There’s a bit of a standing joke with musicians who play instruments, in that sometimes we refer to singers as “singers” and to instrumentalists as “musicians.” (As though singers are not musicians.) I think it’s funny because it’s untrue. It makes a subtle suggestion that the vocals aren’t that important, especially in a band setting.
Ha. Ha.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: everything I need to know about life, I learned watching Sesame Street. So let’s start talking about how to write a song that sells by watching this very educational clip from my childhood:
Okay, time to get serious. 
If we want to get technical about it, nobody can actually tell you how to write a song. Your art is your art, and creative expression stands on its own. In theory, I’m not the judge of whether you can write a good song or not, and neither is anyone else.
It’s inevitable; if you’re a songwriter, at some point you’re going to face the dreaded “writer’s block”. You’re going to feel uninspired, you’re going to feel pressured to create something and come up empty-handed. Or would that be “empty-headed?”
Anyhow.
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a local musician whose band is regrouping. He was talking to me about the band’s new philosophy. “We used to be basically a studio band,” he said, “but now we aren’t going to record anything we haven’t tested out live first.” I thought that was wisdom, because it adds a measure of objective feedback to their song selection process.
One of my favorite parts of the Underground Music Showcase this past weekend was a series of panel discussions held in the basement of a local church. One of these discussions was a panel of music bloggers talking about their contribution to the music buzz. One of the panelists, Erin Barnes of The Donnybrook Writing Academy, made a point I thought was pretty huge. She said that it is actually possible for a huge buzz created on the Internet to be the undoing of a band if it happens prematurely, because the band is not prepared to live up to all the hype. This is a classic example of the folly of style without substance.
Let’s face it–as artists, we love affirmation, even if it comes in the form of flattery. We want people to like what we do, and we want to believe people genuinely mean it when they say they like our stuff. And some genuinely do. But this need we have for affirmation can be our downfall if we don’t exercise a bit of wisdom. We need to be just a little bit suspicious of flattery, because there are people who will use this need of ours to their own advantage.
