Write something rough by the end of tonight
Okay. Here's where we stop talking about it and do it.
By the end of tonight you're going to have a rough song. Not a good one. A rough one. If you wait to write until you know it'll be good, you'll wait forever, and I say that as somebody who waited about thirty years.
Here's how I'd do it, sitting at your kitchen table tonight.
Step 1: Pick three chords
Just three. If you already play a little guitar or piano, pick three chords you already know. G, C, and D work fine. If you don't know any chords yet, go find G, C, and D on whatever chart you've got, or ask me and I'll show you Saturday.
I know that sounds like too few. People always think they need more before they start — more chords, more theory, more something. You don't. Most of the songs that outlived the people who wrote them ran on three chords. Learn the fancy stuff later if you want. Or don't. I mostly haven't and I've made peace with it.
Step 2: Play them in a loop
Doesn't matter what order. G, C, D, G. Or G, D, C, G. Just get a loop going, four chords long, and let it repeat while you hum over the top. Don't write words yet. Just hum. You're listening for a shape, not a sentence.
This is where I'll tell you something I found out from a kid at school, of all people. I had a song built around a chord I really liked — thought I'd found something. Turned out it was just a regular G chord with one finger sitting in the wrong spot. A total accident. Kid pointed it out like I should be embarrassed.
I kept the song anyway. The wrong finger stayed in it. It still sounds like that chord to me, the "wrong" one, and I like it better than the correct version now. Point being — if something sounds good, it's good, even if you can't explain why or you did it by mistake. Don't go correcting every accident. Some of them are the song.
Step 3: Write down one true thing
Not a clever thing. A true thing. Something you actually know. What you did today, what somebody said to you, what the mountain looked like driving home, whatever's sitting in your head right now that's real.
This is the opinion I'll hold the line on: write what you actually know, not what sounds like a song. If you write about heartbreak you never had, it shows. Everybody in the room can tell. But if you write about the actual thing — your kid's shoes by the door, the noise your truck makes on cold mornings, whatever — that's real, and real is what lasts. You don't need a big subject. You need a true one.
Write that one true thing down as a single line. That's your first line. Don't polish it.
Step 4: Say it again, differently
Take that same true thing and say it a second way. That's your second line. Now you've got two lines. Play your chord loop under them, however clumsy, and see if the words roughly fit the shape you hummed in step two. They won't fit well. That's fine.
Step 5: Stop at four lines
Four lines, maybe eight if you're feeling ambitious. Stop there tonight. I know the instinct is to keep going until it feels finished. Resist it. My first finished song had eleven verses about my father's tractor and it was, by my own daughter's account, "a lot of tractor." Four lines is plenty for a rough draft. You can always add. It's much harder to find what to cut once you've got page after page of it.
A caution, small one
If you're recording yourself on your phone to hear it back — and I'd recommend it, I do this — just know it'll sound worse than you think in your head. Don't let that stop you. It stopped me from fixing my timing for years longer than it should have, because I assumed the phone was somehow being unfair to me. It wasn't. It was just accurate.
What "rough" actually means here
Rough means: three chords, four lines, one true thing said twice. It will not sound like a real song yet. It'll sound like a sketch. That's exactly what it's supposed to sound like tonight.
Don't show it to anybody who's going to tell you it's amazing. That doesn't help you. Show it to somebody who'll tell you what's working, if you show it to anybody at all. Tonight, honestly, it's fine if the only audience is you and the dog.
Before next time
Bring your four lines and your three chords to class, written down somewhere you won't lose them — a notebook, not just your head. We'll look at what you've got and figure out what to cut. 🙏