“You can’t say ‘how do you write a song?’ It just comes out. Everyone has their own process.”
-Bruce Roberts
I remember when I first wanted to make a song I always believed that music had a certain formula to it, but the more music I have analyzed in my search, the more I see that there isn’t a specific formula or way of doing it. It's more of a creative process. In this creative process, it's developed within the artist, and that's what made it very intriguing to me. I wanted to find different ways to enhance this creativity by watching videos of producers and artists deconstructing their songs. As a producer myself, this helped substantially, and I really enjoyed the development of finding my creative process. So as an artist, my go-to concept was making a beat and once I had that I knew what I wanted.
At first, when I was trying to make music I thought it was supposed to come naturally.
It wasn't always that easy. At first, when I was trying to make music I thought it was supposed to come naturally. I believed that once I heard the beat it would all just wrap together, but clearly, it wasn't that simple. When I began to write lyrics for the song "People," I began to think of ways to best describe the emotions that I wanted to evoke. I was in shock when I began this process because I didn’t really know about flows, structure, and syllable count. With some guidance and note-taking in Stephen's class, I saw that rhetorical strategies like analogies, repetition, anaphora were the best way to evoke emotion. All in all, I had learned to write bars and this then came to the point where I wanted to write lyrics that were general enough for my audience to understand, but also specific enough to where the listener felt that I was genuine rather than generic.
I remember when Ricardo and I first started on the project. We began with such enthusiasm to compose a song so much so that I remember telling Sarah for our 3-week project that we were going to create a song. She was hesitant at first, but after seeing our work ethic, she was shocked by the efficiency of our partnership. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows though when we first tried to execute the first song we went for the Lo-Fi approach because it was the sound we imagined for the album. We quickly found out that we weren’t the best at portraying Lo-Fi. On the production side, there wasn’t much of an issue but when it came to composition, things got complicated. Ricardo and I struggled to fit the Lo-Fi style. So I had produce more beats that could fit our style better. Once we found our style and creative process, we were able to finish the song for the 3-week project, “People” and start on our next song, “Someone” which was finished before the end of junior year.
My biggest takeaway is best said by Nicholas Meye “Art doesn’t just happen by accident. It is about pulling out new tricks and trying new things.”
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