WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA

Checklist #4. This one is important

My best friend Jim Wilson. Me with my red Hagstrom bass guitar. 1967.

Great ideas make great songs. Plain and simple. Did I mention that great ideas make great songs? If you have a great idea, you have the chance to write a great song... but it’s still no guarantee.

You have to constantly be on the lookout for great ideas and jot them down in your trusty composition book, on your phone, or with a Sharpie on your forearm. Great readers make great writers. Your high school English reading list is a good place to start looking for ideas. You can’t read To Kill a Mockingbird and not want to write about injustice. You can’t read 1984 and not write about man versus society. You can’t read The Count of Monte Cristo and not feel a revenge song bubbling up (thank you, Taylor Swift). You can’t read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and not write the ultimate unrequited love song.

Great readers make great writers.

I have heard many successful writers say that if you stumble on an idea or melody in the middle of the night, don’t sweat it. If it’s great, you will remember it in the morning. I am not that confident or smart... seems like Keith Richards isn’t either.

You don’t necessarily have to have a big idea to start the song, but somehow, someway, somewhere along the “long and winding yellow brick road,” you have to find it. Maybe you back into it. Maybe it’s a happy accident. “Just trust your subconscious to find it,” so says my pal Brent Cobb. Just keep showing up and keep writing the song.

A while back, I was set up to write with a living legend. I was prepared. I had good coffee. I had candles burning. I had studied his iconic discography. I knew his story. I had some scintillating questions that would provide interesting discussions. He walked into my studio, crumpled into my very soft and chic black Corinthian leather couch, and kind of mumbled, “I have an idea.” “That is promising,” I thought... until he said he wanted to write a song about “vampires in love.” Honestly, I thought he was joking. Blood rushed from my face, and my hands got clammy. He wasn’t joking. I literally had no earthly idea how to proceed. This writer is a genius, having written songs that are absolute classics.

My anxiety was ratcheting up because he is a genius, and if the genius wants to write a song about “vampires in love” or “goldfish on Mars,” I am going to try. But I developed amnesia. I couldn’t remember my own name. We discussed it. We beat on it. I jammed my sharpened Blackwing Palomino pencil into the underbelly to try and find the soft spot. We couldn’t find our way in. The idea was IMPERVIOUS.