Experience
You’re gonna need something to write about.
Practice is important, perfecting your skill, but being a really good guitar player or a really good vocalist is kind of like being a really good computer, you’re just a tool, you’re essentially inert, you can’t be believed in.
Or look at professional athletes. As successful as their careers might be on the playing field, very few succeed thereafter. Because they’ve got no skills. And hitting people is not something authorized amongst geriatrics, we’ve yet to have a Legends NFL, hell, a lot of the guys can barely walk.
So you’ve got to be three-dimensional.
If this means it takes you longer to put in your 10,000 hours, so be it. It’s not a race. If you’re not taking time to soak up the sun, you’re not gonna have anything to say.
As for the nitwits who make it in their teens… Most of them end up broken down on the side of the highway, didn’t Michael Jackson regret missing his childhood, wasn’t Screech gonna lose his home?
You don’t want to be successful before puberty, before adulthood, because fame rarely lasts that long, and all those childhood memories and friendships, you just won’t have them.
So I’d stay in school. Not so much for what you learn in the classroom, but the experience of meeting and interacting with others. This is where you learn about humanity, find out who you really are, your biases and your strengths. Take risks. Win and lose. That’s great fodder for a song.
And unless you’re planning on being a businessman, don’t take business courses. You’re learning methodology, you’re not learning how to expand your artistic mind.
And travel. Miles Copeland set the standard for international touring with the Police. He’d lived in all these foreign countries as the son of a CIA agent. Whereas most managers and record company employees, especially Americans, had barely been anywhere. Turned out there was a worldwide market for music with English lyrics, in places so out of the way many U.S. citizens couldn’t place them on a map.
And read.
A lyricist is about words. You can get inspired by movies and TV, but your greatest resource is the printed page, or the Kindle/iPad/computer screen. You’re inhaling words and they’ll end up flowing out of you without you having to think about it. You can learn so much. If you’re willing to put in the effort.
Most people have nothing to say. That’s why they rely on cowriters and producers. Without them, they’ve got nothing.
But great artists possess a plethora of insight which the public craves.
You don’t have to be a great guitarist to sell a song, but a great guitarist can’t sell a shitty song.
Great songs are about creativity. The more you write, the better you get, but you’re mining your life, your experience, and if you’ve got none, no one’s gonna be interested.
P.S. Read the Wikipedia entry on Kris Kristofferson for example. Look at all he did before he was a successful songwriter. These experiences made him who he was, gave him perspective, and we’re still interested in what he has to say, his recent albums have gotten very positive reviews. Is Vanilla Ice still recording?
