How To Become Friends With Your Inner Critic

Songwriting Zen reader and good friend Matt Clearing brought up an interesting point in a comment he posted yesterday in response to my Cal Williams Jr Songwriter Spotlight.

He mentions in his comment that:

“…this is the second time I’ve heard something negative about the inner critic on songwriting zen, and I have to stand up for this oft-maligned contributor to the creative process.

I can faithfully attest to my inner critic forcing me to re-evaluate my music and songs again and again, taking songs that were crap and putting them where they belonged (the circular file), fixing lazy songwriting, and generally making my music better than it would otherwise be.

While I agree that it’s important to keep one’s inner critic from becoming a crippling obstacle to any productivity, I owe what meager level of quality my music has to that curmudgeonly naysayer within, and my music would be even lamer were my inner critic not there to tell me when something sucks…”

Reading this got me thinking that maybe I have been too harsh on the little voice we all have inside of us.

Perhaps it would be a good exercise for me to discuss the positive aspects of having an inner critic using Matt’s comment as a template.

It’s my belief that a songwriters process is only as effective as their ability to win over their daily battles with their inner critic however, Matt states that his inner critic actually helps his songwriting process by:

“…forcing me to re-evaluate my music and songs again and again, taking songs that were crap and putting them where they belonged (the circular file), fixing lazy songwriting, and generally making my music better than it would otherwise be.”

We all have voices inside our heads that warn us, caution us, praise us, critisise us and generally keep us honest.

Some people call it their conscience, some say its their intuition. Some say these voices have saved lives.

Getting back to writing songs, whatever you want to call it, the most important thing is that you use this voice to work with your songwriting, not against it.

What Matt’s saying is that he uses his relationship with the voice inside to work for him.

Maybe turning the inner critic into an inner ally is the challenge that all songwriters must rise up to.

You can never get rid of the inner critic but I do believe (after reading Matt’s comments) you can become friends with it. How we, as songwriters do that will make interesting reading in the future.

Until next time, happy writing,

Corey Stewart
Singer/Songwriter/Musician

PS: Thank you Matt for inspiring this post. I really appreciate your feedback

Keywords: songwriting, songwriter, songwriting tip, songwriting help, songwriting idea, songwriting resource, songwriting blog, corey stewart

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Tags: Corey Stewart, Creativity, lyrics, matt clearing, music, song, Songwriter, Songwriting, songwriting blog, songwriting tip, Songwriting Zen, writer, zen

Thursday, July 10th, 2008 Songwriting Zen

1 Comment to How To Become Friends With Your Inner Critic

Matt says:

July 10, 2008 at 1:38 pm

Anytime Corey. Thanks for this.

Having looked at my comments again, I thought maybe I’d add a bit more context to what I’m talking about, because it’s true, what you say that the inner critic is just one of the many facets of our songwriting personality, which are ultimately all part of the same thing. Bear with me, cause it’s a little long, and I’ll probably cross-post it at my myspace blog later.

I dunno if it’s the 90′s rock purist in me or what, but there are dealbreakers for me which I see in other artists, especially big-time heavily promoted national/international artists, that are sometimes hard to see in myself, but that I force myself to see and deal with.

A while back, I woke up on a Saturday morning with a song in my head. It wrote itself in minutes. This is something that I usually love when it happens, because I’ve made a rule to try to stick to things that are inspired, not to work overly hard trying to match a riff to a lyric or rhyme things that don’t make sense to me.

If I get a melodic idea that comes to me and words naturally flow to it, I am usually very happy about it, and I’m pleased to say that nearly all of my music that I’ve managed to usher to completion has come in this way, because if it didn’t come in this way, I generally ran into a wall somewhere and it didn’t get finished.

But this song had some issues. One, it wasn’t my style. Fine, I like doing different styles, and am always open to stretching my idea of what my music can be. Two, it sounded like another artist that I happen to like. No big deal, we all emulate our heroes. Three, it was way catchier and more rocking than anything else I’ve written, and had the potential to completely overshadow everything else I do, much of which I believe in a great deal more than the sentiment and feel of this particular song.

Like I said, there is a bit of a 90′s purist in me. And this song had “sell-out/one-hit wonder” written all over it. It’s not that it was a bad song. Quite the opposite. But it involved a psuedo-hip-hop rhyme scheme and delivery…a simplistic circular riff…a breakbeat…and an immediate, memorable chorus…nothing wrong with any of those, outside of the fact that none of them have featured in my music to date.

I played it at an open mic…people came running, took notice, were totally into what I was doing by the time it was over, and then lost interest once I started playing what had previously been what I thought was my best stuff.

I recorded drums, bass, and guitar for it for what would eventually become my recent record…while I didn’t get a particularly great drum take for it, I could have worked with it. Ultimately I decided that it was not the direction that I wanted to go in. If, in the future, I want to make more aggro funk garage rock, this would definitely be something that would fit into that. I don’t see that happening, but hey, it’s possible.

My point is that songwriting, like all things, boils down to choices. Popular artists make choices all the time on content like the one I made above. Recent examples…The Roots dropped Birthday Girl, a song featuring dude from Fall Out Boy, from their recent record because they didn’t feel it fit on the record. The Chemical Brothers, on the other hand, kept the Salmon Dance, which was obviously something that would appeal to everyone but their core audience, and the results were predictable…critical fallout, message board flamewars and heaps of radio airplay, the likes of which they hadn’t seen since 1998.

Faced with this same kind of choice of keeping a potentially great song at the expense of my album, turning off people like me (people who like albums that flow without a big WTF? sore thumb in the middle of it) for the sake of appealing to people who would otherwise not enjoy my work, I junked it. My inner critic said, “Matt, this is not right for you.” And I’m pretty cool with that.

Come to think of it, I probably should have submitted that song for FOOM.

But this is not just about whether a song is right or not. The inner critic is always there for us when it comes time to make choices, from, “Alright, on a scale of 1 to 10, how clichéd is this lyric?” to “which bridge progression do I like best?” “Does anyone really care that catorcé doesn’t immediately follow tres?”

These are the important questions that can be posed to the inner critic, and whether its advice is heeded or not, simply hearing what the critic has to say ensures that we make fully-informed choices in the pursuit of our craft.