I'm a lyricist, not a songwriter

Writing songs is hard.

I mean, I realize that the whole point of it is to try and do things that (a) I don't normally do and (b) That will be a bit more challenging for me than the safe, comfortable things I'm good at.

But man, writing songs is hard.

I've got one written. Like, done. It's not great, but it's catchy, and with any luck it could save your life. You'll see what I'm talking about when I post it. I just have a rough version recorded so far so I don't forget it; I didn't want to deal with producing the final audio and/or YouTube clip when I finished writing it.

That's the other thing; it hadn't occurred to me that when I said "I'll post it on YouTube" that I'd actually have to produce a video of me performing the song. I'm genuinely not the strongest guitar player, so playing a song I just wrote and singing the words I also just wrote is hard to do at the same time. Usually, technology saves me by only making me perform one of those at a time, then just laying one over the other. I bet I could just do that with the video too. Or maybe I could just practice the song well enough to do it for YouTube. We'll see. I'm thinking of calling this first song "Rooftop Plea".

I have been trying to write these songs in different ways, but again, it's hard. With the rap songs I've written before, it was always super easy to just come up with a concept, a cadence, some clever words, and then a bunch of other words to put between the clever bits of words to make a song of decent length. With the last melodic song I wrote, I tried coming up with a chord progression before writing lyrics. That worked well enough, and I got a pretty good song out of it.

With Rooftop Plea, I tried getting the song written before the words. I did a different sort of plucking cadence than usual, and didn't use chords. And, when I sat down to write it, it was going to be a completely different song. But then I was like "This sad sap song is boring me. Let's make it something awsome". To which I responded, "Yes, of course, awesome! That's just what this song was missing"

I've gotten a bit carried away with that now into my second song. I've got some great lyrics and a pretty catchy tune. Well I have some great lyrics, anyway. Unfortunately, the tune I'm hearing is only in my head, and I lack the auditory ability to figure out what chord progression for it is. It also is by far the most complex chord progression in any of my songs. Also, I think I'm hearing an ukulele instead of a guitar.

But still! I'll figure out something. It's gonna be a good second song. Well, it'll have good words, anyway.