My evolution as a songwriter is pretty concise. Despite composing classical music since I was a toddler and even taking music composition lessons at a local university as a young teenager, I did not write my first song until the summer before my senior year of high school. I wasn’t a vocalist, and with my very limited knowledge of pop music it never even occurred to me to try to write any songs myself. 

That first song was a complete surprise. I was going through an emotional goodbye and experienced a sort of out-of-body moment where I watched myself from above, walking through the streets of Taipei, tears streaming down my cheeks. It was like a scene from a movie and this song just started to play in the background. I went back to my room, wrote down the words and then realized that I had a song that sounded like something I would hear on the radio. In the next year I wrote several dozen more of these songs, many of them in the same way: I would be going through life…typically nothing as dramatic as in Taipei…and then a song would come into my head like a real time movie soundtrack. 

Now it wasn’t always like that, but it was indeed that simple. For the next seven years, when I wanted to write a song — so that I was actually sitting down and focused on creating something — I could often just default back to pretending I was watching a scene in a TV show or movie and then, again, the music would just flow naturally. Sometimes I would pick a phrase and just say it over and over until the music started streaming through my pen. Or I would sit at the piano and play some chords, and sooner or later an entire song would just follow. Or when I’d drum some beat on my desk. Freshman year of college I learned to play the guitar, and so it was the same thing when strumming a few chords. Sophomore year I picked up the bass guitar, and indeed one time (only once that I can recall) I had a song just flow out of a bass line that I made up. 

One day someone asked about my approach to songwriting, and I realized I didn’t have a process. The best way for me to describe it was like a faucet that I could turn on whenever I wanted to. There was always water ready to flow out. Sometimes it would come out really fast, sometimes it would be more of a trickle, maybe too hot or too cold, but there was always water coming out. I almost never actually felt like I was the person writing these songs…instead I was just tweaking what I heard in my head. Actually, I would often say I wasn’t writing songs, I was just writing them down. At some point, the faucet began to leak so that it was basically running all the time, and instead of turning it on when I felt like it, I would struggle to shut it off when I needed to focus on other things. During this period I wrote around 500 songs. 

Eight years after that first song in Taipei, I graduated with my masters degree in music performance. I began my journey into the working world and to some degree my habits changed. I had more responsibilities. I had fewer days where, if I felt the inspiration, I could spontaneously spend the next four hours writing songs. One subtle but very significant change in my routine: I was no longer scouring and absorbing new music. In college and grad school I had friends who were always sharing new bands, new sounds and new styles with me. When I left that environment, I left that habit behind. Sure, I was still playing in a couple bands and I was working in classical music management, so I was involved with music everyday. But the bands I was in were either cover bands or pretty much only playing old songs (by me or my bandmates). Over time, without even realizing it, I had almost entirely stopped writing music altogether.

And then I stopped playing in those bands. There really wasn’t much of an incentive to continue writing anymore. My motivation was waning. I had been songwriting for an entire decade and outside of a few close friends, nobody had heard 99% of what I wrote. In a way, it was very frustrating that for many years I struggled to keep up with all the songs in my head and the more and more and more the songs kept coming, the more and more and more songs that I would never do anything with, sitting in a box in the closet waiting for a day that likely would never come. 

So I began recording an album in late 2011, which I finally released about 14 months later. It was a labor of love and took such a long time because I worked with three different producers, half a dozen musicians and singers, and then we shot music videos and did some other cool promotional stuff before releasing. I really enjoyed the entire process a lot, but in reality, despite what I was portraying externally, this actually felt like the end and not the beginning. The album was a last hurrah, a sort of closing paragraph to this chapter of my life, a fitting final call where I could at long last showcase some of the music I had created over the years. By the time my wife and I started our real estate business in 2013, I had written maybe all of three songs in the previous year. I had learned to ignore the leaky faucet. Or maybe the well had finally run dry. 

And so here I am, some six years removed from my last song. I’ve been slowly picking up the piano chops again. I’ve actually played keys for our church worship band four times now! By the end of this year I’m gonna start practicing the violin again. Then I’ll slowly ease my way back with the guitar. I’m expecting to be able to take little steps, slowly but surely, towards regaining some basic proficiency with these instruments that used to be second nature. But to be totally honest, I’m scared that I can’t write songs anymore. You see, it’s not something I ever learned to do, it’s not something I really ever fully comprehended, and so I have no blueprint for doing it again. In fact, I’ve taken several stabs at this over the last few years. On more than a handful of occasions, I’ve spent an hour or two working on some lyrics, working on a melody, working on something…but it always felt so forced. And after a few hours, when in the past I’d expect to have a song finished, I was just staring at a disorganized mess. 

Don’t worry though, I’m not giving up. I’ll start listening to lots of music again and hopefully refill the water tank. I mean, that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? When the faucet stops working, you fix it. When the music stops, you put on a new record.