What 1,500 Songs Taught Me About Songwriting

The catalog on this site is around 1,500 songs now. I didn't set out to write that many. I set out to write one that said the thing I needed to hear, and then the next one, and the count is just what happens when you do that for long enough without a label telling you to stop.

I use AI to produce the sound. The writing is mine, and this post is about the writing, because that's the part the number taught me anything about. The audio tools change every few months; the lessons below haven't.

No numbers on streams or money here. I don't track them closely and I don't think they'd teach you anything about songs.

Volume didn't make me better. Finishing did.

The first thing I'd correct in anyone starting out, including the earlier version of me: writing a lot of songs is not the same as finishing a lot of songs. For a stretch I had hundreds of half-done lyric sheets, each one abandoned at the exact point where it got hard, which is usually verse two.

What actually improved the writing was forcing every song to the end: title, second verse, bridge, the decision about the last line. Finishing is where you find out whether the idea was a song or just a good first line, and you don't learn that any other way. A bad finished song taught me more than ten promising fragments.

The first line is the song

Almost every song I still stand behind started with one line I couldn't shake, before there was any idea of what it was about. "I left my rifle at the station." "The good man died first." "The Reaper had me dead to rights." The rest of the song is finding out what that line already knew.

Every song I started from a topic instead ("write something about betrayal") came out sounding like something about betrayal. Generic, correct, and dead. I've deleted most of those. The lesson isn't mystical. It's that a line is specific and a topic isn't, and songs are made of specifics.

I wrote more about this in how I write dark country lyrics.

Objects beat feelings, every time, no exceptions I've found

Fifteen hundred songs is a big enough sample to be sure. The verses that hold up are never the ones where the singer says how he feels. They're the pawn ticket in the Christmas card. The boots under the coffin, mud and all. The kid who knew his father from a photograph.

I now treat "I feel" as a bug in a lyric. When I catch it, I ask what the man did with his hands instead, and the line gets better without fail.

Restraint is a genre requirement, not a style choice

Dark country has a small vocabulary of big images: graves, rope, whiskey, the highway, the preacher, the sheriff. Early on I used all of them in every song, because they were available and they sounded like the genre. Those songs sound like a costume now.

The ones that held up use one big image and spend the rest of the song on small true things. Bury Me with the Bullets has one coffin and a lot of coat. That ratio is the lesson. If a song has a noose and a grave and a black horse, the listener knows you're decorating, and they stop trusting the singer.

Sad is easy. Specific sad is the work.

The genre gives you permission to be bleak, and it's the easiest thing in the world to write a bleak song. It's also worthless if the bleakness is general. What people respond to is a particular man in a particular kitchen with a particular thing he can't say.

I lost my father young and my brother to a war, and for a long time I wrote around that instead of from it. The songs got honest when I stopped writing "loss" and started writing the hallway, the photograph, the rifle left at the station. It cost more to write those. They're the ones that stayed.

The chorus can be plain if the verses earned it

I spent a long time trying to make choruses clever. Then I noticed that the choruses I actually liked, mine and everyone else's, are usually the plainest lines in the song. "Death rides a slow horse, but he never loses ground." Nothing fancy. It works because the verses around it did the detailed work, so the chorus can afford to just say it.

Now the rule is: verses carry the objects, the chorus carries the weight, and I don't put a metaphor in the chorus unless the verses are already full of facts.

Cut the third verse. Then check whether you need the second.

Most of my early songs had three verses. Most of the songs I keep have two. The third verse was nearly always me explaining the song to myself, or adding a scene because I'd read that songs have three verses.

I'd go further now: if verse two could swap places with verse one and nobody would notice, it isn't a second verse, it's the first verse again. Verse two has one job, which is to be later and worse.

The title should be a line from the song, and the best one

Working titles almost never survive. For a while I released songs under filenames, which was a mistake I've mostly cleaned up. The titles that work are the line that's doing the most: The Good Man Died First, I Came Home with the War, They Should've Left Me Dead. If I can't find a line good enough to be the title, that's a note about the song, not the title.

Keep one take. Delete the rest in public if you have to.

Different lesson, same principle. When you make a lot of songs, you also make a lot of versions. I had, at one point, five versions of the same song live on this site at once. Nobody needed that, and it made the catalog feel like a hard drive instead of a body of work.

One version is the song. The alternates are drafts wearing its clothes. Some are still up because people had already downloaded them and I don't like breaking links, but I don't do it anymore, and I'd tell anyone starting now: pick, then delete.

The catalog is the practice, not the point

The last thing, and the one I'd have argued with a few years ago. I used to think the goal was the body of work. It isn't. The goal was always the next song being a little more honest than the last one. The 1,500 are just the receipts for that.

If you're writing, the practical version: finish the song, cut the explaining, keep the objects, throw out the takes. Then write the next one. The number will take care of itself.

If you want to hear what all of that sounds like at this point, the best dark country songs page is where the most-downloaded ones live, and the outlaw songs page is the harder end of it.

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The whole catalog is in one zip at /free-pack.