The ones we didn’t actually write
My good friend, and all round literary powerhouse, Adam Smyth, has a brilliantly dry blog post, recently updated, listing projects that he’s failed to complete. Or start. It’s a fab piece of writing about the often damp firework experience that is creativity. Excitement, #inspo, a document on your desktop, a ship run aground. You should read it – it will prompt some soul searching, no doubt.
“Things never done exist everywhere in time; but things abandoned are hooked to a particular moment... A monograph about all the services offered by early modern authors beyond writing (arithmetic, astrology, dancing lessons). Examples gathered. (2009)... A novel about fatherhood. Abandoned – upon opening the Word document now, in 2025, I see I only wrote the following rather baffling 2 sentences: ‘Will, the host, pushed past Jack. “I’m going to be opening the oven door so there’ll be a waft of hot air around your thighs.”’ (2016)”
It reminded me of both the writing process behind my slender volume of amusing tales, and more broadly how I tend to approach songwriting too. A big blammo idea, an irresistible title, hastily scribbled down, or sometimes sung rather haphazardly into my long-suffering iPhone.
In my experience, the role of titles isn’t incidental. They’re declarations of intent. A good title is one that implies the strength to attempt the work it sits atop. Or something. For about 10 years I’ve been mulling a song that I’ve still not quite nailed. It’s the un-harpooned whale. The title is too perfect perhaps.
Everything good (goes boom, boom, boom)
That’s a keeper right there – veritable pop banger. Vaultingly ambitious but slyly self-aware. Very-era PSBs… a tincture of Eurobeat. The kind of mad song you hear drifting out of the speakers of a Magaluf nitespot, during a holiday you didn’t book but are increasingly hoping to take credit for. The good stuff, in short!
But as with many of the projects listed in Adam’s piece, ‘Everything good…’ has somehow defeated me or remained unassailable by actual songwriting efforts. It’s as if I, a man merely in possession of a small IKEA fridge/freezer, had hit upon the idea of mass ice cream manufacture. The idea is big – maybe too big?
Titles are promissory notes. They function as sudden surprising gifts, offering low-level cracks in your immediate personal universe, oddities somehow glowing in your grasp. (This can’t be mine, can it?) Could I actually produce this thing? And the initial idea is often brilliantly revealing of where your head is at – emotionally, socially, creatively. It’s a psychological distillation of possibility, unabashed in its newness and perky self-belief.
Many people have described the kind of flow state that much creativity embodies. Hours with your head down, your brush flying, instrument soaring, sculpture forming, before you look up, a little dazed and think ‘who made this?’. At the same time, we live in a society that often seems to value ideas over craft and diligence, which perhaps leads to a certain comfort with starting, but not developing our inspirations. Quick! Move on, or succumb to that horrifying fear that it’ll all end up somewhat sub-par or worse: ‘meh’.
Creeping up on the thing
These are relevant thoughts as myself and dear musical pal Astrid are currently 7/10ths of the way through our second LP (you can find the debut, right here.) There are two numbers in particular that glow with that sense of early promise. The titles are confident, sharp-elbowed and dressed to the nines – they would belong on any collection of fashionably interesting tunes. As it stands, the songs they announce are still sketches, works in progress.
The person who makes the return trip to an idea, arrives forewarned but not necessarily forearmed. It often feels like one should employ a little stealth. Approach from the periphery, from the bushes, perhaps wearing a cowl, and jump back in with something new and strong and unabashed, to recapture that initial ‘A-ha!’. It’s all a licensed madness really, isn’t it?
To close, here are a few of my limbo projects that are still just scribbles in a drawer. One day, eh?
Unavailable in the United Kingdom 🎶 a kind of dark romantic satire inspired by the sadly all too common label in European vinyl distributors’ entries on Discogs (thanks Brexit!).
Got all the big calls right 🎶 a Boris-era jokey song that lists a series of increasingly insane claims about the world. Didn’t finish at the time, unclear if the idea would resonate any more. Still q. like the title. Sigh.
You should have this guy’s problems 🎶 Always been a sucker for American English idiom, they gift us all sorts of fun, compressed, slick little devices - often from film dialogue, comedy or old show tunes. This one really should get written at some point.
You won’t believe what he looks like now 🎶 Internet click-bait trope that sounds like a lost musical theatre list song, pt. 94. I think I have the chorus of this somewhere but the verse somehow seemed unscalable. Potential banger.
The story about bored mega celebrities and the increasingly dangerous things they do to gain inspiration ✍️ Was a story that began with Sting and his desk being winched down a cliff face by a team of well meaning assistants, while he was desperately trying to find new ways to write the follow-up to his last LP of Elizabeth sea shanties. It felt a bit clever-clever and directionless after a few pages.
I’ll say she is! 🎶 A line, I think from a Marx Brothers movie (forget which) which just sort of landed with me. It has a kind of musical (and music hall) energy to it. I could imagine it at the end of each verse or chorus. Digging in, the idea of a list of declarations about some particular woman felt a bit off, however!
