Making up songs, for fun

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow”
– Kurt Vonnegut Jr., here

I’m an occasional songwriter who records his own demos. Basically I just like the process of making up a song, and then trying to get it to sound as good as I can, at home, whenever time allows.

Inspired by pros, but definitely not one of them. I’m an amateur, though hopefully in the best sense of that word: someone who does it for the love of doing it.

Playing music, writing songs, and recording them is a tremendous amount of fun, which is a good enough reason for anyone to do it, if you’re so inclined. You certainly don’t have to be in the music business to make music. You don’t even have to be a musician, for that matter.

“… our technology and our economic system seem to produce the present bad situation: millions of people feel themselves poor and powerless; millions feel that music is something to be made only by experts.”
– Pete Seeger, here

And if you ever get discouraged comparing your best efforts (so far!) with any of the polished products you hear on the radio, consider that it took Brian Wilson seven months, with a team of LA’s finest studio musicians, to make just one recording, Good Vibrations, at an estimated cost of more than $400,000 in today’s dollars.

By comparison, you’ve needed way less time and money to have all kinds of fun making music and learning new skills. And in the process, you’ve created something from scratch that didn’t exist before. If you’re not relying on it for a living, you’re done! It doesn’t matter how it compares, who likes it, or whether it sells; what matters is only whether you like it.

“I never wrote for [critics] then, I don’t write for them now. I have no interest in what they have to say about anything. I’m interested in whether I like it. I write for me.”
– Lou Reed, here

“Art is not a horse race”
– Pete Seeger, here

“Make original material. Make what you like. Stick to it, and just do it for fun. If you don’t like it, nobody else is gonna like it. If you like it, probably other people will like it too.”
– Michael Hurley at age 79, here