How to Write Songs

From a guy on the internet whose songwriting article you stumbled on just now.

By David·May 2026

Now look, I'm no Stevie Wonder. I'm just a guy who writes songs a lot. Like, once a day fully produced, tracked, mixed, and shared levels of a lot in some periods of my life. And I'm here to tell you that just like everything else, the people who are most likely to be great start as absolute crap, work hard, and put in their '10,000 hours' and let the dirty tap flow &#!@ songs out before the good water starts, as Ed Sheeran says here. While that may be absolutely true, I think that telling you this as your first bit of advice for songwriting is extremely unhelpful. So I'm going to embark on giving you some real useful and practical advice on how to write songs.

Id, Ego, Superego: Your Three Songwriting Collaborators

Let's start with a bit of Psychology 101! A quick review: The id represents our most basic instincts and desires, seeking immediate pleasure and gratification without concern for consequences. The ego acts as the rational part of the mind, balancing the id's impulses with the realities of the outside world. The superego represents our internalized morals and ideals, pushing us to behave according to social and ethical standards.

So to put it in layman's terms, You as a songwriter are not really a single person, more of a collaboration of three parts of you. Id gets jazzed about an idea for a song and pulls your phone out and hums a melody for safekeeping, feeling a burst of primal inspiration. Your ego decides a good use of time would be to sit down and listen to that recording because your ultimate goal is to make music that connects with people and makes them feel that same burst of energy you had when you ideated it. And your superego is the one that listens and says 'wow - that idea was terrible' and deletes it from your voice memos.

These 3 folks in your head probably do a great job during your average day-to-day life of making sure you're eating enough food while also not breaking and entering your jerk boss's house to eat theirs. (Ooooh, song idea? I'll put a pin in that for later - pls don't steal.) In life, you want a balance of the 3, but in songwriting, the relationship needs to be a bit more lopsided.

Remember earlier when our frenemy Ed Sheeran had a colorful way to say your first songs are going to be dog doo-doo? He's right, they are. So that means that the first 100 times you sit down to try and write a song, you need a really strong inspiration (Id) and motivation (Ego) to counteract the fact that a part of you will never want the song to be finished, because finishing would mean seeing the crap finished product; how embarrassing! (Superego). This means we have to suspend our disbelief; we have to go to a place in our minds where we don't make mistakes, we only follow the dopamine and execute on all ideas without our inner superego having veto power.

Buppy Puppy, I love you: Songs for your Pet

If you have a cat or dog (team cat here, meow), you have inevitably made up silly songs that you sing to them... maybe other people in your household have joined in too! This is a great illustration of early songwriting. You had fun making up the words (id), you knew it would ultimately be funny and wholesome to perform (ego), and you don't have any fear that others won't like your song because either you live alone and so no one will know this secret, or you felt safe with the people in your home to be able to sing a crappy song (superego).

Ovens: Why there are more Bakers than Songwriters

Over the years, when someone asks me about songwriting, I give them this little Baking Schpeal™. (pls don't steal.) With baking, you can follow a recipe, gather all the ingredients, follow all the directions, and then comes the part where you stick it in the oven. From this moment on, a couple of things happen. One is that you give yourself grace knowing that your oven won't behave like other ovens, and there's a sort of 'unknown factor' - something to blame when the first blueberry pie you've ever made comes out tasting bitter. The second thing the oven does is create finality - a moment in time where all your hard work and creativity stop, and there's nothing else to do but await the result. The blueberry pie comes out, you see it, smell it, taste it, you make notes of where you went wrong, and you try again another day. Inspiration, Preparation, Process, Finality of the Oven, Feedback, Learn and Adjust, repeat.

When you first try and write songs, inevitably there has been some sort of inspiration (id) or motivation (ego) to begin. You've felt something so deeply and with such complexity that you feel it's only medium of expression would be the depth and complexity of a song with words. So you go to work with that first thing that really struck you - A line about how much you love someone, or a diddle you found on the guitar that speaks to you, or a melody you feel like you've had locked away since you were young - and that scrap of song is VERY important to you. In this analogy, that musical scrap you have is like an immaculate bowl of blueberries. So you go to pull out your blueberries, then you start to gather up the rest of your ingredients (whatever you typically set yourself up with for songwriting) and you begin step one - roll out your dough. And you roll. And you knead. And the rolling and the kneading you're doing is fine, but it's nothing worthy of those blueberries! So you roll some more. And now it's too thin, so you ball it all up and try again - and this is really only the beginning. By the time you have finally covered your pie with the top crust and sprinkled the sugar on top, you now have an ugly pie and not a blueberry in sight. You're unsatisfied with the creation, and you wonder if you should destroy the pie and recover your precious blueberries!

If this sounds like you, you are not alone - In my experience with talking with musicians, colleagues and friends, most people are in this same stage of songwriting infancy. They have 2 good songs they rewrite over and over, 5-15 more scraps they love, and complain a lot about 'writer's block.' I'm here to tell you that the reason why there are more bakers than songwriters is because it's hard to be your own oven. You have to choose a moment and say 'this song is done.' The only thing that will truly be the test of whether the song is good and worth 'bringing over to your new next door neighbor' is time - for me, I have to get about 2 weeks or more of distance from that song, without ever listening to it, to then come back and say whether or not it's worth sharing. And while I wait for that song to bake, I move on to donuts. Mmmmmmmm, donuts.

Let go of that inspiring scrap you're holding on to, put it in a song, and leave it there. There will be more inspiration, and the only way to really crank out songs is to care less about the outcome of that 1 song and more about the muscle memory of making songs. If a broken clock is right twice a day, we write 100 songs a day so that one has to be a knockout.

I'm all out of wisdom. Take that amazing scrap you've been sitting on and go write a &#!@ song with it!

B-B-B-BONUS CONTENT!

Here's a song I wrote when I was 15. It was probably one of the first 5 songs I ever wrote top to bottom. I can't remember much of any of the lyrics or chords, but the hook? I know every word. Well, mainly because its 2 lines repeated, and my dad TO THIS DAY occasionally sings out these lines to poke fun. And before you get mad at him for doing that, he was extremely supportive and clapped when I performed it the first time, and waited more than a decade to start his teasing.

Music

WriteHook·Felony, by 15-yo David

Lyrics