I’m the woman you don’t know you wanna be with yet

Standing in your American Psycho-style kitchen
eating pizza at 2 a.m.
You’re not a touchy person, you say
and you don’t hold me like men usually do
after sex
but you talk to me and ask me questions
it seems, for now, that’s enough
neither of us came here for love
or maybe we’re both lying

You don’t squeeze your tube of toothpaste
in the middle
and you say you’d let your children
cry themselves to sleep
so that they can become independent adults
are you truly that distant or simply afraid
you’d say you’re rational or type A
and consider it a compliment
I an insult

I said we’re different once
you said, some would say complementary
I think maybe just different

But I still wonder
looking at the bruise on my arm
and standing on the balcony, watching
cars and communist buildings
and thinking, what if we both got out of here
would we still be different
or would I be new?
And would you know then
that I’m the woman you want to be with
and you are the man who might not bore me
for a while, at least

I thought I had stopped living
when you shook me awake
Abruptly, throwing me down on the bed
you said you had a lot of friends who
are working hard and going nowhere
and you weren’t talking about me
but I’m annoyed
it took a man to point it out

You don’t move in bed at night at all
you sleep like a vampire
It’s the first time I called a man smarter than me
but you think Jordan Peterson is intriguing
so I might have to revisit that statement
you’re puzzling

I think that love is all that matters in the end
but you’re all logic and intellect
let go, live a little, get that stick n poke
I bet you hate I’m writing about you
you’re the one who dated a songwriter
and at least I can say
that we shared mostly just good things
I hope I’ll see you again one day
and that you’ll stay (a little longer)

A Moment Not Enjoyed Is a Moment Wasted

This morning, I was reading ‘Our Women on the Ground’, a book with essays by Arab women reporting on the Arab world. Curled up under two huge blankets that were swallowing me whole, with hot tea on the cardboard box I use as a bedside table, I was reading about unimaginable horrors and daily tribulations that people live through in places that are not Berlin. I know sadness is relative, I know people everywhere have problems and they matter even though they might not include lack of electricity or civil war. But there was one phrase in the book that struck me, and it was about how the time we’re not enjoying life is the time we are wasting.

I started making music because it made me feel alive. As opposed to other things I considered studying or working in, music and writing didn’t feel bland, they felt different and they made me feel different, too. Nonetheless, after graduating in Songwriting in June, I fell into a black hole trying to figure out how to do anything other than music. For some reason, being a musician suddenly seemed like a ridiculous idea, and when I told people what my major had been, I felt like my degree sounded made up. To join the world of grownups, properly join it, I felt like I had to come up with a plan B, a different career path entirely, that other people – but mostly me – could take seriously.

When I read that sentence in the morning, I remembered what drew me to music in the first place – the joy of it. All the decisions I had made in my life up until this point had been driven by the innate desire to get the most out of my life, and for the first time in months, I felt like that wasn’t something to be ashamed of. Maybe it was actually something to be proud of.

Working in creative industries is hard for myriad different reasons – no one is doing it for the money or the recognition (or actually, maybe many people are but those are the last things you’ll get out of it). But the hardest part is believing that you are a musician, that you are doing something worthy and aren’t just working on some personal vanity project. I forgot that for a few months and spent all of the summer applying to marketing internships instead. In the end, I didn’t take any of the offers because something didn’t sit right with me, even though I couldn’t figure out what it was.

That sentence hit home. Life is about enjoying every single moment. Sure, we do things because we have to. I have a job that pays because I like to eat and have a roof over my head. But I’m not changing my lifestyle or the person I am so that I can start taking myself more seriously. Because, really, nobody wins when people start taking themselves too seriously. I want to have fun and experience joy and do things I believe in, like having coffee walks in the middle of the day and kicking leaves around in the park, and then coming home to play the guitar and write this blog post. And tomorrow, I will wake up and go to work and know that I’m doing it all so I can keep doing the other thing. Being a musician and enjoying every single moment of it.

How to Keep Making Music When You’re Exhausted from Your Day Job

I have been talking about going for a music career, like really going for a music career for a very long time now. I am making to-do lists and practising, visiting open mics, and socialising with other musicians, but there is just one problem with the whole setup. I’m not making any money apart from a few gigs that paid last month’s rent and nothing else.

None of this was an issue a few months ago when I still had savings, but after a recent trip to London, I’m dead broke. Careful deliberation followed: do I start busking to make money or do I get a part-time job? Do I do something I enjoy but might get stuck in or do I do something horrible just to incentivise myself to make music? In the end, I decided on a part-time job that I enjoyed but that I could clock out of so that when I got home, all I had to think about was music. I’m starting work in a hostel (again!) next week.

I’m quite excited about having a stable paycheck, despite the fact that the job has nothing to do with music. I was inspired by The Roches’ ‘Mr. Sellack’, the song in which one of the sisters asks for her waitressing job back after running out of money.

O Mr Sellack

Can I have my job back?

I’ve run out of money again.

Last time I saw ya

I was singing Hallelujah

I was so glad to be leavin’ this restaurant.

The Roches, ‘Mr. Sellack’

However, I do know that having a job next to being a musician can take its toll on my motivation. But I’ve had to juggle jobs with uni and music before, especially while living in London, so I have a few strategies worked out to get me back to my guitar or my writing desk after work:

1. Sunday evenings are for planning.

Before my work week begins, I sit down with my bullet journal and write a to-do list. I list everything I can think of – who I need to contact, who I’m meeting for rehearsals or press shots, what I need to write, or the songs I need to memorise. Then I weed out the stuff that isn’t that important or can wait until the week after, so I’m not overloading myself with to-do items. Then I plan out how much everything will take and decide what days of the week I need to do everything. I always have one buffer day at the end of the week where I don’t schedule anything, so I can use that day to rest or to finish up everything that didn’t get done earlier. When I worked a lot, I scheduled my workdays by the hour, so the schedule was airtight, but now that I live in Berlin and don’t have to work quite as much to pay rent, I’m not as anal about this stuff anymore.

2. I make a habit of practising every day.

I have to admit that I’ve been slack with this over the summer, but usually, I try to make time for music practice every single day. On days when I have too much going on or I’m just too tired, I only do vocal warmups and maybe run some scales on my guitar to stay in shape. That only takes fifteen minutes but it keeps me from going stale or from making me feel like less of a musician because I’m spending so much time away from my instrument. Make sure you make time to play every day, even if it’s just a little bit.

3. I implement achievable goals so that I feel like I’m moving forward.

The worst part about having a day job is that it can feel like a step back, or like you’re giving up on music, even though a day job is often necessary to sustain your music career. It can help to have some objectives to work towards that make you feel like you’re still making progress. I have recently scheduled a new song release that I’ll be working on for the next month.

4. I funnel my money back into my music.

This is something I never used to do. All the money I made, I would spend on travel or simply put into a savings account (and there’s nothing wrong with that either). But to grow as a musician, you have to invest money into music, which is exactly why having a day job can be a blessing. I am planning on recording an EP in January, so I will be saving up most of the money I make to pay for studio time.

Corona Depression and Lack of Motivation

I hadn’t written anything in weeks – no songs, no stories, no morning pages. I was struggling to get up to do yoga in the morning (so, I didn’t). I stopped playing music. But today I had a date with a friend – we were going to meet in a coffee shop and write. Both of us hadn’t been able to find the motivation to do anything creative for a while, so we both needed it. And once I sat down in the cafe (not without its struggles – I had forgotten my mask), I realised that writing felt good. I was enjoying it.

After an hour and a half of straight writing, we paid for our overpriced Boxhagener Platz coffees and went outside. “That felt good, didn’t it?” I exclaimed, somewhat surprised because I had expected I would just sit in front of the computer, dried up and empty, unable to get a word down. My friend nodded and said: “I finally feel like I’m shaking off the Covid winter depression. For months, I couldn’t get myself to do anything. All the things I’d once enjoyed doing just became the things I was forcing myself to do because I knew they were good for me. Now, I feel like I’m enjoying them again.”

When she said that, I stopped walking. That’s exactly what my life had been, too. Only, the last few months, I couldn’t even get myself to do the things that I knew were good for me. I’d just spent a month binge-watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and hating myself for it. It felt good to know that others were going through the same thing. And maybe it was unrealistic to expect that, once everything opened up, we’d be back to our old, sociable, productive selves right away. We did just spend over a year holed up at home, unable to share our music with anyone in real life.

For me, being able to go to smokey bars and gigs that stretched well into the night again was a blessing. But at the same time, I was struggling with keeping up the routine I had developed in lockdown. Seeing all my friends again and meeting new people felt great, but I felt overwhelmed and exhausted most of the time. After several weeks of gigs and open mics, I realised that maybe what I needed was not a night out, but a night in. But I also realised that it might take a while until I felt like the person I used to be before Covid hit.

In the last year and a half, a lot of my priorities have shifted. I’ve become less obsessed with money because I had nothing to spend it on during lockdown. I started appreciating my friends more and paying more attention to the close ties I’ve formed with people. I fell more in love with music because of what it did for me and not because of how it made people see me. In other words, I started paying attention to the right things, but it did hack away at my productivity. Now that we weren’t living in a vaccuum anymore, I needed to get back into the swing of things. Here are some of the things that helped me regain my rhythm:

1. I cleaned my space.

Maybe it’s my inner control freak talking, but when my surroundings are cluttered, I lack the motivation to do anything. When I clean and reorganise my flat, I always feel way more motivated to get stuff done in my life in general.

2. I agreed to a standing writing date.

Sometimes you just need an outside incentive. That writing date I had with my friend? We made it a weekly thing. So, now, I know that no matter what happens, I will sit down to write again next Monday. It won’t have to be good. But I’ll have to get it done because I’ll have my friend there who’ll be doing the same thing.

3. I started writing my morning pages again.

It’s amazing how much morning pages change my working habits. When I don’t do them, I always feel like the day is getting away from me. When I start my morning by writing 3 longhand pages in bed, I always manage to hype myself up enough to actually do all the things I claim I will in my diary. It’s pretty much my first step towards recovery in any difficult situation.

4. I made rules.

If something makes me feel bad but I can’t stop doing it, I make a rule. I can’t watch more than one episode of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ a day. I’m not allowed to anymore. I also can’t skip two days of yoga in a row. I have to go to bed before midnight if I’m not out at a concert. Sometimes, we need some self-discipline to get ourselves back in line. Having these rules in place forced me back into some form of normality, where I can find the time to make music because I’m not watching six episodes of a soap opera back-to-back.

5. I try to remember that every day matters.

Tomorrow will come when it does. But I want to make today count, too. And I want today to count every day, no matter how tired, shitty, or unmotivated I feel. When I don’t accomplish what I want and when I do, I try to remember to be appreciative of the time I have NOW because it’s the only time I have, right? I have a quote above my desk that’s a little cheesy but that I like anyway (I got it off some blog post somewhere, but for the love of God, I don’t remember which one):

Your mind has the ability to transform your day from a crappy, hide-under-the-covers day to a fabulous, dance-around-the-kitchen kind of day.

With that in mind, go forth and be creative.

What Kind of Person Does It Take?

I went to law school. For one day. Two lectures! But only one day. I enrolled because I wanted to do something good in the world, to do something meaningful that would also pay for my parents’ retirement. I also enrolled because I had just spent four months living in a hostel in London and everyone kept telling me that it was just a phase. Eventually, I’d have to get a proper education, a 9-5 job, and a house. I could still travel during summer and I would have time for music on the weekends, of course. But after one day of law school, I realised something. It wasn’t a phase – I was a musician, and travelling and making music are a part of my life.

I go through phases, as I think everyone does. Some mornings, I wake up and wish I had studied something that would’ve given me a fast pass to a job, like accounting. I have to specify here: a job that pays. It’s demotivating working towards something that you’re not sure will ever work out. Devoting hours to practice, to writing, to networking and performing, only to have to work as a nanny to pay rent. Music doesn’t always pay. Neither does writing. Both are still hard work.

Sometimes, I get to go home to visit family – who are so supportive it’s as if the sun shines out of my ass. But then I also see childhood friends, and sometimes, they ask: “So, what’s the plan? You’re not gonna keep working as a nanny, are you?” The truth is, I don’t have a clue. The whole project hinges on hope, despair, and Plan B, C, Y, and Z. I have a million backup ideas in my head in case the music thing doesn’t work out. I can do a master’s. I can start an internship in marketing. I can keep working as a nanny until I drop dead.

In Berlin, I’m surrounded by a surrogate family of people who all believe in the cause. They’re all musicians, most of whom are making money solely from music. I don’t but I haven’t tried hard enough. I haven’t gone busking or taught music, I haven’t even booked a tour yet. For all the years I’ve been playing, it feels like I’m perennially just starting out. I’m always halfway out the door. I’m only ever half trying to be a musician.

I have trouble committing to things. I don’t know why but I can’t commit to people properly – whenever something becomes serious, I look for a way out. I can’t commit to career paths – I’ve started five different degrees and only finished the one because I had already racked up student debt. I can’t even commit to dreams – wanting to be a musician one day, a writer the other, but then deciding that maybe a 9-5 is the way to go. I’m flaky, and most of my friends know this about me.

Maybe that’s why this music thing is not working out the way it should. Maybe that’s why I’m working as a nanny and exploring other options. Because I don’t actually believe I can do it, and if I never try, I’ll never find out. I’m not talking fame or fortune. I just want enough money to cover rent and groceries. And another part of it is that I never know who I want to be – do I want to be the soccer mum or the hippie traveller? Do I want a family, a house, a job, or a whole lot of uncertainty? But the truth is – I do know what I want because I’ve been tentativily choosing it this whole time.

I chose to live in a hostel for two years and collect stories. I chose to move cities twice to sustain my music. I chose to study Songwriting and to perform and to stand in line for open mic signup in rainy London in December. For all my flakiness, I have never given up on being a singer-songwriter and a bit of a nomad.

So what kind of a person does it take to be a musician? Probably someone with a little more faith and a little more stamina. Someone who has no other options. One of my closest friends struggled through lockdown, trying to figure out whether he should consider doing something other than music. But through all of it, he said: “I don’t know what else I would do, though.” And maybe that’s the kind of person it takes to be a musician. The person who has no other plan, the kind of person who’s all in.

I’ve weighed my options. All of them. And being a musician and a writer is terrifying and hard, but it is the only option that brings me joy, that makes me feel alive, and that makes me proud of what I do. I have just spent two months veering every which way trying to figure out what to do if not music. But it didn’t work. It never does. So, this time, I’m in. I’m all in.

How Independent Are DIY Musicians Really?

When I was a teenager, my dad sent me a Youtube video where Patti Smith gave advice to aspiring musicians. She said:

“Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned about doing good work and protect your work.”

Patti Smith Interview: Advice to the Young

Those words always stuck with me. Whatever I was doing, I heard Patti Smith say in the back of my mind: “Your principles are all you have.”

Last month, my musician account was disabled on Instagram because of suspicious activity, leaving me unable to access any of my content or reach out to any of my followers. With an upcoming release on 11 June, it was also the worst timing. I panicked. I cried. I called my friends, outraged about the injustice. Then, I heard Patti Smith in my head say: “Are you actually crying about Instagram?” I remembered her words about protecting my work and staying true to my principles, and something clicked.

As someone who values slow living, mindfulness, and real connection, I was very quick to jump on the bandwagon of promoting everything on social media. However, the return on investment of Instagram – at least for me – has been pretty low. All the hours put in only resulted in reactions from people I already knew engaged with my music. And just like that, they were all gone. So, in reality, I had spent hours promoting Instagram instead of my music.

After my account was shut down, I spent weeks trying to recover it, only to get messages back saying that no one could help with my issue. As I was getting increasingly more frustrated, I also started realising how dependent DIY musicians are on social media. Where do we promote our music if not on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.? Maybe we aren’t dependent on labels anymore, but we are still not independent. And again, I wondered: why did I bother with social media? Did it make me happy? Was I being creative through it, getting any sort of fulfillment, fostering real connection? No. But I was compromising my integrity as a musician by spending valuable time obsessing about social media.

Instagram made me show people a highlight reel of my life and made me jealous of the people I admired. It stressed me out in a way that wasn’t healthy and pushed me to do a form of marketing that felt unnatural to me. So, last week, I made a U-turn. I decided to stop promoting my music on social media. We keep thinking it’s the only option, thus making it the only option. Musicians become increasingly dependent on networks they don’t control, spending valuable time producing content no one pays for, and paying Facebook to get posts seen by at least their own followers. For some musicians, the return is high – they go viral or keep a dedicated following interested in their work. But am I wrong in thinking that for most musicians it really isn’t?

Besides, if everyone is on social media to promote their music, how effective is it? I started brainstorming on other marketing tactics that resonated with me more and fostered a sense of connection I wanted to create with my music – zines, free online workshops, blogging, building my mailing list… The possibilities are endless. Sure, I might not reach thousands of people a day, but let’s be honest… I wasn’t anyway.

Instead of posting on Instagram, I am now gonna run a blog about my music life on this website, so keep an eye out. You can also subscribe to my mailing list and follow me on Bandcamp. My next song ‘Strongest Woman’ is coming out this Friday and all the proceeds will go to Good Night Out, a UK non-profit that’s creating safer nightlife by training up spaces, event organisers, and communities to respond to and prevent sexual violence.

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On Losing Focus and Picking Up What You Should Be Putting Down

I’ve just had one of those weeks when you question everything, are too exhausted to do anything, and end up watching ‘Jane the Virgin’ and eating pizza instead of doing what you probably should be. I don’t know why I have these weeks, and they don’t come often. This time, I blame it on the fear of graduation, the shifts in my personal relationships, and the realisation that I’ve been in Berlin for a while, wondering if it’s time to move on.

I was feeling drained and unmotivated, trying to work at my boyfriend’s place. Suddenly, I noticed myself rearranging his bedroom in my head, imagining what it would look like if I brought one of my fleece blankets over or bought some flowers for his desk. “I’ll help you clean your bedroom when I’m done writing my thesis,” I said. He looked at me with a look of confusion and said: “Cool. You don’t have to do that, but yeah nice.” In the evening, he finally got into a workflow after a day of running around, and since I didn’t want to interrupt it, I went to the supermarket and made dinner for us instead. Then we watched Netflix and went to bed.

In the morning, I woke up angry. It was one of those weeks, remember. “What’s up? Are you mad at me or something?” my boyfriend asked, and I shook my head and packed my bag, getting my bike and half-shouting: “I just need to be alone. It’s not you.” It wasn’t him. Not at all. I just had a flashback. I had a flashback to the last time I felt lost and decided to find myself by building a life with someone else. I neglected university, lost the few friends I had made in London, realigned my goals to fit his. Again, it wasn’t his fault. But this is what I do: when I don’t know what to do, I project it by trying to help others. If I can’t be useful to myself, I might at least be useful to others.

I cycled home on that Friday afternoon and when I got home, I crashed in bed and slept until the evening. I never have naps because I find it hard to fall asleep in the middle of the day, but I just felt drained. I had no idea what I was doing – I was angry with myself for falling back into old patterns but I was used to running away from my head when being inside it became uncomfortable.

Somehow, a shift happened between that Friday and today. Well, not somehow, I know exactly how. Instead of falling headfirst into fixing other people, I took time off. I spent time by myself. On Saturday, I went for a walk and sat by the river while listening to Laura Marling. I read a book and watched a movie. On Sunday, I cleaned and cooked. On Monday, I lit some incense, meditated, and journalled. By Tuesday, I was back in my body.

This morning, I was listening to a podcast while running in the park. It was sunny, and that was probably the real reason I felt optimistic about life after several grey weeks in Berlin. But I was listening to Hattie Hill talk to Marie Forleo about how women tend to carry instead of to care – how we feel compelled to take on other people’s problems and fix them because that’s how we’ve been brought up. I loved the distinction she made between caring and carrying because it’s so accurate. However, I notice that I often choose to take on other people’s problems not only because that’s what’s expected of me – and very much how my mum operates too – but because it’s a way to escape my own ambitions.

Ultimately, it’s a form of self-sabotage. The thinking that drives this is: “If I don’t try well enough, I can’t fail. If I say that I couldn’t go for something 100% because my time was taken up by helping this other person, it won’t be my fault if I don’t succeed.” Not to say it’s bad to help other people or be there for others. But my boyfriend doesn’t need me to rearrange his room or make his dinner (unless it’s just a nice thing I want to do). And you can care about someone and be there for them without having to uproot your life to make theirs more bearable.

The thing is, sometimes I choose to lose focus. I lose focus because I’m afraid to fail. I lose focus because I think that what I want is stupid and unworthy of my undivided attention and commitment. I lose focus because I don’t want to miss out on all these other paths I could take if I spread myself thin. But it all comes down to fear, and we don’t ever want to base our decisions on emotions that ultimately hold us back. We want to make decisions we wholeheartedly believe in. I’ve already spent a year of my life losing focus before and I don’t want to go there again. If you’re going through one of those weeks where you’re desperately looking for something to distract you, here is what I try doing now instead:

1. Switch off.

I mean switch off from technology, work, and other people. Sometimes, we want to escape because we feel overwhelmed, but instead of slowing down and taking time for ourselves, we overload ourselves with social engagements and new projects instead. Turn off your phone, throw out your to-do list for a day. Go for a walk, journal, read a book. Be with your thoughts. If you’ve been running around for a while, it will feel incredibly relaxing to just be.

2. Have a ritual.

I’m not talking about routine here. I’m saying that sometimes, you need to reset yourself. If you’re feeling low and you feel like there’s no point to anything anymore, you need some symbolic new start to breathe new life into your aspirations. For me, that was a full moon ritual on Monday – I saged my room, journalled about what I wanted to release and what I wanted to welcome, and burnt the pages over the kitchen sink. On Tuesday, I felt like I was starting fresh. New starts are important, so think of one for yourself and how you can mark it – maybe you can journal or meditate, or start a new resolution. Examples of new starts are Mondays, birthdays, new moons, full moons, new months.

3. Meditate, manifest, write.

Once you’ve taken time out for yourself and you feel well-rested, it might be time to reclaim your focus again. Meditate on what you want and ask for guidance, write down your vision, make a mood board. Remember why your focus matters, think about where you’re going. Instead of trying to flee your fears, work through them – write down your limiting beliefs, think about the real reasons you’re feeling lost. Is it because you don’t know what you want? Or is it because you’re afraid?

Should We Fight the Single-by-Single Release Culture?

In October 2020, I planned my release calendar for 2021. I was going to release four singles throughout the year – nothing more, nothing less. “The release cycle of a song is three months,” my tutor said at uni, and that served as my guiding principle. The only flaw in my plan was that the four songs sounded much better together than they did as singles. They were written more or less at the same time, talked about similar emotions of heartbreak, growth, and learning. They were just about good enough to be singles, but they would have been a much better EP.

I know a lot of artists who struggle with this. The other day, one of my musician friends complained about how he felt he had to release all of the songs from his EP as singles, which made me wonder why he bothered to release them as an EP at all. By the time the EP comes out, everyone will have already heard the songs out of context.

I started asking myself that question after recording the demo album I mentioned last week. The songs all talked about one period in my life and went together well, but as standalone songs, they didn’t sound quite right. The album told a story. Besides, the recordings were as lo-fi as they go, and getting into the vibe of the sound would take some time, and if the listener would be jerked out of it after one song, it just wouldn’t have the same effect.

Then I heard another friend talk about how this single-by-single release culture affects our artistic output. We’re expected to release a single every few months at the most, or we’re dead to the world. We’re expected to produce content but we’re not content creators, we’re artists, right? But taking time to ruminate over our work, to experiment, fail, and grow without it being documented by social media and Spotify isn’t a part of our culture anymore.

Art takes time. It takes time to get an idea, get excited about it, work hard, hit a roadblock, start working again, throw it away because it was shit after all, start again. Ideas form over time through experimentation, failure, stagnation. If we’re pressed to produce stuff all the time, we’re excluding vital parts of the process. And that opens up a whole other can of worms: the fear and guilt that come with the idea that we have to be working and creating ALL the time. Who can ever live up to that?

First of all, no office employee ever works the whole time they’re paid for. I grew up with a dad with a 9-5 job. He used to read the paper on the toilet until another employee would come to look for him. My ex-boyfriend hid in the toilet to watch the final episode of GoT during his working hours. My current flatmate comes into my room at least five times a day to chat while she’s technically on shift. I read books behind the reception desk of the hostel I worked at. All this to say that no job ever involves constant effort. There are always breaks, downtimes, coffee chats. But somehow, people are outraged when artists take time off to live.

When I have free time and I don’t use it to work on my music, I feel guilty. Not to say that I work on my music all the time because I don’t. But that doesn’t take away the fact that I feel horrible whenever I turn on Netflix or read a book instead. But to create art, artists need to live first. If I’m not learning or experiencing anything, I have nothing to write about, no matter how hard I’m working on my music.

The single-by-single release culture has affected artists in various ways, but most of them don’t stand out to me as beneficial. Of course, there are reasons why artists choose to release single tracks instead of EPs or albums. I have too, so I’ll explain my reasoning here. First, it’s cheaper to have to pay for the recording and production of one song as opposed to a whole collection of them. Another is that it allows you to reassess and tweak your strategy for the following releases. The last one I can think of is that you might not have enough songs for an EP or an album, but in that case, it’s probably too early for you to release any music at all. But ultimately, most of us are releasing singles because we’ve gotten it into our heads that it’s what we’re supposed to do. And it’s just not.

Do I Trust My Own Artistic Judgement Now? When Did That Happen?

I was walking down the street in late autumn and sobbing on the phone. “I don’t understand why my dad hates my new songs,” I said. “I thought they were the best songs I’d ever written.”

The day before, I had enthusiastically sent my parents demos of some new stuff, songs that I thought would blow their minds with their brilliance. When my dad called the day after, he said he wasn’t overly impressed. For other people, the moment when they stop caring about what their parents think probably comes when they’re teenagers. For me, however, that moment never came. And my parents rarely told me they didn’t like what I was doing, so I grew to need their validation. Whenever my dad told me he didn’t like my songs, I started questioning everything about them, often abandoning songs because I started believing he was right.

“Erika, this is ridiculous,” my friend said. “Of course, you want validation and approval. But you also know what’s good and what’s not for yourself. Music is inherently subjective. So what if he didn’t like it? Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe it just means you’re growing. Maybe this is the Universe telling you that it’s time to start trusting yourself.” Of course, it was the fucking Universe.

I spent a week forcing all of my musician friends to listen to those songs, none of whom told me they hated them. I started thinking that maybe sometimes, what my dad said was an opinion rather than the absolute truth. I was playing one of those songs in my childhood bedroom when I went home for Christmas. My dad came into the room and listened, and when I finished, he said: “This is a great song. When did you write it?”

One of my closest friends criticises my music incessantly. “That lyric really jars with the rest of the song,” he’ll say. Or: “It doesn’t rhyme at all.” Or, my favourite: “It just needs some work.” But hearing his feedback at the same time that my parents decided that the direction my music was taking was not sitting well with them has helped me to let go of wanting to please anyone. I couldn’t please the people closest to me, so what did it even matter? I just started doing my own thing.

A few weeks ago, I recorded a demo album and sent it to my parents for feedback. I don’t care, but it doesn’t mean I’m not curious. My mum called me and said: “I liked it better when your voice sounded pretty.” My dad said: “You sound too angry.” I knew I was growing as a person when those comments didn’t make me burst into tears. Maybe I am a massive wimp, but I was extremely proud of myself when I shrugged at their words and carried on with life after our phone call.

Today, I talked to my Songwriting Tutor at uni. I showed her the arrangements I had in mind for some new songs, and she said: “Well, if you trust your artistic judgement, that’s the only thing that matters.” And when I got off the Zoom call, I thought to myself: “I do trust my artistic judgement, don’t I? When the hell did that happen?”

Songwriting Habits I’ve Developed Over the Years

My dad was one of the first people to start a blog. I think he started it in the early noughties, and it was called ‘Me and My Lada’ because we lived in Russia, and he owned a Lada. He wrote in it regularly, posting once or twice a week, but sometime after our move to Belgium, he stopped. I remember scouring through his blog a few years ago, and stumbling upon an article he wrote about how to write a song. It was the most popular article he had ever written, even though he’s not strictly a songwriter.

He disconnected the page a while ago, mostly because the number of comments on the post was overwhelming. Most of them seemed to be written by people who were disappointed that songs didn’t write themselves. That’s why I’m wary of writing articles like that, because no guide can guarantee you’ll get a song out of it, let alone a good song, but also because songwriting is highly personal. So, instead, I thought I’d just share some of the habits I’ve acquired over the years, and how I write songs. I don’t think I’m sharing anything particularly useful, but it might be interesting nonetheless.

1. I write about everything

My friends write very differently from how I write. I spill out onto the page – anything goes, no thought is too embarrassing and no confession too private to be made into a song. I process things quickly. After what turned out to be a traumatising date experience a few weeks ago, I woke up in the morning to pen down lyrics in bed, getting down a melody before brushing my teeth. That means that everything I write is constantly being worked into songs – things my friends say become notes on my phone when I go to the bathroom, if I have a melody, I’ll hum it into voice memos on my way home. I never sit on a lyric for more than a day or two. I don’t attach myself to my songs because I’m writing all the time. A lot of what I produce is utter shit because there’s so much of it. But I don’t take any of it personally, and none of my songs are special, even though all of them are

Other musicians can take weeks to write a song. One of my friends has a list taped to the wall above his bed with songs he has yet to finish, and some of them have been up there for months. He changes lyrics around, plays the songs until they jump off his fingertips. He never writes about things right after they happen – he gives his music breathing space so that the songs can come to life without being stifled by sentimentality.

2. I write regularly to fight writer’s block

I write regularly, aiming at one song per week. I have a friend who writes a song a day, although that sounds like complete insanity, and most of my friends write only when they feel they have something to say. I always feel like I have something to say, which I guess is the joy of being 22. But when I don’t write for a few weeks, coming back to an empty page feels much more daunting, like there’s a lot more at stake. This is why I sit myself down a few times a week, and this is why I write about everything – not enough earth-shattering stuff happens to me to write profound songs every week. I write regularly to keep my fear of failure at bay and to prevent writer’s block. The more I write, the surer I am I’ll still be able to write the day after.

3. It doesn’t matter whether I write lyrics or melody first… but I write lyrics first

Another question I often get as a songwriter is whether I write melody or lyrics first. This has changed several times throughout the years for me, and I think it’s nice to experiment with these things. I started writing songs when I was twelve and my English was pretty poor, but since I wanted to make it big and become world-famous, I refused to write in Dutch. At that time, nailing a good melody was much more important to me than having lyrics that made sense (and more often than not, they didn’t). Now, I know that writing is one of my strengths, and so is my urge to overshare, so lyrics have become increasingly more important, and I often write them first. When I’m having an emotional breakdown and want to process something in real-time, though, I grab a guitar and hum lyrics over a melody, doing both at the same time. In other words, the order in which I write is irrelevant. I have, however, been told that I should stop cramming so many words into my songs, and that good lyrics don’t make up for shitty melodies, which gave me some food for thought regarding this.

4. I always write songs down on paper

I never write lyrics on my phone, although I know that a lot of musicians these days do (although I’ve never met a folk musician who did). There’s something about writing on paper that I love, and I like that you can’t erase lyrics that don’t fit or move words around quite so easily. When I start singing the song, I always end up using some of the lyrics I had previously discarded. I also like seeing the process on the page, the struggle of my thoughts fighting their way out. I write down the chords I play, and if I don’t know the names of the chords, I’ll sketch the fretboard and write tabs. When I don’t do this, I can spend hours trying to remember what tuning I wrote something in, or what weird chord I used where.

5. I finish songs once I start them, even the ones I think are bad

I always finish songs once I start them. Some of my best songs I thought were average or even crap when I first wrote them. Had I decided they were worthless after writing the first verse, I never would have finished them, so I try to hold off judgement on my songs until I’ve sat on them for a week or two. I don’t know any musician who disagrees with me on this – we have all walked away from a songwriting session thinking we’ve written a hit to then listen back to the song and hate it. The opposite has also been true. I just know that when I don’t finish a song in one sitting (or at least its skeleton), I usually abandon it altogether.

6. I always record the songs I write on my phone

Once I’m finished, I record the song into voice memos on my phone. I didn’t always do that. I used to think that I wouldn’t forget the melodies to good songs. How wrong I was. Some melodies are good but not catchy, sometimes another song will worm its way into my ear, making me forget everything I’ve ever written, sometimes, the intricacies of a melody will be lost because I was too lazy to press record. So, now, I record it all. The bad and the good because you don’t know what’s bad or good until time’s passed. Some of my friends record a video of the song once they’re finished because it can also be used as song promo on Instagram later when you’re looking back to where a song originated.

These are just some of my songwriting habits, but everyone has their own way of doing it, and I’m sure you do too. Let me know if you have any questions, or if I’ve skirted over some important part of the process. I’d be happy to chat about this.