Impose yourself a deadline when writing a song

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today I would like to explore a topic that has been on my mind since long time, which concerns how long to be working on a song.
I have been mumbling about this question because the first conclusion could be "as long as necessary: sometimes a piece of art can take years to complete", but then I've seen situations like a friend of mine sending me the demo of a great song, then, 2 months after another demo with same the song radically changed, and then again after 2 months and so on... Eventually 2 years later the band broke up, they never finished that song and the latest iteration was way worse than the original one.
They had just come to hate the song and lost completely any objectivity about it.

The conclusion is that yes, it's important to refine all the details of the song like it's a painting, as much as needed (yes, even if you do the rawest punk rock), but it's equally important that the first intuition, the first burst of creativity when we write a song usually is the least mediated by our reason, and usually it's the best part, so it's probably a good idea of writing down and preserving these more "inspired" parts and to limit the "craftmasnhip" side as little as possible, only to fill the gaps between the quick ideas, otherwise we will come up with an overcooked piece of music that taste like nothing.

The aim should be to get to know the right time to "let a song go", meaning to consider it finished and publish it, so we can focus on other songs, and this is sometimes a hard task for a perfectionist, therefore some songwriter came up with the idea of setting yourself a deadline: "I'm going to work on this song for (for example) 4 sessions, and one month from now I will consider it finished".

This can be a good exercise: one can actually work on the song for example on the weekends for one month, and keep the other days of the week for listening to it with fresh ears, in order to understand what is there to correct, or whether the song is bad and needs to be scrapped, and then at the end of the month the song should have received enough "debug" to take a final form.
If the final form is still not 100% satisfying, it's time to demolish the song, salvage the usable riffs and put them in the warehouse in case we need to complete another song.
For someone the 1 month deadline can be even too long, so they can prefer a 15 days deadline, or a 7 days one, it all really depends on you and your creative output.

One final note: we have talked about deadlines for individual songs but this doesn't mean that we can be working on 2, 5, 10 songs at the same time, each one with its own specific deadlines!

Did you ever try this technique? Let us know in the comments below!

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