Several years ago, I had an opportunity to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One of the things that I enjoyed seeing is the notebooks that the songwriters used when they were working on their songs. It made me think about the different methods that I use when I’m writing songs. I wish I would have written all of my songs in a journal but that’s not the way that I’ve worked. I do have some journals that I have used to write a few songs. I also use the journals to write a few of the ideas that I have for songs and the earliest threads of ideas for songs. Most of the time, these ideas are transferred to Word files. I keep those files on a jump drive that I have with me most of the time. I carry the drive to work just in case I get an idea and I want to get a record of it before I forget it. The unfortunate thing about the files is that they are edited. I move words and phrases around with little to no traceability of the evolution of the song from one form to another. It’s really convenient for creating but bad for documenting the creative process.
Some of the earliest songs that I wrote were handwritten on pages from my Franklin Planner. There are the pages that have the earliest ideas for the songs and other pages that show the evolution of these ideas to actual lyrics. Here are some pages from my planner showing the evolution of the song The Prodigal Son.
The final versions of all of these songs have made it to Word files over the years. You can see a similar evolution of my songs in some of my journals. The exception of the journals is that I usually go pretty quickly from the written page to a Word file. Until very recently, the files on my jump drive have been my go to method of recording lyrics. Here are pictures of my journals with lyrics for Arkansas and The Tree of Life.
Most recently, I have started using the notes function on my iPhone to write songs. I have it with me all of the time and it’s easier to put these earliest ideas on my phone than to hunt down my jump drive and a computer. When I get these songs complete or close to complete, I will email them to myself to transfer them to a Word document to finish up. I used this method write Don’t Cry For Me When I’m Gone and have provided screenshots of the Notes file from my phone here.
