I’ve been doing surprisingly well (given the additional curves life decided to throw me in the month of February) at keeping up with a schedule for February Album-Writing month that keeps me on track to be able to finish. I know myself well enough to know that if something seems impossible it will become so, so I wanted to get a bunch of songs written reasonably early in the month so that it actually felt like I had a shot at completing the challenge. In practice, it’s turned out so far to be a stately pace of one song every two days, exactly the schedule I need to maintain throughout the month. But with five songs written, some of them – one in particular – I like a lot, it’s been feeling doable. And then I came to today. I actually have time today to devote to songwriting, but I don’t yet have an idea of what to write. My facebook friends/fans have been helpful, suggesting topics. But it made me realize that it’s not a topic or even an idea I need – I’ve generated whole lists of them in my songwriting notebook so far this month; it’s a way in to a song. For me, a song starts with a phrase of some sort and I build outwards, often not entirely sure what the song is about it until it’s well underway. But a phrase isn’t enough – I’ve got lots of them in my songwriting notebook that don’t yet have a direction. There’s some moment when I’m writing when the song takes off – when I know that the phrase or the idea is capable of becoming a song. That’s the magic of songwriting. And I don’t know how to will that moment into being. It’s a little bit like dragging the kite along the ground behind you, hoping it will catch the wind and take flight. And when it does, all you can do it follow it, play with it, give it the extra string it needs. That’s the easy part. That’s when the real fun of songwriting happens. I can barely keep up with it. The hard – and mysterious – part is getting it to catch the wind in the first place. There are certainly things you can do to make it more likely, not least of which is taking the kite out to the beach in the first place. That’s what FAWM is doing for me – it’s making me regularly drag the kite behind me. If you don’t do that, it definitely won’t take off. And the more kite-flying skills and experience you have, the more able you are to get it to take off. But I remember childhood kite-flying efforts where the wind never caught the kite. Just showing up, with an idea for a song, does not – for me anyway – translate into a song worth writing. But not showing up surely won’t, either. So I guess I’ll carve out some time this afternoon to drag my metaphorical kites down the beach and see if anything becomes of them.