What you can learn from children being a songwriter .
Children might be some of the greatest songwriters in the world. They just don’t know it yet.
They haven’t learned all the rules. They don’t know what a cliché is. They don’t understand song structure, commercial appeal, or what some record executive thinks people want to hear.
And that’s exactly why songwriters can learn so much from them.
Children haven’t been taught how to stop thinking originally.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we start losing something. We learn what’s acceptable, what’s normal, and what we’re supposed to believe. We start filtering our thoughts before they ever come out of our mouths.
Children don’t have that problem.
Ask a five-year-old why the moon follows the car, and you might get an answer more interesting than anything you’ve heard on country radio in twenty years.
The kid might tell you the moon is lonely and wants somebody to talk to.
There’s a song right there.
An adult will explain gravity, astronomy, and the Earth’s rotation.
All perfectly correct.
And completely useless if you’re trying to write a song about loneliness.
1. Children Question Everything
Why is the sky blue?
Why do people die?
Where does the sun go at night?
Why does Daddy sleep on the couch?
That last question might have a whole country album behind it.
Children are naturally curious. They haven’t accepted the world as something that doesn’t need questioning.
Adults eventually stop asking why because they think they already know the answers.
That’s dangerous for a songwriter.
The minute you stop questioning the world, you start writing about the world exactly the way everybody else does.
And that’s how we end up with a million songs about broken hearts, whiskey, pickup trucks, and somebody leaving somebody.
There’s nothing wrong with those subjects.
The problem is that everybody keeps looking at them from the same direction.
A child might look at a divorce and wonder why two people who once loved each other now need lawyers to talk to each other.
That’s a much more interesting starting point than another song about drinking away a broken heart.
2. Children Have No Respect for Clichés
A child doesn’t know that a phrase has been used ten million times.
They don’t know that “my heart is broken” is supposed to describe sadness.
They might say something completely unexpected.
“Mommy, why does your face leak when you’re sad?”
Now that’s an interesting observation.
A grown songwriter might spend three hours trying to find an original way to describe crying.
A child can do it in three seconds.
Why?
Because the child isn’t searching through a lifetime of familiar expressions.
They’re describing what they actually see.
That’s one of the greatest lessons in songwriting.
Stop telling listeners what they’re supposed to feel. Show them something they’ve never thought about before.
3. Children Don’t Worry About Looking Stupid
Give a child a cardboard box.
Five minutes later, it’s a spaceship.
Ten minutes later, it’s a submarine.
By lunchtime, it’s a castle with a dragon living in the basement.
Give an adult a cardboard box.
He asks where the recycling bin is.
What happened?
Somewhere along the way, imagination became something we’re supposed to grow out of.
We started worrying about being ridiculous.
Songwriters do the same thing.
They get an unusual idea and immediately start questioning whether anybody will understand it.
Will people think it’s stupid?
Will it sound strange?
Will somebody criticize it?
A child doesn’t care.
The spaceship is leaving in five minutes. Get in or stay home.
Songwriters need a little more of that attitude.
4. Children See Things Adults Have Stopped Seeing
A child can spend twenty minutes watching an ant carry something across the sidewalk.
An adult walks right over the ant because he’s late for work.
Who’s missing something?
The child sees an entire world happening beneath his feet.
The adult sees a sidewalk.
Songwriting is about observation.
The best ideas aren’t always hiding in dramatic events. Sometimes they’re hiding in things we’ve looked at a thousand times without actually seeing.
A child notices the old man sitting alone on a park bench.
Why is he alone?
Who is he waiting for?
Does he come here every day?
Maybe he’s waiting for somebody who died twenty years ago.
Now you’ve got a story.
The adult walks past him while checking his phone.
5. Children Understand Emotions Before They Understand Explanations
Children don’t need a psychology degree to recognize sadness.
They know when somebody is angry.
They know when they’re frightened.
They know when somebody they love isn’t coming home.
They might not understand the reasons, but they understand the feelings.
And music works the same way.
A listener doesn’t need to understand every word of a song to feel something.
Sometimes the simplest observation carries more emotional weight than a hundred clever lyrics.
A child might say, “I miss Grandma because her chair is empty.”
A songwriter might try to explain grief, mortality, the passage of time, and the meaning of life.
The child already said everything that needed saying.
Her chair is empty.
That’s the song.
6. Children Don’t Know How Stories Are Supposed to End
Adults have watched thousands of movies, heard thousands of songs, and read countless stories.
We recognize patterns.
We know the hero usually wins. The lovers get back together. The bad guy gets what he deserves.
Children haven’t accumulated all those expectations.
They can take a story somewhere completely unexpected.
A child might decide the dragon doesn’t want to eat the princess.
He wants to marry the king.
Now you’ve got a problem nobody in the kingdom saw coming.
That’s what a songwriter should be looking for.
The unexpected turn.
The line that makes somebody stop what they’re doing and listen again.
Great songwriting isn’t always about inventing a completely new subject.
Sometimes it’s about taking an old subject somewhere nobody expected it to go.
7. Children Aren’t Trying to Impress Anybody
This might be the biggest lesson of all.
Children create things because they enjoy creating them.
They draw purple cows, green suns, and people with six fingers.
They don’t worry about whether an art gallery will display their work.
They don’t ask how many streams their song will get.
They don’t need a record company to approve their imagination.
They just create.
Somewhere along the way, adults start confusing creativity with approval.
We want people to like what we write.
We want applause.
We want recognition.
And sometimes we start changing our ideas to get those things.
That’s when originality begins disappearing.
A child doesn’t ask whether a purple elephant will sell.
He just wants to know where the elephant is going.
And that’s a much better question.
8. Children Live in a World of Possibilities
Tell a child that people might someday live on Mars.
He’ll ask if he can bring his dog.
Tell an adult the same thing.
He’ll ask how much the taxes will be.
Children haven’t built all the mental fences adults live behind.
They believe things are possible until somebody convinces them otherwise.
Songwriters need that kind of imagination.
Not because every crazy idea will become a great song.
Most won’t.
But one might.
And you won’t discover that one if you throw every unusual thought away before exploring it.
The Biggest Lesson: Don’t Grow Up Completely
I’m in my seventies, and I still question just about everything.
Not because I expect to find all the answers.
I know I won’t.
I question things because the questions are often more interesting than the answers.
That’s where my songwriting ideas come from.
I take something everybody accepts as normal, turn it upside down, shake it around, and see what falls out.
Sometimes it’s a song.
Sometimes it’s an article.
Sometimes it’s complete nonsense.
But even nonsense can lead somewhere interesting.
Children understand something adults tend to forget.
The world isn’t just a collection of facts, rules, and explanations.
It’s also a gigantic playground for the imagination.
And songwriters should never stop playing in it.
A child looks at the world and asks, “What if?”
An adult looks at the world and says, “That’s just the way it is.”
The songwriter should be the one who never stops asking, “What if?”
Because the day you stop asking questions might be the day you stop discovering anything worth writing about.
And if a five-year-old tells you the moon is following your car because it’s lonely, don’t correct him.
Write the damn song.
— Elvis Nash