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.

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 easy, relaxed 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.

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