Blind-sided by a Yeti

So I've recently become mildly obsessed with becoming a proficient songwriter. This is especially unnerving if you've ever heard me play a guitar. I started almost exactly two years ago and, though I've come a long way, it is painfully obvious that I have a long way still to go. In spite of this, I grow weary of rehashing tired, old exercises and playing my own versions of songs that Death Cab wrote nearly 10 years ago. It is time to take my first steps into a larger, and slightly more intoxicating world. To help me on this journey I have been reading interviews, listening to songwriters, and buying up literature on the song writing method as if it would go out of style in the absence of my patronage. One such volume is "The Frustrated Songwriters Handbook" by Karl Coryat and Nicholas Dobson. It's an interesting read and I consider several of their "radical" methods to be incredibly useful in digging raw material out of the darkest, most misunderstood depths of your soul. Of course, there is a ton of polish that must be added to make that material into listen-able media, but it looks like Dobson stumbled into a cool way of overcoming creative block.

In one section of the book he offers up a mini-exercise to get in the proper mindset for holding a composition session. It is called "The 3-minute Burn," and, as the name implies, you do something for three minutes and burn it afterwards. In this case, you set a timer and give yourself three minutes to fill as much of a page as possible with stream-of-consciousness writing. After the three minutes, you glance over the page, copy any tidbits you like to a new page, and burn the original. No one will ever know that you wrote it. This is incredibly therapeutic and has helped me overcome my perfectionist nature. Wanting everything I write to be brilliant has meant that I haven't done much writing lately.

I encourage anyone (even those of you that don't think you're creative) to try the 3-minute burn - partly because you'll discover that anyone can accidentally strike gold and partly because it's fun to watch paper burn. To close out this post I've published a few of the "tidbits" that I took from my first three 3-minute burns below.

One that got away wasn't worth it anyway
Sunny sides and almond eyes aren't anything until they die
Solemn or not, here you come
Harmony hates to tell its own story and who am I to say it should?

There were a few others. Given, nothing here is brilliant, but considering they came without concious thought behind them and in about nine minutes - it excites me.

Goody's Powder is just plain fast.