On songwriting and killing your darlings

05 Nov, 2026

I have written music for as long as I can remember. Within my first year of piano lessons, my teacher Mrs Topper was encouraging me to compose my own pieces and setting it as weekly homework. Those early compositions were beyond simple, but it didn't matter. I was routinely creating something that wasn't there before. It was like a magic trick. Over time, Mrs Topper pushed me to perform my own music at her annual concerts, instead of pieces that I had learned. Again, they were not showy or complex, but they were mine. I felt enormously proud that people were listening to something that I had come up with. Something that I had written to express an idea or a feeling. It has stayed with me since the age of about eight, and is nothing more or less than a compulsion at this point.

It once struck me that not everybody who learns an instrument feels that urge to write. I remember chatting to lots of my high school peers who learned one instrument or another, and those who wrote their own music were by far in the minority. A similar pattern has continued through to my adult life (even when the relative quantity of musicians I know is substantially lower). To not feel that compulsion to try and create new music is an alien concept to me. Almost thirty years on, the drive to write is still with me, nestled right in the core of my identity. It occasionally wars with other creative impulses, but I write music in one form or another almost constantly.

And yet despite decades of experience, it remains extremely challenging. Of course there are times when it just flows out faster than you can get it down. You feel as though you are discovering something which is already there, and a piece just writes itself. But there are other times where I can find myself midway through writing a song only to get completely blocked and unable to think of the way forward. More often than not I think that can be attributed to the rest of the song not being right. Sort of like I have partially assembled a Jenga tower, only to discover a few of the blocks are actually from a different set.

It's painful to discover that you have written yourself into a corner with no way through. I have never found another approach to handle it other than killing my darlings. There's a wonderful line in the film adaptation of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas:

"Composing is a crusade. Sometimes you slay the dragon. Sometimes it slays you."¹
- Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent)

And it's fairly true in my experience; those darlings I have to kill are the dragon taking its toll. They are parts of me that have to be amputated for the rest to flourish properly. It feels monstrous, sometimes. These cherished creations banished to some forgotten corner of my mind, for a future version of myself to pick over for any useful scraps of meat. But (to quote another Jim Broadbent role) it's for the greater good. You return from the campaign for a time, broken and bruised, mourning your losses. But the crusade always calls again, and there are always more dragons.

I've been writing a metal(ish) album for the past few years. My creative process looks different from how it was in years gone by, so it's slower progress than I'd like. I'm getting there on a lot of the material now, and a lot of it is coming together faster. I like to think I've matured as a songwriter; a lot of my more self-indulgent impulses are reigned in, and there is genuine restraint in my writing where once there was little (or none). But these eight songs are littered with the corpses of their forebears; not so much standing on the shoulders of giants but on a mound of the Frankenstein remains of their ancestors. It's been a brutal fight, and if I ever get the thing out, I will not be the same person that I was when I started it. But I suppose the same can be said of any creative endeavour that is truly worth making. As Hemmingway put it:

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

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