Chapter Two: Set a Goal
From Songfarmer: Writing More and Better Songs
Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Prompts, Conclusion
Set a Goal
Our brains are problem solving machines and they need purpose and direction, so let’s come up with a purpose and a direction for them by breaking down the idea of more and better songs with two questions. Now, grab a notebook to write down your answers to these questions in this section. Plan to keep this same notebook handy whenever you are reading Songfarmer to answer questions, capture song ideas, and make plans.
The first question: how many songs do you want to write? We are assuming you want at least one more song, but beyond that it is up to you to be specific. Do you want enough for a performance, enough for an album, or just one? Do you want to have a lot of extra songs to choose from for your purposes, or do you just want a certain number - no more, no less? Do you have a frequency goal, such as “I want to write one song a month,” “I want to write ten songs a year,” or “I want to write a song a week?” Or do you have a target goal date, such as “I want to have two new songs by August 1”?
Simply set a goal for how many songs you want to write and specify a time period for when you want to have them completed. Don’t proceed until you have written down your quantity goal.
Better songs
“Better” means something different to everyone. But for our purposes, “better” means that over some interval of time, your songs become more effective at doing what you - the songwriter - hoped the songs would do.
Ask yourself: What do you want to do with your song?
Some common purposes of writing a song are:
Enjoy the physical and intellectual activities of making music and writing lyrics
Discover your own thoughts and feelings through the act of writing
Communicate concepts to a reader or listener
Connect and make a listener feel similar emotions and empathize with the characters in a song
As the creator of a song, you will need to determine why you want to create them. What do you want the songs to do? Do you want them to help you have fun, discover, communicate, and connect? Though these are common uses of a song, this list does not cover all the purposes of writing a song. You may have a few additional goals, including to make money with songs (and that’s certainly a valid - and common - goal). Or your goal may be to change others’ behavior, or to elicit positive feedback from people you admire or respect. However, we would argue that, even to accomplish goals like these, your songs need to do a good job of helping you to discover, communicate, and connect.
To the extent your songs allow you to discover, communicate, or connect (or make money, change other’s behavior, or raise your influence or profile in a community), your songs will be “better” as get you closer to accomplishing the goals you hope to accomplish with them. “Better” will be determined by the song creator’s assessment of progress, or lack of progress, towards his or her goals for the songs. Answer as best you can: How do you want your songs to improve?
Quality through quantity
(or, more can lead to better)
We firmly believe that the problem solving, practice, and skills you acquire through writing more songs (quantity) will increase the likelihood you will write better or more effective songs (quality). We also believe that the more songs you plan to write, the odds are:
You will spend more time on a weekly basis practicing your songwriting skills.
You will regularly run into problems, and then come up with solutions for those problems, while writing songs.
You will finish songs that communicate, connect, and move people the way you hoped, and you will develop a sense for “what works” and what features made that connection more likely to happen.
You will finish songs that do not communicate, connect, and move people the way you hoped, and the more this happens, the more you will figure out what doesn’t get the reaction you hoped for.
Consider someone who decides to train for a marathon. The more runs the person completes, the more he or she will learn to solve the problems that come up while running. Through each completed run, she finds out what works and what feels good and what doesn’t.
A fast, satisfying experience at a marathon doesn’t necessarily follow because someone completed a quantity of completed runs, but all those completed runs make a competitive, effective long run more probable because of all the learning and strength in muscle that the frequent exercise made possible. If you complete the training runs in an effective way, using the feedback and learning throughout the process, your odds of completing your goal of running a marathon go up. In the same way, the more songs you complete, the more your skills and “songwriting muscle” will strengthen to make you ready to write “better” songs or songs that allow you to accomplish your goals.
Quantity and quality
Quantity: How many songs do you want to write?
Quality: How do you want your songs to improve? What goals do you want to be able to better accomplish with the songs you write? (Such as to discover, communicate, connect, and/or to do what else?) This is tricky, but you might also decide how you will measure or track the extent to which your songs accomplish the goals you set for them. That is, how will you know if your songs get better through the work you do in this program? Be as specific as you can be, though we know it is hard to quantify. Do your best to come up with a way to measure your progress at song quality with respect to your goals.
So again, before you move on, write down your answers to the questions: How many songs do you want to make? What is your target date or how often do you want to write them? (Create a tracking chart or use a wall calendar so that you can see your quantity goal and you can make a mark for each created song.) In what ways do you want your songs to get better or more effective? What goals do you want them to accomplish?
Activating the Songwriter Consciousness
Deciding to write songs is an act of courage. You are deciding to a devote a portion of your time, attention, and problem-solving power to a recurring process of creation. You are deciding not to only consume but to produce. You are deciding to tell the stories and the perspectives that only you can tell, because no one else in the world shares your history and no one else in the world has lived the set of experiences, places, and people that you have.
Your life has never been lived before. You are an original. Only you can write and sing the songs that emerge from your hours, days, weeks, and years as an aware and sensitive individual in your family, your town, your job, and your time on this planet. You have decided to try to grow things - to record and organize the truth of your experience in a way that is recognizable and relatable for your fellow man and woman. You seek to communicate and connect with your inner self and others, despite all the differences, distractions, and hassles. And that is an act of optimism and hope and the opposite of chaos and disorder. The act of commitment to write a song will engage your brain, and immediately after you set your goal, a songwriter consciousness is born, and it will be there as long as you have a goal to write a song.
Set a goal to write songs, decide to be a songwriter, and the songwriter consciousness will emerge and be a part of you. And almost immediately, the songwriter consciousness will be on the hunt, sifting through your past and present experience for material that it can use. Did you set your quantity goal to write a song by a specific date or to write a song at a particular frequency? Did you write the goal down somewhere you will see it and be reminded of your commitment? If you answered yes, then you are a songwriter looking to grow more and better songs.