Paul McCartney says one day he woke up and had the melody to Yesterday in his head.
He says that some musicians dream about music but don't remember it when they wake up. For him he was able to remember and block out chords.
For me that is what a musician does - 'dreaming awake'.
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.
insofar as making stuff goes, especially art, I think there are widely held views that it either comes easy to you, or you don't do at all. It doesn't occur to some people that to be good at something (even something "fun") you have to work at it and put in time that decidedly isn't fun.
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
Many of the 3B dedicate at least an hour a day thinking about him and the values he tried to communicate , and in a very deep way
He was somewhat of a crossover between a magician , a cult leader an artist and a businessman self promoter so nobody can convince me that he would not the type to gloat about his success.
And honestly I can accept that . I’d rather have promotion about love and compassion than the technoutipian futurism such as crypto Jesus or rocket Jesus .
But as I said I have to point out that luck plays a huge role . So many people tried to sing the virtue of compassion and love via story telling but only Jesus broke out and became a figure with 3 billion religious followers
He didn’t dictate it, but he’d be pleased about it.
He was a human being after all, if you want to cut him some slack you can compare him with a contemporary Buddhist monk.
They too have an ego
How do you know? Citation needed
Also The most famous celebrity ever
Nobody even comes close
It happens to me and musicians I know. On occasion you remember one.
As someone that wouldn't regularly consider themselves a musician, hearing music out of nowhere is super cool but weird.
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.
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.
Albert Einstein and Salvador Dali practiced naps while holding an object over a plate. When they dozed off and dropped the object, the clang would wake them and they could better remember their thoughts from the dream-like state moments before.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3023078/how-dali-einstein-and-ar...