How songwriters felt watching the new Beatles documentary

Where do you see that? Watching the documentary I see people who have been, for years, putting in the work. This is them going to work. Most people I know who have not met their songwriting goals do not put in the time, day after day, year after year.

I feel the Beatles wild success in the United States is linked to the incredible sadness in the U.S. after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. These four English lads were the Pollyannas that the country needed, clung to, to get out of their national funk.

Recently I dreamt a poem that was absolutely amazing but when I woke up it had melted away even before I awoke. I have some dribs and drabs of it that I'm trying to reassemble into something coherent.

As someone that wouldn't regularly consider themselves a musician, hearing music out of nowhere is super cool but weird.

One of the tricks is that sometimes when you hear a song in your head, it's a bit sloppy and has some blanks in it. Like, there may be a melody with a descending run, but it's not clear what the steps are in the descending run or which notes it starts and ends on.

Another one of the tricks is that people typically focus on the topline melody, but if you hear a song in your head, you probably also at least "hear" the bass, or even other internal voices in the harmony. But without practice, you might not know that this is what you're hearing in your head, so you might struggle to put it to paper.

For a basic example from the Beatles, take the first line of the chorus for Yesterday, "Why she had to go". The melody holds the same pitch for the first two notes "why" and "she", but the bass is descending. If you know the song Yesterday, you can probably hear that descending bass in your head. If you can translate that to paper, you can transcribe songs. If you can hear songs in your head and transcribe them, you can write songs.

Yesterday is only good when you hear it in hindsight, knowing the commercial success that it had and under the influence of halo effect

Honestly every song of that Level is.

You have to put together a good album and it can make it to 100k copies sold .

Everything above 100K copies is more telling about the luck and the scope of the promotional campaign supporting it then it says about the album itself .

It’s a phenomenon you see in every field .

Gisele Bunchen is beautiful but not 400M dollar beautiful

Bill Gates is smart but not 170B smart

The Mona Lisa is a great painting I guess but not 1B dollar worth

Jesus was a pretty cool role model , but not a 3B devote follower type role model dictating that the world stops on his birthday

All the above phenomenons rely on a mix of luck, vitality and as well as people not thinking about potentially buying into something that could be overrated and ‘overpriced’ compared to cheaper options which is the definition of halo effect

Songwriting is like any other kind of creative work. You come up with an idea, put it into some concrete form. That first recording. If it's shite, give it a minute and then come back to it with fresh ears and think about what you like about it and what you don't like. Take away the parts you don't like. Maybe you can think of something else that works with what you already like. Work that in. Evaluate. Rinse, repeat.

Sometimes you just have to abandon stuff that isn't working and move on to something completely different. That's OK too. Just keep doing it and your output will get better and better.

Even though it can be fun, in order to do it well you have to work on it. Your tenth song is going to be better than your first song, and your hundredth song is going to be better yet.