Songwriter Theory Podcast: Learn Songwriting And Write Meaningful Lyrics and Songs · Joseph Vadala

Responding To Your Biggest Songwriting Struggles Part 8

·44 min·1 clip

Ride the wave when it comes; paddle anyway when inspiration doesn't.

Part eight returns without making the earlier episodes homework. The host treats the survey responses as separate songwriting problems, but the same worries keep showing up. Instead of pretending each one is brand new, he looks at the habits sitting underneath them. One big one is audience fear. His answer is blunt: writers are not great at predicting what other people will like, skip, or secretly connect with. Bardcore becomes the useful example. On paper, the style can sound dated or even ridiculous. In practice, it can work if someone commits to it and makes it feel alive. So approval is weak evidence. The better question is why the writer keeps coming back to songs at all. Maybe songwriting helps process emotion. Maybe it keeps difficult feelings from spilling out in worse ways, or makes them easier to live with afterward. Maybe music once changed the writer, and that still matters. If that is the root, the job is not to please a made-up audience in your head. It is to write from the reason that still has weight. The advice stays practical: imagined rejection does not deserve the deciding vote. Near the end, he turns inward. Writers can train themselves to notice what things remind them of, almost like passive metaphor practice. Think more like a songwriter, and more raw material is waiting when it is time to write.

As heard by us

A practical reset for writers stuck between hesitation and the blank page.

Part eight of the songwriting-struggles series stays on the obstacles that can freeze a writer at the start: the deeper why, the pull of outside reaction, and the reminder that taste is less predictable than it looks.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Stuck at the blank page? This one keeps you moving by asking why you write, not just how.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Songwriter Theory Podcast: Learn Songwriting And Write Meaningful Lyrics and Songs