Writing with Presence

When we are open to Wisdom speaking through our songs, we start hearing Wisdom’s voice.

It’s like working with dreams. When you start noticing them, writing them down in a notebook perhaps, they become clearer and easier to remember—almost as if, when they know they’re going to be treated well, they show up. It’s the same with God, the Higher Power or Great Creator. When you invite Divine Presence to participate in your songwriting, suddenly you find you have a pretty effective co-writer.

Give it a try. Next time you’re writing a song, pause from time to time (maybe when your brain feels a little stuck) and invite in Divine Presence. This invitation can take the form of simply breathing in light or listening to silence. Or it can take the form of prayer to God or to the Ancestors (perhaps songwriters you admire or wise elders in any form). Above all, it’s an allowing, an invitation and a willingness to be participated with: to be shaped and moved by something more powerful than yourself.

From this receptive stance, you may find that lyrics mysteriously drop into place or strong ideas occur to you “out of the blue”. Coincidences may happen that serve your song. For example, when I was writing a song about my father who recently died, a close friend of his emailed me to reflect on something Dad used to say: a phrase that was exactly the line I needed for the verse I was working on.

It doesn’t matter whether you call it Divine Presence, God, the Unconscious, Inner Wisdom or the Great Songwriter in the Sky. That which joins everything together intelligently is just waiting to apply Its talents to your song. All we have to do is provide the invitation.

Choosing

Writing any song requires choice. Every choice defines and limits us, which makes it a significant thing.

A thousand choices face us as we begin to write. What is our subject? What is the form? The main idea? The melody? The chord progression? And these are only the broad strokes: beneath these come the more subtle choices of notes and words, and beyond that, instantaneous choices we make as we sing and play.

How many of our songwriting choices are truly conscious ones? What do they say about us: about who we are and what we believe?

Try this. When you first wake up in the morning or just before you go to sleep, write a simple song as quickly as possible. Don't worry about whether or not it will be performed for others. Just put it out there, to yourself and the Universe, without judgment and without agonizing over any choices at all. Write at least two or three verses, then stop and look at it.

What does it say? Does it reveal something about your life that you hadn't seen before?

By working this way, we allow our Song to choose what it wants to say, instead of letting our Ego do the talking all the time. Interestingly, the Song might be able to make choices freely (to improvise) more easily than we can, as it nimbly hops from one truth-full moment to another.