In the last 5 days I've written 3 songs which means as I wrote up the one I wrote this evening in the little notebook which replaced the one I filled in October last year it wasn't until I checked the page before to see the number that I realised that this was song number 100.
Since I started documenting my songs in one place (the 2 notebooks) in 2011 I made a point of numbering them so I could easily keep track of them and when I began the new notebook I decided to continue with the previous numbering rather than starting from scratch. When I made the decision to write little numbers in the corner of every page with a song title on it never in a million years did I imagine just how many songs I would write. The fact that I'm 18 years old and have written 100 songs already is a little bit crazy to me, especially as it would seem that the older I get the more songs I write. My aim for 2015 was to write 50 songs within the year and while I have no idea whether or not I'm currently on track for that, hitting 100 songs in 2015 is a pretty huge achievement in itself.
The majority of the songs I write will never see the light of day or be heard by anyone other than me and my 2 best friends who often receive an email with a voice memo from my phone with a (very) rough version of the song I've written 2 minutes before but that doesn't matter to me. The more songs I write the more I write them for me. I used to be very concerned with making my songs relatable (something which I admired a lot in Taylor Swift's writing and wanted to emulate) but these days I've decided that my songs should accurately describe how I feel, not anyone else. If people pick out details and see reflections of their lives in my songs that's awesome, but that's not my main purpose in writing a song. One massive thing that shows this development in my writing is that I wrote a song with names in recently, something I never dreamed I'd ever do 4 years ago. While the names are cryptic and anyone other than my closest friends probably wouldn't be able to figure out who the people in the song represent, the use of names still limits how relatable it can realistically be. And I really don't mind.
Songwriting is my art form. It's how I channel my emotions and when I don't write for a long time I will often then have a surge of pent up ideas and write a lot of songs in a short space of time. I'm an emotional person and whenever I feel strongly about something, I write a song about it. I know now that I will never stop writing songs, even if none of them were ever heard by anyone other than myself. Without writing songs I would have far too many emotions cooped up inside my brain scratching to get out and I would be a very miserable Luce.
I am a songwriter through and through, and one that's proud of their achievements at that.
Lucy x
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