Week 6: I Think It's Called Hitting A Wall

This past week a few things happened: Andrew flew off to the USA to swan around at SXSW, John discovered that his new drumkit, affectionately known as "Esther", has arrived in the country, and I hit a proverbial wall creatively. About the last one in that list - it was bound to happen at some stage, surely. Yes, unfortunately this week I pretty much managed to achieve nothing. You know how originally the plan was to cut myself off from the world and go into 'solitude'? Well that worked for a bit but this week it started to go against me. I think that as a person you can only take so much time without contact with other people. But that seems well timed considering I am back in Brisbane as of the other day. I'm spending a few days not writing to get my breath back so to speak but tomorrow I'll set up my songwriting station and get back into it. I'll take some pictures etc of the new surroundings for next post.

I think every songwriter (and I'm generalising here without any possible way of knowing for sure) probably has moments where they just can't write anything good no matter how hard they try. That's what's happened to me this week. It's an interesting feeling. It's particularly interesting when in weeks previous you've been quite productive. So in stages such as these you know you're not completely useless but at the same time you have no guarantee that you'll be able to write something good ever again. To make myself feel better I like to think of things such as these in statistical terms. Statistically speaking, 99% of songs written are going to be either really bad, bad, sort of bad, mediocre, alright, and kind of good. That leaves 0.9% for songs that are good and 0.1% for songs that are great. When having a dry spell in songwriting the way I see it is that I'm just churning through the 99% really quickly and therefore paving the way for 0.1% of greatness to happen. Feel free to disagree, but that's how I sleep at night.

Anyway, it's St. Patrick's day so for all you pale skinned Irish heritaged people out there, like myself, have a great celebration. I for one am off to drink beers and hopefully do or witness something awesome and worthy of a song.