Behind the Lyrics: The Song That Isn't Written Yet

Welcome to the first installment of Behind the Lyrics, a series where I take you inside the songs on the album I'm making — the album I will own outright, every track, no fine print. The stories, the struggles, the craft. Behind the music.

There is one small problem.

The first song isn't written yet.

The Album Exists. The Song Doesn't.

Here is what does exist, because I want the record to show I have not been idle. The album has a title with delusions of grandeur: Album One. Its official description, written by me in a burst of confidence: "Ten tracks, owned outright."

I built a whole workshop for it — a little app where songs live with their lyrics, their versions, their sections all neatly labeled. Verse here, chorus there, snapshots so no draft ever gets lost. There's even a budget set aside, because apparently I am the kind of artist who opens a spreadsheet before he opens his mouth to sing. The stage is built. The lights work.

And track one has been, for longer than I care to admit, a blank page staring back at me from inside a very well-organized app.

The Block

Writer's block is a strange affliction for a person like me, because I am not short on words. Ask anybody. I can talk. I have opinions about everything, and I will share them at length, with footnotes.

But a song isn't talk. A song has to be about something, and every time I sat down to start, the same questions showed up and sat down with me: What is this album going to be about? What do I actually want to talk about? And the more I chased the answer, the quieter it got.

So the songs stayed at zero. Ten tracks, owned outright, none of them started. The workshop gleamed. The page stayed blank.

Tonight, in a Parked Car

The breakthrough — if we're being generous, and tonight I am — did not happen in a studio. It happened tonight, in a parked car, where I was waiting out evening classes with my allergies staging a full protest. I had just done my Spanish lesson out loud, by voice, sneezing through my daily-routine phrases like a man defusing a bomb in a pollen factory.

And somewhere in that ridiculous, sneezy, ordinary moment, I finally said the true thing out loud. Not a lyric. Not a hook. Just the truth about where I actually am with this album:

It's amazing you can have so much to say but then don't know what to say.

That sentence is not a song. But it is honest, and it is the first true thing this album has produced. So I did the most songwriter thing I could do with it: I saved it.

Song One, Officially

As of tonight, Song One exists. Officially. In the app, under Album One, track one, status: idea. It has a working title, which is "Song One (working title)," because I contain multitudes and all of them are procrastinators.

Its entire lyric sheet, version one, is one fragment — the seed line above. No verses. No chorus. No bridge to nowhere. One sentence, holding the door open.

Maybe the album will turn out to be about exactly this: having a whole life to talk about and learning, slowly, how to say it. Or maybe that line is just the first pancake — the one you make to season the pan. Either way, the blank page is not blank anymore, and a beginning you can point at beats a masterpiece you're only thinking about.

Ten tracks, owned outright. One of them has started.

Pray for the other nine.