Why Finding Something to Write About Is One of the Biggest Songwriting Challenges
One of the most persistent challenges songwriters face isn’t finishing songs—it’s knowing where to begin. Whether you’re writing your first song or your hundredth, the same questions often appear whenever you sit down with a blank page: Where do I start? What should I write about? Is this idea even worth pursuing?
While many songwriters assume they have an inspiration problem, the reality is often more nuanced. Most of us are surrounded by potential ideas every day. The real challenge is finding an idea that feels meaningful enough to hold our attention long enough to become a finished song.
This is where Paul Simon’s advice offers a surprisingly effective solution: Start with something that’s true.
You can watch the video below, or keep reading:
What Does “Start With Something True” Mean in Songwriting?
At first glance, the advice sounds simple. However, hidden within it is a powerful framework for generating ideas that are both personally meaningful and creatively sustainable.
When we ask ourselves what is “true,” we’re shifting our attention away from trying to invent something clever and toward discovering something honest. Instead of searching for the perfect concept, we begin examining our own experiences, thoughts, emotions, and observations.
The result is often a songwriting idea that already carries emotional weight before we’ve written a single lyric.
Finding Song Ideas Through Personal Experience
One interpretation of “something true” is asking a simple question:
What feels true for me right now?
This question encourages reflection on the things currently occupying your mind. Perhaps you’re navigating a difficult relationship, questioning your direction in life, experiencing anxiety, celebrating a personal breakthrough, or processing a major life change.
The first angle is the most personal one. What is actually going on in your life right now? What are you preoccupied with—not in a vague, general sense, but specifically, when you lie awake, or when something hits you unexpectedly in the middle of an ordinary day?
I tried this myself, just before filming this tutorial. I sat down for a couple of minutes and wrote without editing.
What came out was a collection of things I’m genuinely wrestling with: worry about the state of the world, the strange accumulating weight of adult responsibilities, the way my family has scattered across different homes and different lives, the slightly terrifying reality of watching my children mirror my own behaviors back at me.
None of those are small ideas. And that’s the point. When you ask yourself what is actually true for you in this moment, you almost always arrive at the big themes—love, death, family, change, purpose—not because you went looking for them, but because that’s what your life is actually made of. These are the universal themes that work in songs precisely because everyone is dealing with some version of them. They connect because they’re genuinely shared. They’re not manufactured.
These themes are often referred to as universal themes because listeners recognise themselves within them. While your specific story may be unique, the emotions underneath it are often familiar to others.
Why Authentic Song Ideas Are Easier to Finish
There’s a second advantage that’s just as important: when you’re writing about something you actually care about, you’re more likely to finish. Creative energy isn’t infinite. Starting from something true gives you the momentum to push through the middle sections of a song, the parts where most unfinished songs die, because you actually want to get to the end.
How Current Events and Real Stories Can Inspire Songs
The second angle on the word true is facts, events, things that happened. Songs have been doing this forever. Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” — all of them rooted in documented reality, in things that actually occurred. There’s a reason writing that way feels satisfying: it has the structural advantage of being grounded, of having a story that already exists and only needs to be shaped.
Current events are an obvious starting point here, though I’d gently push back on the instinct to only scan the headlines of the mainstream news cycle. I’ve found it worth deliberately going to sources that report differently, stories about people doing remarkable things, unexpected kindness, ecological recovery, community resilience. Not because the dark stuff isn’t real, but because the beautiful stuff is equally real and far less represented.
A headline can be a title. A phrase from an article can be the seed of an entire song. You’re not looking for something to report on: you’re looking for something that catches, that creates a small interior reaction, that feels like it has more inside it than the headline says.
How Starting With Something True Leads to Better Songs
Whether you start from your own interior life or from something happening in the world, the filter is the same. You’re looking for the thing that grabs you. Not the thing that seems appropriate, or impressive, or likely to succeed. The thing that actually resonates, that has some charge to it.
Random prompts can be useful for loosening things up, for getting the engine running when it’s cold—but the risk is that the disconnect between you and the idea shows up in the work itself.
Starting with something true is a way of honoring what Paul Simon is actually saying: that the best songs are ones where the songwriter had no need to cover their tracks. Where the emotional authenticity wasn’t something they had to fake, because it was there from the beginning.
When that shift happens, the blank page becomes far less intimidating. You no longer need to wait for the perfect idea to arrive. You simply need to ask yourself one question:
What is true right now?
And from there, the song can begin.
Happy songwriting,
Benny
