Keeping a Songwriter’s Notebook

Why should you keep a songwriter’s notebook? I don’t know; I’m not you. I keep one for many reasons.

First, I tend to forget things. Writing them down helps me remember what I was doing, thinking, and/or feeling at a particular point in time. Putting everything in one place reduces the time I spend searching for stuff when I need it later.

Second, it’s a good place to experiment. This goes back to my days of writing fiction and poetry, and even more to when I edited both for a zine I published in the early-’90s.

I used to receive some great submissions, but I also got a lot of stuff that, while meaningful to the writer, held little or no appeal to a broader audience. Some things shouldn’t be published.

In fact, most things shouldn’t be published. That’s why we have notebooks. (Blogs are another issue altogether because there are so many shades of grey, but we’re not talking about blogs right now.)

What do I put in my notebooks? It can be anything from the extremely mundane and inane chatter of warmup exercises (”I am sitting in the backyard, the dogs are with me”), to overheard phrases, to lines from a book or magazine, to lofty concepts or hypotheses, to exploration of language for its own sake (e.g., “today I’m going to write four quatrains that contain internal rhyme” — incidentally, if I ever get back to my recording project, you’ll see an example of this one), to pretty much whatever I feel like. There are no rules other than those I impose on myself.

It is said that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. With notebooks, one man’s trash is that same man’s treasure — he just hasn’t discovered it yet or put it into the proper form.

On this day…

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