Organization for Songwriters

A million thoughts running through my head at once. Clips of songs I’m trying to finish, songs I’ve already finished, songs I’ve just started, and songs I’ve yet to start. How can I keep track of all this? How do we sit down and deliberately work on a song when it’s hard to hear the sound through the noise?

We can’t always wing it, sometimes we have to buckle up and organize our songs. We have to divide the finished from the unfinished, the good from the bad, the new from the old, and the ready to perform from the leave on the floor. We all fret over forgetting songs that we didn’t record, or ideas that we never came back to. How can we avoid this from happening or at least happen less often?

Songs exist at various stages of completion. I try to think of these stages in four ways. These four stages help me divide and conquer so I can see my work more clearly. The four stages represent the process every song goes through. Some get through the process faster than others, some don’t make it through at all, but at every moment they exist within this songwriting life-cycle. It’s like a song’s coming-of-age until it’s ready to be shared with the world (or your close friends who put up with you).

The initial idea of a song can be one line for a lyric, one guitar riff, something you heard someone say, an emotion you’re feeling, or a thought you’ve been pondering. The list goes on. It is that initial spark where you think, “maybe this could be a song.” You can have a collection of ideas but only a few turn into songs. You can have dry spells where you have no ideas for a long time, or periods where you’re continuously inspired. They come and go, but you have to collect them when they come, good or bad. In this stage every song is born.

Taking a simple idea forward into the realm of a song is the creation stage. Nurturing the idea, giving it all it needs to become a song. Patiently playing the same chords over and over until the words, melody, and music come together. Trying different variations repeatedly, seeing what works for the song and what doesn’t. Writing and scratching out, writing and scratching out, recording and listening, recording and listening. Keeping focused, being receptive of inspiration and being completely dedicated to teasing out the song. Whatever your process for creation is, the idea grows into a song in this stage, however long or short it takes.

Not all songs need editing, sometimes they come out in one fell swoop. For me, however, this is more rare than not. I usually have to edit lyrics, move around parts, write new lyrics, or write whole new sections, until the song can be considered finished. This is perhaps the most frustrating stage for me because a song is so close to being done, but just isn’t quite there yet. It needs some fine-tuning or sometimes major rework to get it to a place where I’m comfortable with it. While we can’t achieve perfection in this stage, we can achieve perfectly adequate.

Your repertoire is your collection of finished songs. When an initial idea is nurtured and fleshed out, and you’ve edited and revised as necessary, it finally becomes a song in your repertoire of originals. We can’t stop here with the finished song, of course. Now we need to perform it and/or record it. But before we doing that, we need to practice. Rehearsing a song is just as important as any other stage of the song’s life. We need to know how we’re going to play it on stage and be able to play it so well that despite nerves or one to many beers, we can nail it every time. Getting it ready to record is also important so we don’t waste anyone’s time or money learning how to play the song in the studio.

Now let’s organize our songwriting and bring these four stages out of our heads and into reality. To do this, I like to think of these four stages as “bins”. You have a certain number of ideas in bin 1, you’re creating a certain number of songs in bin 2, you’re editing a certain number of songs in bin 3, and your repertoire is made up of a certain number of songs in bin 4. Any bin can contain any number of songs, all at the same time. This is constantly changing as you finish songs and come up with new ideas. So how do we implement this concept of bins? Answer: folders.

To organize these four stages, I took four plain folders. On the front of each folder, I wrote the title of each stage: 1. Ideas, 2. Creating, 3. Editing, and 4. Repertoire. I took these four folders and stuck them to the wall in my living room.

For the Ideas folder, I took a sheet of paper and wrote down all my ideas I currently had that could turn into songs. The titles I used for these ideas usually weren’t the final titles used for the songs, but something that would remind me of the idea when working on it later.

In the Creating folder, I listed all the song titles I was currently working on and fleshing out. These titles could be the final titles used for the song, or some variation of the final title. The Creating folder had a range of songs from just beginning to be created to almost ready to be edited.

In the Editing folder, I put in anything that I thought needed revisions. It could be a sheet of lyrics that needed editing, or chord charts that needed to be revisited, or simply a list of titles that needed some sort of editing but I hadn’t quite figured out how yet.

And finally, the Repertoire folder contained a list of finished titles, final chord charts, and/or sheets of lyrics for songs that had made it through the other stages and were now ready to be performed and recorded.

There was actually a fifth folder (not stuck to the wall) that I kept for old songs. I thought of it as an archive, a collection songs I finished a long time ago or had already recorded or performed. The four folders on the wall were meant to organize the current songs I was working on or had just finished. The goal was to keep track of where I was at with each song at that moment.

This was a helpful exercise for me to think clearly about the different stages of my songwriting process. Now I don’t have to keep up with this system of folders because I can think about my ideas and songs as existing somewhere within the lifecycle of these four stages. The goal here wasn’t to be too meticulous or to overthink things. It simply was an exercise to help me be more productive with my songwriting, and to inspire me to keep filling the bins with new ideas while finishing up old ones. Maybe trying to organize your songs and ideas into these four stages can help you do the same.

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