Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
~Plato
Writing a song is not just an exercise in seeking some kind of future fame. It is simply an exercise in making your own indelible mark upon the world—a setting in the stone of eternity a pattern that captures the sound, sense, and sensibility, an imprint against the ravages of time time of who and what you are and what you aspire to leave behind.
And it is surely not rocket science. But it can and will take you farther down the road of being a writer and further into the realms of possibilities of wordcrafting and creation. Writing songs stands alongside poetry and prayer as the nearest thing to perfection in words. It is a hammering of the malleable into an uncrushable icon of our being, Though created by us, it is born and released into the greater world as a gift from our time on this planet.
There is an interplay of words and music which is somehow magical and leaves us astonished, sometimes for reasons beyond our understanding. There are few, if any, people I have encountered who are not in some way shape or fashion, unmoved by music, and it is a sad and cynical teacher of writing who does not try to lay bare the underpinnings of song and let the genius of his or her students the time and place to create what is undeniably the most universal of needs because we—the great “we” of humanity need music.
We always have and always will.
Writing a song, or songs, will be the work we begin this week. Hopefully, this seed will fall on fertile ground. It will be up to you to tend this soil as a farmer his or her field.
Be prepared; be open, and be willing to explore what’s in a song.
It should be a pretty cool thing!
