How To Make A Song About Nothing

I missed two days of writing blog posts and sending them out to my mailing list!

I feel like a failure. But I’m taking my own advice, being gentle with myself and just picking it back up now. It’d be really easy at this point to throw in the towel (nobody said anything when I missed the two days), but really, this exercise is for myself. I can only get better at writing blog posts by writing blog posts.

The problem is that I don’t know how to phone it in. I don’t know how to make a blog post about nothing.

Writing a song about nothing is easy for me. I do it all the time. When I don’t have a specific idea, I’ll literally just start writing down words in a verse. Here, I’ll do it right now. I’ll write down a verse that is going to just come fully formed, I’m going to do as little thinking as possible.

Up on the ledge I was diving for my life
Mixed up with something I couldn’t even see
Drawn into the dark like a moth into the light
How much of that was you and how much of it was me

That’s literally what I do for maybe 75–80% of Song A Day, though it changes year to year, month to month. And often when I start writing a song that way, some theme or idea will emerge organically, and then I may quickly go back to the earlier verses to make them match up.

But the point is, when I have no juice, no time, no ideas, no feelings, no energy, it’s easy for me to just sit down, write 3 or 4 verses like the one above, set it to some simple chords and sing it into my phone.

I don’t know how to do the same thing in a blog post. If I don’t have an idea for what to write about, somehow it doesn’t seem right to just do what I do for songs…to just write about nothing. In a song, you’ve got the chords and the melody to hide behind, even if they both suck.

It’s not like I didn’t already, but man, I respect people that write words down like this for a living.