Last night, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a Her Roots songwriting event, where we were put into groups, given about 45 minutes to write a song, and then performed the songs for each other. Before this event, I had only written songs by myself, so it was a different experience. Everyone has their own songwriting process (you can read mine here), so blending those processes was a fun, creative experience.
How we ended up approaching it was by strumming a few chords until we found a chord progression we liked, and then we worked on coming up with vocal lines to go along with the chords. Along the way, we came up with the story behind the song, and the “sound” we were looking for.
It was neat to have different ideas come together. It was also good and bad to have three songwriters to veto parts of songs – when you are writing by yourself I feel like it goes faster because no one is there to tell you “no” for song ideas. However, I also think you may end up with a more well-rounded song when you do have others there to do that.
In the end, we came up with a song that we were pretty proud of given the short time frame. I think I prefer writing on my own, but would definitely write with others again! It was neat to learn about others' processes and have multiple perspectives go into one song.