Lately my career, specifically where music is related, has taken a turn that I don’t think I expected. For those new here who read that first sentence & said to yourselves “wait, you do music?!” welcome to CharlieRogersMUSIC.com, nice to have you. The turn I seem to have made lives in the writing world, & no, not this writing world, the songwriting one.
I’ve been writing songs since I was sixteen, so almost half of my life at this point. I started in my bedroom writing about my life as a high schooler & while a lot of those first songs were definitely not the greatest, I am still proud that I took the step to start somewhere. From there I went to college where more often than not, I was writing for myself still. It wasn’t until around the time that I graduated from Belmont that I really started to write for other people. I had a hard time with that at first, removing myself from the art, from the narrative, but I soon found that that is where the empathy of the artist really comes in handy. Even though I may not have a specific lived experience, I can still, to some degree, project my own life experience into the writing & inject my own personality & life into crafting a song that is entirely to do with someone else’s point of view & story. Even though I had shifted away from being entirely self centered in my narrative, I was still writing a lot for &/or about myself, though the shift allowed me to create songs that were still about me but were filtered through the lens of an alternative character. See Jericho. This continued for a very long time until I kind of lost my way.
I would say around 2020 it became incredibly difficult for me to write. Probably in part due to the pandemic as well as a lot of personal change that I went through, my creative mind seemed to have departed my being almost entirely & when at long last it finally came back, it seemed to have left my introspection behind, wherever it had gone. However, what seems to have come back with my creativity was this new found ability to draw entirely personal stories & details out of those I find myself writing for & inject that into their songs.
I found myself entering rooms & leaving with songs that, to me, felt disingenuous. I knew a lot of my cowriters & their backgrounds & a lot of what they were projecting into the writing space was very counter to who they are as people or what their lived experience is. That’s not to say that we can't play characters as writers, but I feel like when writing for oneself, there needs to be a level of authenticity in the project or the audience sniffs it out near instantaneously. I started to get fed up with vague generalities & instead found myself craving the deep intimate details of each song being written. I wanted to know the story behind the prompt, how it made the writer or artist feel, what in their mind the specific imagery surrounding the song consisted of, any specific memories it brought up. It was no longer enough for me to play into an interesting rhyme or idea just for the hell of it, I wanted the music I was a part of creating to bear signatures of the soul of those who worked on it.
I’ve gotten very good at this practice, in fact, it’s one of the main reasons I get drawn into sessions these days, because I don’t settle for the generic in terms of the song’s personality signature. I am, however, finding myself incapable of extending this practice into my own writing for myself. I find myself utterly blank when I ask the same questions about a song & its premise that I drill my fellow writers & artists about during a write, I can’t seem to refocus the lens on myself & make something deeply personal. Maybe it stems from years of projecting an idea of who or what artist I wanted to be. Maybe it stems from years of censoring myself because I know if I said certain things in songs that it would offend or upset people close to me. Whatever it is, I can’t, at the moment, seem to shake loose of it.
So here in lies my struggle, the bridging of this disconnect that I have had the last couple of years. Having the ability to be almost overly analytical & receptive to the lives & ideas of those I collaborate with but lacking, almost entirely, the ability to be introspective & open with myself & the things that I want & need to say as a writer & artist.
Maybe there are conversations that need to be had that will allow me to feel like I can express my feelings, my history, my emotions openly in song without fear of retribution or backlash, maybe there’s inner work that needs to be done. Whatever the answer it, it has become abundantly clear to me that I am, at my current state, far more comfortable with being open & honest through the lens of other people than I am through my own works. Which as someone who strives to be an open & authentic artist, is incredibly discouraging for me. I think I’m writing some of the best works I’ve ever written, & am more proud of what I leave writing rooms with then I ever was before, but I would certainly like for the elevation to extend to myself & what it is that I want to work on.
As always, much love to you all,
-C