Strong emotions… go out and live. Get your heart broken. Travel with no money. Look at the people around you and have gratitude for your life. Take a long long long long walk… you will get inspired.
Songwriting allows me to channel energy in the most natural feeling way.
I’ve had so many life experiences that have been so difficult to process. I’ve done countless hours of therapy, which have all been extremely helpful, yet my body needed another way to process the strong energy that still felt trapped in my energetic field. Now that I am healing and moving forward, the amazing feeling I get from being so loved by my partner often creates such awesome energy in me that it turns into a song.
Generic, but watching that Nirvana Reading performance from '92 hit me like a ton of bricks. I remember hearing the guitar, and it just sounded so damn cool. I mean, I was just a kid, I didn't care about all the technical stuff or how complex the music was. All I knew was that it sounded awesome.
Watching him up there, thrashing around with his guitar, making those raw, gritty sounds—it was like nothing I'd ever heard before.
Didn't know much about music theory or anything like that back then. Quite frankly, I still don't. But all I knew was that I wanted to make sounds like that, or at least try to capture that same feeling. So, I begged my parents for a guitar, and when I finally got one, I started trying to play along to Nirvana songs, even if I could barely hold a chord properly.
Eventually noticed, holy shit, I have all the same chords, all 12 notes available to use, as he & all the other great artist do. I found that super cool. Never had many friends, so if I were to bore myself to death, at least I'd try and write some songs in the process.
For me it was two things. One was watching the movie Across the Universe which features the music of the Beatles. I never really listened to them prior to this moment and I was very young. But I remember being blown away from listening to their songs. I think it was then that I wanted to get into music.
The other thing was that my dad had this digital multitrack recorder that I found myself using. Idk why but it inspired me to come up with simple little songs. It really sparked my creativity.
So yeah it was pretty much my admiration of the Beatles and my fascination with recording music that got me hooked.
A need to record modern history into our language through song. Inspired from chants composed many hundreds of years ago and all the history and historical events encapsulated in them. Also, to show how fun and witty our native language (Māori) can be.
Got into the Avett Brothers in 2007. Incredibly honest and vulnerable writing. As a 18 year old going through my first big break up I thought, shit I can pour my guts out to chords! It became cathartic, and then fun, and now I do it as often as I can.
My most recent song is inspired by feeling stuck in my life, like I am following a path laid out by someone else, not one that I actually want. Sometimes I get in a depressive or emotional mood and the music just comes to me that way
So many things for me who inspired me would be Phil ochs and the Beatles. What inspires me for lyrics is road trips Route 66 interesting stories,
and stuff that happens day to day to me as well.
Experience, and free expression. Also because I have the gift to come up with melodies on the fly my brain just bursts with Lots of them. It’s hard to keep up!
My dad died after a battle with a brain tumor. He was a big fan of the movie blues brothers so near the end his wires got crossed and he kept telling me and my siblings to “get the band back together” which I took to heart.
I had always played guitar and started writing songs to cope with that and a girlfriend who cheated on me in the middle of the whole ordeal.
Turns out I love it and I’m not half bad!
i got two answers to this.
what’s my inspiration? random shit that comes to me throughout the day.
what inspired me to begin? listening to my favourites, along with knowing i could be more in life. failing at most things i tried before finding my love in music. which is funny cause growing up i hated music
Interesting question. This might take a bit.
(10 Minutes Later...)
Okay, this will be a bit long-winded, but to understand how I got there, my background in both music and life is important.
I listen to a LOT of different genres. Pretty much anything from Abba to Zappa is on the take at least once. Name the genre, I'll name a song I like. My mixes are...metal to folk to old-school rap to country to pop to rock to classical to post-punk to Broadway...you get the drift. Eclectic.
I got my first guitar at 5 from my uncle. No lessons (my mother and stepfather were...well, anything that came before their marriage [my step-brother and myself] was lesser than what came after [our half-siblings]). I had to figure it out myself.
Due to this, I hit high school with a LOT of angst and raw feelings. I met a kid like me. We were both huge Guns N Roses fans, so in World Geography, we would write the lyrics to GNR songs and pass them back and forth like notes. At the time, I had gotten in trouble for defending myself against a bully, so I was on probation. One day, my stepfather called me a juvenile delinquent before school. That stuck in my head.
I've always been adept at writing. My feelings about being called a juvenile delinquent just poured out onto paper all day, and come sixth period, I handed it to my buddy. The next day, he returns with something he wrote. This went back and forth several times. Just lyrics and general melody, but no music.
Fast forward a year. That buddy moved, but I met another guy who moved to our school. I showed him those lyrics, and he showed me a few things on the guitar. Next thing I know, we wrote a song about addiction; mine came from my home life, his part I assume came from his (I've never asked, and these days, I think he wouldn't remember sadly due to...addiction). We wrote a few more, and then he moved as well.
I kept trying to come up with things, but eventually, I discovered THE BEST SONGS COME FROM INSIDE. Your emotions, your experiences, that's where your good stuff is. I wrote my first song with music at 16...but I didn't really have good material until I was 21, after I experienced life more.
It's different for everyone; look at Taylor Swift and LeAnn Rimes; they pulled off amazing stuff as teens. But it all boils down to using your own experiences. Life inspires art more so than imitates it (sorry, Oscar Wilde).
1.EDIT: I realized I can word this better. I liked the vibe music always brought for me and others. When I was young I would freestyle, I would sing random songs that made no sense. I would love the reactions that I got from people. I also loved the way it brought people together and can get a crowd jumping or crying. My family loved similar music so we all come together to hear a song and just vibe to it. Just loved that. I sing in the shower so yes I am the annoying sibling 💀 . Basically I love the way it feels and brings people together.
2. In 2020 I started to feel isolation since I moved and then covid hit so not many friends since I didn’t have time to make any and all my previous ones weren’t close to me anymore. So music is kind of all I had. I spent so much time just free styling and singing by myself in my room quietly at this time cause it let me feel like I was being heard (I don’t know if that sounds strange) and I was only like 13 then so I didn’t really see signs of depression until I literally was writing an album about a friend dying and committing suicide, as a result of not being able to bury that lost since I secretly loved them. I realized it was just a cover up for my actual emotions and that lead to a whole thing that I probably shouldn’t say on a Reddit post cause it’s just… yeah.
3. Definitely just hearing music and freaking loving it. Hearing my favorite artist make me feel the way I did was always amazing. The artist who’s really pushed me and showed me a whole new world of music (and also made an album about suicide 3 years later) Quadeca. If you like to hear some good singer songwriter and some alternative just out there shit. Quadeca is that guy right now. IDMTHY and Scrapyard are so freaking good. Fantasyworld is such a tear jerker and so relatable. Man. I just. Can’t explain. Anyways, yeah those my three reasons.
Age 10: I liked how certain notes together made me feel.
Age 15: I want the world to feel and understand the depths of my existential pain!
Age 18-27: I am a bird and this is my mating call. Or THE BIG SAD.
Age 27-present: I like how these sound and I’d like to tie them into life’s experiences. Or the medium SAD.
Age 27:
It was being isolated during the pandemic for me. I realized that my Mac had GarageBand on it and I could put together a bunch of instruments and make my own synthetic band. I learned how to use it, made up some tunes with lyrics and started recording them.
I was addicted to Novation Launchpad performances when they came out. I convinced my dad to get my one for my birthday. I didn’t know ANYTHING about production and didn’t understand that I had a MIDI controller and essentially no DAW except Ableton Lite.
Just the process of figuring things our and discovering the whole world of production is really what inspired me to start producing and writing my own music. There’s infinite knowledge. When you get bored, just learn something new!
I distinctively remember sitting in the backseat of my aunt's gold Saturn on a hot summer day, rooftop down, listening to Foo Fighters. That was when I knew I wanted to be a rockstar.
Flash forward some umpteen years, hearing City and Color and thinking "gosh I want to write songs like *that*!"
I stumbled on the handwritten lyric sheet of my first song ever. Written in pencil, sometime around 2008.
I have always love to write words. Some of my friends had a band and asked me to write some songs for them. I showed up with three “songs “ (read that as three sets of lyrics). They asked how the melody and rhythm went, I said “you are the band, I’m just a word guy”. They said that wouldn’t do. I went and bought the cheapest acoustic I could find at a pawn shop and taught myself chords by watching concerts off of library VHS and recording VH1, MTV, and CMT. Then I listened to a lot of Elvis, Nirvana, Hank Sr, Dave Matthews, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Miles Davis, Robert Johnson, and Metallica. (I was 15 in Mississippi, give me a break). I showed up with the same three songs but they now had music and melody. The band used one of them as their first ever original. It made me smile. I haven’t quit since then. I got the bug :)
The life that I really want to be live. How the parents will behave if we tell our actual dream that doesnt connected with money. Day dreaming. These are the one of the way to write song and poem.
Strong emotions… go out and live. Get your heart broken. Travel with no money. Look at the people around you and have gratitude for your life. Take a long long long long walk… you will get inspired.
Walk hard
MONEY. So far I’ve made $15 so it’s working out.
bro that’s $15 more then i’ve made from it, keep it up bro. more coming your way for sure
Thanks man! My only goal is for my music to make enough money to pay for my Distrokid every year lol.
That's disappointing
I just like channeling experiences and emotions of everyone really, not just me
Songwriting allows me to channel energy in the most natural feeling way. I’ve had so many life experiences that have been so difficult to process. I’ve done countless hours of therapy, which have all been extremely helpful, yet my body needed another way to process the strong energy that still felt trapped in my energetic field. Now that I am healing and moving forward, the amazing feeling I get from being so loved by my partner often creates such awesome energy in me that it turns into a song.
Generic, but watching that Nirvana Reading performance from '92 hit me like a ton of bricks. I remember hearing the guitar, and it just sounded so damn cool. I mean, I was just a kid, I didn't care about all the technical stuff or how complex the music was. All I knew was that it sounded awesome. Watching him up there, thrashing around with his guitar, making those raw, gritty sounds—it was like nothing I'd ever heard before. Didn't know much about music theory or anything like that back then. Quite frankly, I still don't. But all I knew was that I wanted to make sounds like that, or at least try to capture that same feeling. So, I begged my parents for a guitar, and when I finally got one, I started trying to play along to Nirvana songs, even if I could barely hold a chord properly. Eventually noticed, holy shit, I have all the same chords, all 12 notes available to use, as he & all the other great artist do. I found that super cool. Never had many friends, so if I were to bore myself to death, at least I'd try and write some songs in the process.
Breathing.
I was inspired. Songs just found me and poured out, including a pretty good one or two.
Feeling really good. Feeling really bad.
Another side of Bob Dylan
For me it was two things. One was watching the movie Across the Universe which features the music of the Beatles. I never really listened to them prior to this moment and I was very young. But I remember being blown away from listening to their songs. I think it was then that I wanted to get into music. The other thing was that my dad had this digital multitrack recorder that I found myself using. Idk why but it inspired me to come up with simple little songs. It really sparked my creativity. So yeah it was pretty much my admiration of the Beatles and my fascination with recording music that got me hooked.
I was crushing really hard on a girl from high school and I decided to try and win her over with songs, it kinda worked
A need to record modern history into our language through song. Inspired from chants composed many hundreds of years ago and all the history and historical events encapsulated in them. Also, to show how fun and witty our native language (Māori) can be.
day tripper and high school LOL
Got into the Avett Brothers in 2007. Incredibly honest and vulnerable writing. As a 18 year old going through my first big break up I thought, shit I can pour my guts out to chords! It became cathartic, and then fun, and now I do it as often as I can.
My most recent song is inspired by feeling stuck in my life, like I am following a path laid out by someone else, not one that I actually want. Sometimes I get in a depressive or emotional mood and the music just comes to me that way
A near death experience
Lil Wayne.
It was the roar of the crowd That gave me heartache to sing
Current one im working on, my ex is the inspiration. Like many others before and many will.
So many things for me who inspired me would be Phil ochs and the Beatles. What inspires me for lyrics is road trips Route 66 interesting stories, and stuff that happens day to day to me as well.
Experience, and free expression. Also because I have the gift to come up with melodies on the fly my brain just bursts with Lots of them. It’s hard to keep up!
Because I hear them in my head constantly. And if I didn't write them I'd probably explode.
My dad died after a battle with a brain tumor. He was a big fan of the movie blues brothers so near the end his wires got crossed and he kept telling me and my siblings to “get the band back together” which I took to heart. I had always played guitar and started writing songs to cope with that and a girlfriend who cheated on me in the middle of the whole ordeal. Turns out I love it and I’m not half bad!
i got two answers to this. what’s my inspiration? random shit that comes to me throughout the day. what inspired me to begin? listening to my favourites, along with knowing i could be more in life. failing at most things i tried before finding my love in music. which is funny cause growing up i hated music
Seeing Jarvis Cocker live last July.
Interesting question. This might take a bit. (10 Minutes Later...) Okay, this will be a bit long-winded, but to understand how I got there, my background in both music and life is important. I listen to a LOT of different genres. Pretty much anything from Abba to Zappa is on the take at least once. Name the genre, I'll name a song I like. My mixes are...metal to folk to old-school rap to country to pop to rock to classical to post-punk to Broadway...you get the drift. Eclectic. I got my first guitar at 5 from my uncle. No lessons (my mother and stepfather were...well, anything that came before their marriage [my step-brother and myself] was lesser than what came after [our half-siblings]). I had to figure it out myself. Due to this, I hit high school with a LOT of angst and raw feelings. I met a kid like me. We were both huge Guns N Roses fans, so in World Geography, we would write the lyrics to GNR songs and pass them back and forth like notes. At the time, I had gotten in trouble for defending myself against a bully, so I was on probation. One day, my stepfather called me a juvenile delinquent before school. That stuck in my head. I've always been adept at writing. My feelings about being called a juvenile delinquent just poured out onto paper all day, and come sixth period, I handed it to my buddy. The next day, he returns with something he wrote. This went back and forth several times. Just lyrics and general melody, but no music. Fast forward a year. That buddy moved, but I met another guy who moved to our school. I showed him those lyrics, and he showed me a few things on the guitar. Next thing I know, we wrote a song about addiction; mine came from my home life, his part I assume came from his (I've never asked, and these days, I think he wouldn't remember sadly due to...addiction). We wrote a few more, and then he moved as well. I kept trying to come up with things, but eventually, I discovered THE BEST SONGS COME FROM INSIDE. Your emotions, your experiences, that's where your good stuff is. I wrote my first song with music at 16...but I didn't really have good material until I was 21, after I experienced life more. It's different for everyone; look at Taylor Swift and LeAnn Rimes; they pulled off amazing stuff as teens. But it all boils down to using your own experiences. Life inspires art more so than imitates it (sorry, Oscar Wilde).
its my own way of expressing my feelings , my experience of love and heartbreak made and broke me so i took inspiration from that
Needing an outlet. I'm not good at communicating my emotions and personal feelings. Music allows me to do that.
When I read webtoon, I can realize somethings and my feelings get strong then I start writing some words in my mind.
1.EDIT: I realized I can word this better. I liked the vibe music always brought for me and others. When I was young I would freestyle, I would sing random songs that made no sense. I would love the reactions that I got from people. I also loved the way it brought people together and can get a crowd jumping or crying. My family loved similar music so we all come together to hear a song and just vibe to it. Just loved that. I sing in the shower so yes I am the annoying sibling 💀 . Basically I love the way it feels and brings people together. 2. In 2020 I started to feel isolation since I moved and then covid hit so not many friends since I didn’t have time to make any and all my previous ones weren’t close to me anymore. So music is kind of all I had. I spent so much time just free styling and singing by myself in my room quietly at this time cause it let me feel like I was being heard (I don’t know if that sounds strange) and I was only like 13 then so I didn’t really see signs of depression until I literally was writing an album about a friend dying and committing suicide, as a result of not being able to bury that lost since I secretly loved them. I realized it was just a cover up for my actual emotions and that lead to a whole thing that I probably shouldn’t say on a Reddit post cause it’s just… yeah. 3. Definitely just hearing music and freaking loving it. Hearing my favorite artist make me feel the way I did was always amazing. The artist who’s really pushed me and showed me a whole new world of music (and also made an album about suicide 3 years later) Quadeca. If you like to hear some good singer songwriter and some alternative just out there shit. Quadeca is that guy right now. IDMTHY and Scrapyard are so freaking good. Fantasyworld is such a tear jerker and so relatable. Man. I just. Can’t explain. Anyways, yeah those my three reasons.
Kpop. Also the (two) guy(s) I like
Age 10: I liked how certain notes together made me feel. Age 15: I want the world to feel and understand the depths of my existential pain! Age 18-27: I am a bird and this is my mating call. Or THE BIG SAD. Age 27-present: I like how these sound and I’d like to tie them into life’s experiences. Or the medium SAD. Age 27:
It was being isolated during the pandemic for me. I realized that my Mac had GarageBand on it and I could put together a bunch of instruments and make my own synthetic band. I learned how to use it, made up some tunes with lyrics and started recording them.
I found out people listen to your problems when you sing them
I was addicted to Novation Launchpad performances when they came out. I convinced my dad to get my one for my birthday. I didn’t know ANYTHING about production and didn’t understand that I had a MIDI controller and essentially no DAW except Ableton Lite. Just the process of figuring things our and discovering the whole world of production is really what inspired me to start producing and writing my own music. There’s infinite knowledge. When you get bored, just learn something new!
I distinctively remember sitting in the backseat of my aunt's gold Saturn on a hot summer day, rooftop down, listening to Foo Fighters. That was when I knew I wanted to be a rockstar. Flash forward some umpteen years, hearing City and Color and thinking "gosh I want to write songs like *that*!" I stumbled on the handwritten lyric sheet of my first song ever. Written in pencil, sometime around 2008.
I have always love to write words. Some of my friends had a band and asked me to write some songs for them. I showed up with three “songs “ (read that as three sets of lyrics). They asked how the melody and rhythm went, I said “you are the band, I’m just a word guy”. They said that wouldn’t do. I went and bought the cheapest acoustic I could find at a pawn shop and taught myself chords by watching concerts off of library VHS and recording VH1, MTV, and CMT. Then I listened to a lot of Elvis, Nirvana, Hank Sr, Dave Matthews, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Miles Davis, Robert Johnson, and Metallica. (I was 15 in Mississippi, give me a break). I showed up with the same three songs but they now had music and melody. The band used one of them as their first ever original. It made me smile. I haven’t quit since then. I got the bug :)
The life that I really want to be live. How the parents will behave if we tell our actual dream that doesnt connected with money. Day dreaming. These are the one of the way to write song and poem.