Weird, Wonderful, and Totally Mine: The Songwriting Habits Nobody Warned Me About

Let me set the scene for you. It's 11:30 on a Tuesday night. I'm sitting in the parking lot of a Target in my pajamas, humming a melody into my phone's voice memo app while the receipt from my grocery run sits crumpled in the cupholder. This is not a vibe anyone would put on a poster about creative inspiration. And yet — that parking lot gave me the bridge to one of my favorite songs I've ever written.

Songwriting is weird. My songwriting is especially weird. And after years of pretending I had some polished, photogenic process, I've decided to just tell the truth about it. Because honestly? The unconventional stuff is where the good work lives.

Here are seven habits that changed how I create — and might just do the same for you.

1. I Write in the Wrong Key on Purpose

This one sounds counterintuitive, but stay with me. Early in my writing process, I started experimenting with playing in keys that felt slightly uncomfortable — keys where I had to stretch, where my muscle memory couldn't take over. What happened was kind of magical: the melodies that came out were less predictable. I wasn't defaulting to patterns I'd already used a hundred times.

If you're a musician who keeps writing songs that sound like each other, try this. Grab a capo, shift your tuning, or just start in a key you rarely visit. Your fingers won't know where to go automatically, and that uncertainty is creative gold.

2. Voice Memos Are My Real Notebook

I have beautiful journals. Leather-bound, nice pens, the whole aesthetic. I use them almost never for actual songwriting. My real creative archive lives in 400+ voice memos on my phone, most of them recorded in places like parking lots, bathroom stalls between sets, and the cereal aisle of a grocery store.

Humming a melody the second it appears — no matter where you are or how weird you look — is one of the most important habits I've ever built. Melodies don't wait. They show up, hang around for about thirty seconds, and then they're gone. Your phone is always with you. Use it shamelessly.

3. I Set a Timer and Write Badly

Perfectionism is a songwriter's worst enemy, and I say this as someone who spent years rewriting first lines until I'd lost the whole song. Now I use a different approach: I set a fifteen-minute timer and write with zero filter. Terrible rhymes, clichés, half-finished thoughts — all of it goes down. The goal isn't quality. The goal is momentum.

What I've found is that even in the ugliest, most embarrassing draft, there's usually one line — sometimes just a phrase — that's genuinely good. Something real snuck through because I didn't have time to overthink it. I build from that.

4. I Listen to Music I Don't Like

This one raised some eyebrows when I mentioned it in conversation, but I stand by it. Listening exclusively to music you love keeps you in a comfortable lane. Listening to genres or artists that don't resonate with you forces you to analyze why — and that analysis teaches you more about your own taste than almost anything else.

I'll put on a playlist of country-pop or hyperpop or baroque classical, and instead of just vibing, I'm asking: what's working here? What's not landing for me? Why does this chord choice feel wrong? That critical listening mode sharpens your ear in ways that passive enjoyment doesn't.

5. Co-Writing With Someone Who Challenges Me (Not Just Agrees With Me)

I love a collaborative session where the energy flows easily. But some of my most interesting work has come out of sessions with collaborators who pushed back hard. Writers who said "I think that chorus is safe" or "what if the story went somewhere more uncomfortable?" — those conversations stretch me.

If everyone in your creative circle tells you everything is great, find someone who won't. Not someone cruel, but someone honest. The friction is where the growth happens.

6. I Take Walks Without Headphones

This feels like heresy for a musician, but hear me out. Some of my best melodic ideas have come on walks where I wasn't listening to anything at all — just the ambient sound of the neighborhood, the rhythm of my own footsteps, the way the world has its own kind of music when you're quiet enough to notice.

There's a concept called "incubation" in creativity research — the idea that your brain keeps working on a problem even when you've stepped away from it. A walk without audio gives your subconscious room to bring things to the surface. Try it for thirty minutes and see what shows up.

7. I Finish Songs I Hate

This might be the most important habit on this list. I used to abandon songs the moment they felt bad. And because almost every song feels bad somewhere in the middle, I was leaving a lot of unfinished work behind. Now I have a rule: finish it anyway.

Not every song is meant to be released. Not every song is even meant to be good. But the act of completing something — of solving the problem all the way to the end — builds a creative muscle that abandoning things never will. Some of my "bad" finished songs have pieces I've borrowed for songs I love. Nothing is wasted.

The Bigger Picture

Here's what all of these habits have in common: they're about removing the pressure of perfection and replacing it with curiosity. The best creative work I've done came from moments when I stopped trying to make something impressive and started trying to make something true.

If you're an aspiring songwriter, I want to encourage you to stop waiting for the right conditions — the right studio, the right mood, the right amount of time. Write in the parking lot. Hum into your phone at the grocery store. Finish the bad song. Your weird, wonderful process is yours, and it's valid.

And if you want to hear where all this strangeness eventually lands, the music is right here on the site. Come find me.