When you drink orange juice, once you sweat it out, it’s your own

Writing songs is very often a reaction to something.

Like when you hear a piece of music that’s so damn good, you get excited to go and try and beat what you just heard.

Or when you’re overflowing with admiration for something, so you compose a song as love letter to the art you admire.

Then there’s straight up thievery, which is one hundred percent an acceptable reaction. You read the words or hear the melody or feel the rhythm of someone’s else music, and you think to yourself, dude, I am so stealing that.

It’s tough not to. The world is full of these naturally occurring shapes that you can appropriate. It’s like you walk around eating poetry and then you puke up song at the end.

And sometimes it’s not even purposeful theft. If you’re a songwriter, odds are you listen to music all day. Perhaps the one irrefutable qualities of being a great songwriter is being a great listener. If you just shut up for a few minutes, there’s gold all around. You’re breathing the stuff in. And then you realize, oh damn, it’s suddenly a part of your own work.

I once heard an interview with veteran blues artist who used a perfect analogy for this process:

When you drink orange juice, once you sweat it out, it’s your own. Oranges don’t really belong to anyone.

What an apt description of how inspiration works. Indeed, songwriting is poaching. Cannibalizing a car for parts. You collect specimens of all kinds for temporary storage, and when the time is right, you put them to use.

Naturally, there’s the fear of being derivative, of sounding too much like your heroes, and of course, getting sued for copyright infringement.

Fair enough. There have been enough high profile celebrity plagiarism cases to scare the average songwriter away from creating dishonestly.

But the reality about songwriting is, everything comes from everything.

Beatles fans are essentially listening to blues music from the fifties, but with better production and happier lyrics. The fab four openly admitted that stole guitar licks from right under the noses of their contemporaries. Those guys played cover songs eight days a week at the strip club, and eventually molded it into a sound that sounded like their own.

Sure, they absorbed ingredients from each band they loved, but mainly the lads were learning to be themselves.

The same goes for you. Go drown yourself in an ocean of influence. In time, you will amass enough to come up to the surface with something new and exciting.

Truth is, when you take parts of a random thing you love and weld it together with parts of some other random thing you love, boom, you will have found your voice. Even if you were inspired by something, it’s still going to sound like you. Steal all you want. You couldn’t rip off a blues song from the fifties, even if you tried.

As one songwriter friend of mine said, take it in, send it through the tumble dryer, distill it and push it out the other side.

Dylan is someone whose music I’ve always loved. Not the early folk protest records, but the dark, post born again phase in the eighties and nineties. Bob had reached middle age and was reinventing himself with some of the best and worst music of his career.

That inspires the hell out of me. Because he was all about experimentation. One of his albums won record of the year in the late nineties. Dylan reminds is that every new song we write, we have an opportunity to go beyond where we’ve been. We can evolve every time we do it.

Each new miracle that arrives in our world is momentous to the extent that it just might changing everything.

Then it again, it could be a piece of dogshit you record and never perform in public again.

So what? I’ve written hundreds of songs in my life, I don’t like every song I wrote, I still like that I wrote it. Every song matters. They’re all important to my music soul. The goofy advertising jingle I wrote in my teens, the bloody emo breakup song I wrote in my twenties, or the satire country song I wrote in my forties.

They’re all my babies. Even if they don’t come to visit anymore.

Are you giving yourself that kind of creative permission? Will you allow yourself to appropriate shapes from any and all sources?

One ritual that’s been helpful for me is building an inspiration playlist. Every time I hear a melody that gets my toe tapping, makes me want to harmonize, or makes me angry I didn’t think of it first, I immediately whip out a song identification app and save it to my playlist.

Which is appropriately titled, songs that make me want to write songs.

Every musician should have one of these on their phone, computer or streaming platform. Right now mine contains about seven hundreds of songs on it. Seventy hours of amazing music that makes me want to create art of my own.

And anytime I’m not feeling particularly inspired to work, I press the random button on the playlist and see what comes up.

It’s like a game to see if I trust my own taste. And most of the time it’s like, wow, I remember this dance song catching my ear seven years ago while sitting in the husband chair at the lingerie shop. What a gorgeous melody. Let me see if I can go do my version of it.

Ultimately, this thievery strategy requires equal parts permission, discipline, organization. But it’s rarely ever failed me.

Worst case scenario, I get to hear a beautiful song that I forgot I loved.

Best case scenario, I drink the orange juice, sweat it out and see what it smells like.

What sounds and words are you breathing in that you could appropriate into your own work without feeling guilty?