About Songfarmer

What Is Songfarmer?

Songfarmer is a process-oriented approach to growing more and better songs. It is a set of habits, principles, and techniques you can use to move forward in songwriting so that you are constantly learning and creating. Like a farmer of the land, a songfarmer collects seeds, tends the soil, and does the daily work to grow things — stubbornly, patiently, and with tools that come in handy.

The Method

Set a Goal — Decide how many songs you want to write and by when. The act of commitment activates a songwriter consciousness that will be on the hunt for material in everything you experience.

Build Four Daily Habits — Songwriting can be viewed as the repetition and cycling between four key habits:

  1. Writing — Journaling, freewriting, noting ideas as they come to you
  2. Listening — Paying close attention to songs, recordings, and live performances
  3. Performing — Playing your instrument, singing, learning new chords and tunings
  4. Reading — Fiction, poetry, screenplays, spiritual texts — absorbing language and story

These habits collect song seeds (ideas for songs) and enrich the soil (your skills, knowledge, and memories). A seed can be a phrase, a groove, a chord progression, a melody, a character, an emotion, a setting — anything that gets you writing.

Compose with FLOW and EDIT — When you sit down to grow a song from a seed, you alternate between two strictly separated modes of composing:

  • FLOW — Stream-of-consciousness writing with no judgment, evaluation, or critique. Keep the pen moving. Don’t use backspace. Create a “wild zone” of raw material — words, sounds, and connections pouring out of your subconscious.
  • EDIT — Evaluative, critical, structural work. Pick through the wild zone for the best lines and phrases. Move them to a “manicured zone.” Shape, prune, reorder, and refine.

The key insight: these two modes cannot be performed at the same time. Trying to FLOW and EDIT simultaneously is the root of writer’s block. Separate them, and you will produce more songs. Iterate — FLOW then EDIT, FLOW then EDIT — until the song is done.

The Authors

Owen Temple is a Texas singer-songwriter who has recorded and released 12 albums of original songs, and the songs he has written appear on the recordings of more than 30 artists.

Gordy Quist is a record producer and founding member of the Band of Heathens, a Grammy-nominated Americana group, and a lifelong student of the songwriting craft.

Together, they’ve led Songfarmer workshops helping songwriters at every level develop a sustainable creative practice.