4 Reasons You MUST FINISH Your Songs!

One of the biggest challenges for any songwriter is the mountain of half-finished songs on their desk - but we need to learn how to finish because when we do, we develop habits that will elevate our songwriting to the next level. In this video, we look at 4 reasons you MUST learn to finish and how to start doing it right away.

0:00 - INTRO
0:43 - Reason #1
2:31 - Reason #2
4:09 - Reason #3
5:42 - Reason #4
6:50 - Wrap-Up

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ABOUT BENNY

Benny's passion for music and creativity stretches across multiple disciplines and art-forms. He is a founding member and songwriter / lap-slide guitarist for one of Australia's best and most bearded country-bluegrass-folk bands, THE GREEN MOHAIR SUITS. To date the Mohairs have released 4 full-length albums and tour both nationally and overseas.

Benny is also the Founder and Head Producer of SILAMOR STUDIOS, a boutique studio specialising in Composition for Film, TV and Interactive Media. He writes extensively across various instrumental and lyric-based genres and has been commissioned for major projects by Adobe, Cathay Pacific and Audible. He also currently releases original songs under the name SILAMOR.

Benny is passionate about education and has taught song and lyric writing as well as film composition for JMC Academy and the Australian Institute of Music. He also designs and regularly facilitates workshops on creative process and innovation.

Links to Benny's music are here:

The Green Mohair Suits

SILAMOR

ABOUT KEPPIE

I'm Keppie. I'm a professional songwriter, and songwriting teacher. I've been teaching song and lyric writing for over 10 years now for some of the best contemporary music colleges in the world—Berklee Online, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music's Open Academy, as well as for the Australian College of the Arts. At other times, I've taught for the Australian Institute of Music, as well as the LA School of Songwriting.

My goal is to help people write better songs! My experience in the classroom, with thousands of students at this point (many going on to find careers and success in music), is that your songwriting, like all things, can get better with meaningful, deliberate practice. My intention is to share the skills, knowledge, information, and ideas that I've gathered with anyone who wants to improve their songwriting.

Keppie's music is here:

#howtowritesongs
#songwriting
#challenge
#finishing
#songs
#lyrics
#musictheory
#lyricwriting
#songtips
#protips
#howmusicworks
#songtips

[ericlanglais]

Oh man, I didn't realize that my struggles were so common! This is so helpful and full of wisdom! Thank you!

[SeanSullivan]

This is one of the best advice pieces I've ever seen. I can beyond relate and I now know that many others suffer from the same. It happens to my with stories, the novel I'm working on, my songs... I imagine this advice can be applied to any sort of artistic pursuit. I am motivated. Thank you!!!

[azbluesdog]

So much to be learned here, but the disconnect from initial inspiration to “unfinished” is the most painful. It’s nearly impossible to recapture that spark. I literally feel as if I’ve let down the Muse.

[MiriamEHC]

Fantastic video. I had been thinking of my pile of unfinished songs as a little treasure box of ideas that I can use later. When I struggle to finish a song, I just add it to the pile and think maybe some part of it will find a home somewhere else in the future. But you’ve got me rethinking that now. I’m going to try to finish one or two of them - if I don’t feel good about them after completing them, that’s fine; I can put them back in the box to maybe repurpose later, but at least I will have grown and learned something from the practice (labor) of completing them. Thank you!

[ulfsvensson]

I try to use my unfinished music as bridge, pre-chorus, chorus and so on, when i get stuck in newer work or collaborate with others in wrighting. Works more often then you would guess.

[ivanl.]

Thank you so much. I've been interested in writing instrumental songs for as long as I know myself, but have really been so afraid of it that I ended up focusing on computer science and computer programming instead. But then I got to my late 40's, and realized that I do want to get these ideas into a song form, and have really realized that a lot of my fears come from a lack of experience in this process that includes everything from significant gaps in my playing ability and music theory knowledge to not knowing how to sequence/mix/arrange etc etc. And I do get stuck a lot, but I feel that the only way I will ever learn this is to just keep going, no matter how good or bad the outcome is. Your words have completely validated and confirmed what I've been feeling like it's been this internal truth, trying to present itself to me.

[michaelchadwick]

Thanks you for this video. It sure resonates with me. I write the music first and leave the words till later. And later. And later. Never doing it. I love cobbling bits of music together such that they sound like coherent songs. But they're not songs until there's words and melodies. They sit on a hard drive waiting for me to commit to finish them. I've done a couple of online collabs and it's a great feeling to finish a song. I need to do more of that. Sometimes you can't do everything on your own.
Thanks again

[johnmirabile]

IM THE CHAMPION OF WRITING 2 VERSE, 2 CHORUS SONGS....THEN HOPING TO FINISH THEM ON HE DAY OF RECORDING...WHICH JUST ADDS TO SONG MAKING PROCESS....THIS VIDEO IS ON THE MONEY...THIS MORNING MY BROTHER, TOLD ME 'FINISH THE DAMMM SONGS' THEN I SEE THIS...YA KNOW, I THINK THERES ALMOST A FEAR FACTOR IN THE WRITING PROCEES, THE FEAR BEING ONCE WERE SATISFIED WITH THE HALF FINISHED PRODUCT? WERE AFFRAID OF RUINING IT, SO ITS EVEN DEEPER THEN THIS SOMETIMES..GREAT WORK

[superduperdom]

Excellent tips. Changing the world one finished song at a time! Even if some of the lyrics are a bit meh, for now. Recording them on a smart phone and listening back, gives me just enough distance to also see what works, or doesn’t.

[julianflaman]

Great video! Thank you for these advices. So much inspiration

[leonardcortez]

Thanks for this advice it makes complete sense

[PrfessrG]

Wow! This is an outstanding, meaningful set of reasons. Really resonating with me right now.

[stokedupart]

Ideas sprout momentum. Capture it all.

[Lukas-rvlc]

Last year, I started setting deadlines for my songs, and it really worked out for me. Writing and producing songs is like embarking on a long hike that I have to finish. If you're struggling with your song, then maybe you should try hiking as a source of motivation.

[tiemanspace]

Songs I wrote when I was young have basically dissolved into my musicianship improvements. Some of them make new song ideas when combined. They are not compositions but instead ideas and bits and pieces of musical sentences. One's heart draws the final conclusion. The chord changes draw the perspective of the song. The landscape and the environment of a song course the lyrics into place and vice versa. Like swimming in a pool of leafy water or water with a bunch of rubber duckies or plastic spoons in it. Yeah. If you can poetically swim in it then it's a song. (:

[mchacha]

This is definitely something I relate to a lot. I start a lot of songs but rarely finish them. I do feel like sometimes I can tell if a song idea isn't going to work or turn out very well, but then again a few of my finished songs that I do quite like have been ones that were at one stage abandoned until I eventually came back to them. It's something I've been trying to work on though, finishing at least most of the songs I start writing and then after they're done making the value judgements on them. Interestingly enough, one of my songs, "Leave It Alone" was partially written about my complicated relationship with the writing process, insecurities in my abilities and not finishing songs. Thanks for the video Ben!

[brianolson_music]

This is awesome. I’ve recently started the practice of finishing every song, and I totally agree. I rarely finished anything prior to this. It’s improved my songwriting significantly in a short amount of time. Thanks for the video 🙏

[stevesaba]

Always the voice of reason Ben! Love it 🙏

[therealjohngalaxy]

Great tips! Thank you! Everyone needs to hear these!

[TheHarmonicaBarge]

This video was made for me, right now. Subscribed

Thank you