I woke this morning wondering how I might articulate what is, to me, the strange and quietly mysterious process of songwriting.
Entering the current
Songs seem to appear every few days. I’ll usually be holding my guitar, moving through a few chords or circling a simple motif. If something stirs, some small kernel of recognition, there’s an impulse to follow it. Not to invent, but to notice. It feels less like creating something new and more like encountering something that was already there, waiting to be found. It feels like stepping into something already in motion.
Beneath the surface
There is a sense, in those moments, that something is hidden. Not concealed in any deliberate way, but submerged—like a shape moving beneath the surface of water. A melody, perhaps, or a feeling that hasn’t yet found its form. Sometimes it seems vast and unknowable, like a kind of musical leviathan. Other times it reveals itself as something smaller, almost ordinary. There is no way to know in advance.
The shape that chooses itself
It brings to mind the idea that form already exists within matter—that the sculpture is somehow present in the marble before it is revealed. And yet, unlike stone, this process feels unstable. You’re making sense of it as it comes, a bit like reading a map while drawing it. There are many possible shapes, many potential songs, all existing in a kind of fragile simultaneity. The act of choosing, of committing to a chord, a melody, a phrase—collapses that field of possibility. In deciding what something is, everything else quietly falls away.
A brief opening
You can feel this happening. As a musical idea begins to take hold, other possibilities linger for a moment, like faint echoes. There is a brief liminal space where things might still change, where the direction is not yet fixed. But once an idea settles, once it becomes part of the song’s shape, it roots itself. From that point on, it resists being displaced. The song begins to organise itself around that choice.
From seed to form
It’s difficult to say where this movement comes from. An idea often begins as something almost imperceptible, like a single cell. Then, with surprising speed, it develops—gathering structure, coherence, even personality. What begins as something formless moves, in a short span of time, towards something that feels complete. It passes, in a sense, through its own stages of growth.
Releasing control
In the past, at times I have approached songwriting more deliberately. I might construct chord progressions, search for lyrics, try to build something I might understand, or control. Now, I find myself working differently. I don’t begin with a clear aim. There is no fixed horizon. Instead, I try to remain open, to follow the movement of the idea wherever it leads. Recording it becomes less about capturing something finished, and more about staying close to something in the process of becoming.
A mind that lets things through
The mind, during this, feels less like a tool and more like a filter—an open space through which ideas pass, shifting, refining, and leaving traces behind. Fragments, images, melodies, appearing and dissolving without needing to be held. There is no real sense of grasping. Writing, in this way, feels closer to falling than building.
What remains
I’ve come to accept ideas in whatever state they arrive. Some are partial, some fleeting, some more defined. Each one feels like a kind of encounter. Over time, they accumulate, not as a collection to be completed, but as traces of something lived through. I return to them occasionally, not always to develop them, but simply to recognise that they exist.
Unreleased, unlost
I don’t feel a strong urgency to release them into the world. It seems enough that they have appeared at all. They move alongside my life—like quiet companions, or distant signals. In some way, they seem to describe things I don’t fully understand myself.
Where it returns
How any of this happens remains a mystery. There is, at the centre of it, a kind of openness—a playful, almost impersonal energy that doesn’t feel entirely like my own. Perhaps it is simply the nature of attention itself. Or perhaps it is something more fundamental: life, moving through form, briefly taking shape as sound, before returning again to silence.
A willing surrender
And I keep returning to it—this quiet surrender to the creative process, this openness, this curiosity, trusting that something alive will unfold, beyond my control, but always waiting to be discovered.