How to Start a Song When You Can't Be Bothered

Right. The hardest run I do all week is the one in the hallway, sitting on the stairs with one shoe on, inventing reasons. Not the five miles. The lacing. Once I am out the door the run more or less happens on its own. The whole fight is getting out the door.

Songs are the same. A blank page does not care how good you are. It just sits there being blank, and the longer you look at it the bigger it gets. So here is what I actually do when I cannot be bothered to start. None of it is clever. All of it works.

Five ways in when you cannot be bothered

1. Lower the bar until it is on the floor

You are not writing a song today. Drop that. Today you are writing eight bars of rubbish, on purpose, and you have already succeeded the moment they exist. Aim low enough that you cannot fail, and you take away the only thing the blank page has on you, which is the fear of doing it badly. Do it badly. That is the plan.

2. Set a timer for the dead time

I learned to write in the dead hour between soundcheck and doors: a corner, a guitar, forty-five minutes I would otherwise have spent scrolling. I call it the forty-five-minute song. A timer makes the page smaller. Give yourself fifteen minutes, not an afternoon. An afternoon is terrifying. Fifteen minutes is nothing, and nothing is much easier to start.

3. Play something bad on purpose

Make a sound. Any sound. Mash two chords together you would never normally use; the chord builder is handy for this, because you can throw chords up fast and play something deliberately wrong without committing to it. A bad sound is a thing you can fix. A blank page is not. It has to make a noise first!

4. Keep your hands moving

Strum one chord for two minutes. Hum nonsense over it. Tap the tempo on your leg until a shape turns up. The point is not the chord or the hum. The point is that a body in motion writes, and a body staring at a wall does not. Thinking about the song is not starting the song. Moving is.

5. Talk before you write

Sometimes the fastest way into a song is to not write a song at all. Open Morning Pages and put down three pages of whatever is in your head, no line breaks, no chorus, no judgement. It is a way of clearing your throat on the page. By the bottom of page two, more often than not, a real line has shown up in among the nonsense, and now you are off.

The song can be rubbish. It just has to exist first.

Why this works

Every one of those moves does the same job: it makes starting smaller than the dread of starting. You are not trying to be inspired. You are trying to lower the cost of the first move until it is cheaper to do it than to avoid it. That is the whole game. Good is a job for tomorrow, when there is something on the page to be good to. (If you have old voice memos on your phone, by the way, that counts as already started; raiding them is its own way in.)

The song does not have to be good today. It has to be there today.

That is the whole trick. Lace up. Get out the door.