If you’re planning your first wedding, my guess is you’re just planning on doing it once. You’re not trying to get good at getting married multiple times, right? So pretty much everything is stressful. You’ve never done this before. What’s the budget? Will you have a band or a DJ? Who will perform the ceremony? On and on it goes, until you suddenly find yourself married (or perhaps not,) and the event is over. You’re exhausted. You never want to plan another wedding in your life. And you might not have to. You succeeded once, and that was the goal.
Now, let’s pretend the goal was to “succeed” at getting married thirty times per year. Wouldn’t you start to recognize patterns? Who you’re often calling, bands you’re hiring, bakers, catering. All that stuff. And you would start to have an order of doing things. Then you would start to write all this down and get pretty savvy at spreadsheets; collecting data, phone numbers, etc. until planning a wedding was like a well oiled machine. You had systems and processes in place.
If you want to succeed at writing one song, just do it. Figure it out along the way, and adjust things until you’re happy. Maybe you’ll do this once or twice a year, whenever you feel like it. And that’ll be fine. The same goes for albums. If you want to record one album or EP, just do it and be done with it. Cross it off your bucket list.
But if you want to write multiple songs, if you want to be prolific, if you want to release multiple albums, EPs, and singles—then you need to come up with systems and processes, just like our wedding planner. This is how you take your work seriously. And it’s the difference between professionals and amateurs.
You start noticing patterns. When to write. What works, what doesn’t. How to create this type of song or that type of song. You’ll start recording all this data in your head or on paper, (which I recommend). You’ll become really great at writing songs, improving with each one.
Every time my record label was ready to release new music of mine, there was a pattern. I’d get an email from so and so. And they wanted this from me or that. Then it would go through all these different steps until it was finally out in the world. Then there was another step-by-step process for marketing. Why? This is what a record label does. They release lots of albums, so they wrote it all down and follow the process.
You can do this, too. You can apply this process to songwriting. In fact, you can apply it to pretty much anything you’re wanting to successfully do over and over again.
Yes, there’s a big part of music that’s entirely mystery and you can’t replicate. But you know what? There’s a lot of it that isn’t mystery. Nobody says, “I can’t believe they put a verse and a chorus in that song—they’re so cliche!” Nobody says, “Wow, they added a bridge, what a bunch of posers.”
If you want to succeed once, just do it.
If you want to succeed multiple times, create systems and processes.
Act like a wedding planner.
Love,
Aaron
P.S. If you need help coming up with systems and processes, I created an online course that details my own for how I write songs everyday. Learn more here.