Because you’re never too old to plaster your bedroom with pictures of your heroes.
If you keep a copybook, the entire world offers itself up to you like an apple. Whose work do you love? You can make any one particular CD, song, book, or ballet your classroom. By paying close attention to a piece of work and struggling to understand how it’s made, you can make any great artist your teacher—even if you’ve never met them. And even if you never will.
Finding Models
How do you choose which songs and lyrics to analyze? How do you choose which artists, thinkers, writers, creative people to accept as your role models? Well, it often happens that you’re instinctually drawn to certain artists, but who you choose to follow might also depend on what your goals are. If you want more than anything to get a song cut in present-day Nashville, be sure to study whatever successful songs are coming out of Nashville at present.
Personally, I don’t like to base my quality standards on what makes a song marketable in L.A., Nashville, or anywhere else. Instead, I take my cues from great poets, literary classics, jazz, art songs, classical music, and other high-ambition arts. And, more than anything else, I trust my own tastes. If I don’t love it, if it doesn’t interest me or move me in some way, I’m not going to study it and I’m certainly not going to imitate it.
Personally I admire highly specialized, well-crafted music. And my tastes do tend to run a little on the strange and experimental side. It may limit my potential audience to a smaller group, but that’s the music that interests me.
Through listening and learning about music, you’ll find yourself drawn to certain scenes and styles of music, too. Your tastes are as unique as your fingerprint; let them develop and change naturally as you grow.
Your role models don’t have to be songwriters
Can a Nashville songwriter look to Bach for inspiration? Absolutely.
You’re under no obligation to learn only from songwriters in your genre. In fact, your role models don’t have to be involved in songwriting at all. They might be composers. They might be poets or novelists. They might be architects, samurai, special forces soldiers, ballerinas, painters, or adventurers. Maybe they inspire you with their work ethic, their strength of character, their adventurous spirit.
Personally, I’m inspired by the mountain climbers who make the pilgrimage to Mount Everest each year to test their mettle against that massive mountain. Climbing Everest is an incredibly long-term project. It’s unthinkably tall, it’s cold, there are avalanche hazards, the oxygen is so thin that at times you might only be able to find the strength to take two or three steps every minute. Altitude sickness is a constant danger. Near the summit, climbers have to strap on oxygen tanks to avoid becoming delirious and making fatal mistakes from lack of air. I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from the stubbornness and grit of these people who are able to just keep putting one foot in front of another despite all that suffering. They literally fight their way to the very top of the world. The top of the planet! Amazing.
As a songwriter, and as a person, take your inspiration wherever you can find it. Contemplating people you admire and work you appreciate is a healthy pastime, and one that can inspire you to keep on pushing through your own obstacles when the going is tough. Admire well-crafted things everywhere you encounter them, and admire well-built people, too.
Good writers write badly
One other thing to keep in mind is that just because a particular writer or composer is regarded as “great” doesn’t mean that they never made any poor artistic choices. Hero worship won’t make you a better songwriter! Even the best of the best make questionable decisions at times, so don’t be shy about admitting to yourself that you don’t necessarily love or understand everything a favorite artist creates.
And just as you do with passages you love, try to understand exactly why you don’t like in a particular lyric or piece of music. Exactly which parts turn you off, or leave you indifferent? How might you have handled the piece differently?
Reaching back
It may be that you’ve studied one role model for a long, long time. Now it’s time to find out: who was your role model’s role model? Who’d they collaborate with? Whose work did they admire? What did she read, where did she live, who did she listen to, what else did she like to do with her time?
No artist operates in a vacuum. Each absorbs influences and reacts to those influences in a unique way. Each one is another forking limb on the very, very long limb of musical history, selectively taking cues from those who came before and synthesizing those cues into a new direction.
Through Jeff Buckley I was introduced to Led Zeppelin, French songbird Edith Piaf, and the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. As it turns out, Jeff and I have similar tastes in other areas, too: Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Merle Haggard, on and on.
Even if you’re alone in the middle of nowhere, writing songs on an empty porch in the woods, and even if you can’t even hear the nearest road, you’re part of a rich tradition of music and poetry. It can be very encouraging to remember that you’re never really alone as a songwriter; instead you’re sprouting from the work of your creative influences. Look back as far as you can, and remember: You’re just the latest sprout on the tree.