Every now and then, I go through a songwriting drought and I worry. During such droughts, I often find myself accidentally rewriting my own worst songs, or as has happened lately, accidentally lifting entire chord progressions or lyric ideas from bands that I love.
This drives me crazy, and to try and avoid such in the future, I have written a list to myself of the subject matter of some of the songs that my best friend and I have written together or that I have by myself (including his is kinda pointless since it's about my self-assessed artistic merit on this occasion), to try to remind myself that I'm not always a complete hack.
Song subjects have included:
- Growing out of teenage cynicism
- Webcam masturbation
- The feeling you have when on the beach in Blackpool
- Accidentally murdering your spouse and continuing the relationship anyway
- The death of record shops/my marriage/self loathing
- A suburban serial killer/good guy with a monster on his back, based on the Tooth Fairy from Red Dragon
- Apologising for the poor quality of the song's lyrics, recording, guitar solo, vocal take and the rest of its home album
- Committing suicide over a teenage crush
- How hard it must be to live like Ric Flair
- Hardcore Holly
- An assessment of Mario (of Mario Bros fame)'s sexual attractiveness, and how that has evolved over the past 30 years
- Mario's response to hearing this song, which is a descent into alcoholism
- A tribute to one of our friends who moved to Japan
- Cannibals running a takeaway in Lancashire
- A duo of idiot criminals whose crime escalate by mistake
- A delusional young actor who moves to Hollywood but is convinced he will one day be a huge star
- A boyfriend's all-too-honest answer to his girlfriend's query about his darkest fetishes
- What is essentially an entire song about coming down off MDMA on the tube in London and how much that sucks
- Getting dumped because your girlfriend likes Hoobastank and you don't
- Being in a sexual relationship with a series of bowls of bran flakes
- Trying to convince a sexually withholding girlfriend to allow 'just the tip'
- A song aimed at teenagers observing that school is usually shitty and that life gets better afterwards
And that's just missing out songs of mine that I do love but have less original subject matter. I think some days I need to look at this list a bit more closely.