The Catalog You Build While Nobody’s Watching

A few months ago a collaborator reached out looking for a recording we’d done of a song about 5 years ago. I hadn’t even remembered writing the song, but figured I’d recognize it when I re-listened. For the next hour, I went on a search and rescue mission that came up empty, except for about 30 others I had very little recollection having worked on. These weren’t bad songs, or the kind you quietly erase your name from and hope your collaborators never choose to demo. These are finished songs, some of them written with projects and artists in mind. And all of them had verses, choruses, bridges, a title, and a date in the corner. Somebody had sat down and done the whole job, and it wasn’t anybody I could clearly remember being.

We have a great deal of advice about the beginning. We’re told to write a lot, and some even quote a number like 100, 200, or 250 songs. We’re told that a finished song beats a perfect song, and that routine beats inspiration. I’ve been known to say these things myself. Quincy Jones is said to have listened through hundreds of songs to fill a single album, and that number gets handed around as proof that the numbers game works. And we have a great deal of advice about the end, too, though it arrives in a different accent, with language like ‘catalog as asset,’ ‘metadata hygiene,’ ‘re-pitching,’ and ‘valuation multiples.’ This kind of intimidating vocabulary used to belong to managers and labels and now turns up in the inbox of anyone with a distributor account (Spotify, Apple Music).

What we don’t hear is anything at all about the middle. As a songwriter, that’s just crazy, because the middle is where the story actually happens. Whatever the real number was, the interesting part of Quincy’s story isn’t the handful that made the record. It’s the several hundred that didn’t. Every one of those songs belongs to a writer who went home afterward and had to decide what that song had been for.

But that’s where most of us spend our time. Not at the start, where everything is still possible in music and songwriting, and not at the valuation, which most of us will never need. In the middle, where a hundred and eighty songs, or thirty, or four hundred are made, and most of them competent and finished and not special. A functional song is not always a musical song, and a memorable song is not always a timeless song. That is simply what a long practice produces. It’s the honest yield of doing the work for years, and nobody has written a useful word about it. Every hundred-song-challenge story I’ve read was written from inside the first year, from inside the enthusiasm, and ends energized. But that’s the way it is, for anything we stick with long enough to truly build skill and experience.

Here’s what I’ve come to, slowly and not very gracefully. The middle of a catalog is the only place our patterns as writers are visible. One song can’t tell us anything, because you wrote it in a mood, on a Tuesday, in whatever key the capo happened to be sitting in. Fifty songs start telling on you, with comments like ‘ The same three chords,’ ‘the rhymes that sound forced or lazy,’ ‘the same emotional posture you take up every time you write the same topic over again. None of that is visible from inside one song, but only shows up across the pile. And for musicians, there’s nothing glamorous about the pile, especially when friends and family ask with good intentions how our music careers are coming along.

Writing for years is like living in one city long enough to stop using the map. We come to know our own routes, like the streets we take, the shortcut we use, the block we avoid without remembering why. No single day in a city like that tells you much of anything. It’s the accumulation, the bad years and the good ones, the chances we missed, the things we learned about four years later than we’d have liked. That makes the place ours.

So what do we actually do with two hundred competent songs? Three things I keep coming back to.

Read the catalog instead of grading it. Sit down with twenty of them, not to decide which ones are good, but to write down what repeats. Key, tempo, song length, the words that keeps showing up, the things you always do in the second verse. That list is closer to your real voice than anything you’d ever put in an artist bio.

Take one back with the ears you have now. Not the best one, but the one that was always close. Don’t rewrite it. Find the single place where you can now hear the problem you couldn’t hear then, and fix only that. You’ll learn more in that hour than you will writing a new song.

Let some of them have been practice. Some songs did their entire job the day we finished them. They taught us a move, or just got a feeling out of the body, and they are allowed to just sit there. Nothing is wasted. 

Nobody is watching you build your musical skill. There’s no applause for the sixty-first song, and no one congratulates you for the year you spent writing things that were fine. But that stretch of long, unlit, competent-and-finished-and-not-magical stretch, is where we learn the difference between functional and musical. The catalog you build while nobody’s watching is the one that eventually tells you who you are.

If you’re looking for support in taking a closer look at your own writing, these are the kinds of patterns we explore together in my Mentorship Program.