Songs about Writer's Block

Fatlip, “Writer's Block”

Natasha Bedingfield, “These Words”

Gillian Welch, “One Little Song”

MercyMe, “3:42 AM”

If you’re a songwriter with writer’s block, I guess one thing you can do is write a song about it. Here are the four best songs I’ve heard about the subject, all recent ones (“3:42 AM” is from 2006, “Writer’s Block” is from 2005, and the other two are from 2004). “These Words” was a number-one hit in a lot of countries, including the UK, but it never caught on the U.S.; “3:42 AM” is from Coming Up to Breathe, which made number-one in the U.S., but only on the Christian charts; and the other two tracks are far more obscure.

These songs are all so catchy, brilliant, and perverse that when I tried to write about them, I got writer’s block.

Now if your writer’s block is so bad that you can’t even write about writer’s block, here’s a passage from Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory that might help.

“If you think of something new to say, if a cyclone comes, or a flood wrecks the country, or a bus load of school children freeze to death along the road, if a big ship goes down, and an airplane falls in your neighborhood, an outlaw shoots it out with the deputies, or the working people go out to win a war, yes, you’ll find a train load of things you can set down and make up a song about.”

Good advice, no? It goes back to that local news entry I posted. But personally, I’d like to hear a few more riffs on having writer’s block, so scribble away.

P.S. I wrote this a while back, and now I’ve thought of something to say. I’m fascinated by songs that talk about the process of their own creation, and all four of these songs take this to some sort of extreme. If you take a certain aesthetic of authenticity--tell the truth about the immediate moment you’re in--to its logical extreme, what else is there to write a song about than writing a song? Now writing a song about writing that same song can’t be easy. So how about writing a song about how hard it is to write a song? Now that’s even more honest, right? All these performers, in my opinion, take their honesty about their shortcomings as songwriters to an absolutely embarrassing pitch--Fatlip blames the failure of his entire career on writer’s block while delivering the most perceptive thoughts on hip-hop authenticity I've heard from a hip-hop artist; MercyMe gets frustrated because the Lord Himself isn’t talking to the songwriter like He apparently usually does; Natasha Bedingfield evokes Byron, Shelley, and Keats in one line and then pronounces hyperbole as “hyper-bowl” in another; and Gillian Welch gets totally honest about how frustratingly unoriginal most of her songs actually are, and starts repeating herself simply because there’s nothing else to say. And what makes this even more fascinating is that you can tell that not one of these artists were actually suffering from writer’s block when they wrote these dazzlingly writerly numbers, thus rendering their apparent naked honesty about the process completely false.

- Yuval

Comments

[Graham Vickers]

Ah, the paradox: if the song came about, there was no writer’s block. Let me bounce a musical thought off your theme. Nobody ever bought Abba songs for their existential insights, but the group’s final, bleak single—The Day Before You Came—is a strangely haunting anti-song, being a catalogue raisonné of a drab existence that passed for life up until…what? The song never touches on what presumably changed everything: it’s a protracted melancholy build up without a celebratory payoff. Very Swedish…as indeed is the English of its memorable couplet:
“I must have had my dinner watching something on TV
There’s not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn’t see…”

[yuval taylor]

Yes indeed, and one of my favorite songs too. But while the maximalism of the verses contrasts hauntingly with the minimalism of the chorus, Abba does tell us what presumably changed everything: "you came." If you're looking for this kind of hinting minimalism taken to its logical conclusion while retaining all of Abba's seductiveness, check out the Swedish woman who bills herself as El Perro del Mar.

[Thalia May]

A complicated thought, but given that the Natasha Bedingfield song is about writers' block, I wondered if it was partly inspired by 'I Capture The Castle' - wherein a writer suffers from said block and is eventually locked (by his daughter Cassandra) in a tower and made to type any old rubbish to overcome his problem - the result of course being a modernist classic. The last line of the book is Cassandra using up the end of her notebook, writing 'I love you, I love you, I love you' just as in Natasha Bedingfield's chorus.

I might just be overanalysing it. Great book either way though (and an OK song).