I like to liken songwriting to working a muscle in your body. The more often you work that muscle, the stronger it becomes, or in the case of songwriting, the more you spend doing it, both the better you’ll get it at and the easier it will come to you. This extends to the idea of how long does it take to write a song, so let’s talk realistically how long it takes to write a song particularly when you’re just starting out.
How Long Does it Take to Write a Song
As I alluded to in opening, in terms of how long does it take to write a song, the answer is it varies from song to song and depends on how long you’ve been doing it.
Realistically, how long does it take to write a song can range from 10 minutes to 10 years; I’ve heard anecdotes from artists I listen to on both ends of the spectrum.
If you watch interviews of some of your favorite artists talking about writing their songs, you’ll typically hear and might be surprised that some songs take longer than others whereas some of their biggest songs come lightning quick.
Oftentimes the most famous songs are completed in the same evening or session, at least the composing i.e. writing and non-recording process.
This is typically because many of the most famous songs revolve around extremely simple hooks and structures. The simpler the hook, the easier it is for a larger audience to latch on to it.
By that logic, it’s not by accident that a lot of the biggest songs come so quickly; if a song is going to resonate and connect with a huge audience, it likely shouldn’t be complicated so the writing should come just as simply.
This doesn’t just mean forcing in any old melody for the sake of completing that song as quickly as possible; the great songs which came together quickly have just the right melodies and adjoining pieces come to the writer just as quickly.
Hitting the Wall
You might be tempted to put a song idea on the proverbial shelf after tinkering with it for a half an hour or so when it feels like you’ve hit a wall.
In my experience and what I preach in my complete nearly 100 page tutorial on how to write a song is your best chance of finishing a song is in the same sitting in which you first came up with the idea.
The idea is still fresh in your head so the possibilities are open and limitless – this is the best time to get as much done in the writing of a song idea as possible, if not completing it outright.
You’ll find that the more time you spend away from the new song idea, the greater your expectations will become for it in the sense that you’ll begin limiting those possibilities and closing those doors in terms of where the missing segments of that song can go.
By thinking TOO MUCH about that song idea after that initial kernel of it comes to you, you start to put it in a box where you’ve put a lot of mental limitations on it in terms of what those missing pieces can be, making it that much more difficult to complete.
Of course once you hit a wall, you hit a wall; again you don’t want to force a song into completion by putting in parts you’re not entirely happy with.
As such, you can have half of a song sitting on the shelf for a very long time.
My go to example for this is Noel Gallagher’s “Lock All the Doors”. He started the song in the early 90’s and didn’t complete and release it until his 2015 album “Chasing Yesterday”.
Of COURSE he always had the chorus (see what is a chorus), the most important part of the song and typically the part you begin with.
After purportedly giving away the song’s initial verse to another artist, he was stuck trying to find something to take its place for 20+ years.
One day it finally just came to him, but 20+ years between the initial idea and the final release goes to show how long does it take to write a song on the long end.
Honestly that’s a bit excessive; I might just recommend that you do settle with something which only meets the majority of your criteria at that point, but it’s not uncommon after you’ve been songwriting for a few years to have dozens if not hundreds of unused ideas in your back pocket.
You can always combine elements of multiple song ideas to finish a song, it’s better to have one completed song than two incomplete songs, after all.
Thankfully I have lots of hacks, tips, and tricks for completing songs, not to mention coming up with initial song ideas to begin with in my aforementioned guide “How to Write a Song – The ‘No BS’ Songwriter’s Bible”, so check that out.
Also check out the many songwriting tutorials here on Music Guy Mixing covering the subject in depth because there’s no song to mix until it’s written and recorded!
