pain took me 2-3 years to finish. I’m not looking for encouragement, I know I have it in me, I just need to kick my ass into gear and be honest with myself. John Mayer is my favorite songwriter, I recently watched his VH1 Storytellers in which he says, “Sometimes I get tapped on the shoulder by pure break-through ideas, but most of the time I listen to a song and I go ‘I want one of those’, and it’s how I’m not able to make one of those, it’s how I’m not as good as to be able to make one of those, it’s my failure to sound like my heroes, that has allowed me to sound like myself.” I feel like that is the story of my life, as a musician I listen to a great song and instantly think how awesome it would be if I had a song just like it that I could sing, but you can’t think like that, you have to write for yourself and nobody else. Okay, great pep talk, I’m glad we did this.
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