What Not You? Why Not Now?
I always wondered how songs were written.
Since I was 13 years old, I had been composing music on my guitar — but the songs had no words. I wondered if people wrote the words first, and then the music, or the music first, or both together. I spent my career as a writer, and most of my life as a musician, playing and singing other people’s songs, and I still couldn’t figure out how songs were written.
The Great American Songbook is filled with the songs of collaborators like George and Ira Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart, where one composed the music and the other wrote the lyrics. I remember being surprised when I learned that Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to all of Elton John’s songs.
Collaboration is one way to write songs, but I was focused on singer-songwriters as a teen, when I was discovering the music that spoke to me. Artists like Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Jim Croce, Steve Goodman, and others were captivating to me.
I played their records thousands of times, memorized nearly every lyric to nearly every one of their songs, and in the back of my mind the thought was always there — how did they create these songs?
Decades later, I was sitting in my living room listening to “By Your Side” by Sade.
And I thought: I need to do this. I need to write a song.
I picked up my guitar and wrote the music to what became “Everything but the Truth,” and then followed it up with the lyrics. After that, songwriting felt like something I could do. I learned that my preferred method is to write the music first, and then listen to it to determine what the music is saying.
What changed the day I listened to that Sade song, after years of playing and singing the songs of others?
Jim Rohn, a motivational speaker from the ‘70s and ‘80s, was famous for saying: “Why not you? Why not now?” Although I hadn’t heard of Jim Rohn at the time, these are nearly the identical words I thought as I listened to the smooth vibe of Sade. “She can write a song, I thought. Why not me? Why not now?”
So I picked up my guitar, and I wrote a song.