Songwriting is such a strange process. I often spend months and much research on a single idea, and it might take a year for the actual song to emerge and mature. I have even said that a song isn’t a song until I have played it 100 times, because it will morph even after it has been fully fledged into the world.
But there is another process that is both fragile and powerful, wherein a song will appear “whole cloth” and the writer must hurriedly capture the moment and the ideas without crushing them. We rush for pen and paper or phone apps or digital recorders. Or we find ourselves without any of our usual tools or even instruments and we must sing that song while driving hours across Iowa before we can stop to capture the magic. And magic, it is!
This week, I spoke with several of my songwriting siblings about this phenomenon. We each describe the moment a little differently, yet we all recognize that the songs that write themselves come from someplace other than our usual sources. And there is an urgency in those moments.
A dream. Divine source. An entity. The Awen. Family healing itself through our craft. A voice that surely is not our voice. Some of us don’t even analyze the source … we don’t question it; we just RUN with it.
In the summer of 2016, I spent 6 days in a hospital as my alter-ego Nine Toes the Bard began her final push into my body and soul. We wrote 6 songs in 6 days in that hospital and I absolutely know that she was expressing herself through me, as I simply could not have written that music and those lyrics on my own. Most startling to me was Pomona’s Song of love, life and growth in four seasons under an abandoned apple orchard, written in a single day. I could smell those apples in my hospital room as I wrote through the summer verse.
You can listen to and purchase this song on Bandcamp: https://mamagina.bandcamp.com/track/pomonas-song
Read what my musical siblings have to say about the songs that wrote themselves, and listen to the magic that worked its way into the world.
Meren King – Ebony Wings
“Rarely do my songs come to me in full form … However, there sometimes comes the rare inspiration that has everything – chords, melody, story, lyrics – all at once, and that is when “the new song” is all I can think about.”
“Ebony Wings was born and bloomed all in the space of about 48 hours … the chords and melody came all at once, and as I’ve learned over the years, if I don’t get ideas recorded or written down, I will forget them as quickly as they came to me. My phone recorder was soon turned on to catch this latest gift from my Muses.”
Meren described her experience during an Oestara 2023 Florida Women’s Retreat. She credits the land, the women, the work that she was doing, and so many crows gathering as part of the inspiration for this song that wrote itself.
Meren’s thoughts ran from Tribal folklore about crow/raven to an imagined story of her grandmother working with that magic. “With the song mostly written, I slept on it and woke in the morning with the rest of the story and lyrics, and by the end of that second day of the Retreat I had the song completed. … a record for me, as birthing a song usually takes much more time and effort.”
You can listen to and purchase this song on Bandcamp: https://merenking.bandcamp.com/track/ebony-wings
Beth Sage – Earth Day Song
“I’m more of a “Thunderbolt” writer. Whoooosh! It all comes raining down.“
Beth shared with me that she works with the Awen, the Divine creative flow, and that songs sometimes take time and hard work, and other times reveal themselves in a thunderbolt! Those latter moments are more of a compulsion, and she will capture the idea on her phone. She also describes these moments as akin to automatic writing. From her debut digital album, Earth Day Song was born of one of those Thunderbolts.
You can listen to and purchase this song on Bandcamp: https://bethsage.bandcamp.com/track/earth-day-song
SJ Tucker – Little Bird
“Little Bird. It woke me up out of a dead sleep, and it poured outta me fully formed.”
“It’s like nothing else I’ve ever felt on earth, like a very bouncy spirit has come to visit, and our conversation is only limited by how long it takes me to grab pen & paper or guitar or smartphone voice recorder app or all of the above. Lightning in a bottle that you drank the night before and forgot about.”
You can listen to and purchase this song on Bandcamp: https://sjtucker.bandcamp.com/track/little-bird-2
Louis Garou – Just My Other Side
“It’s a weird story. I had moved into an old cabin in the mountains. There was a wood stove, an old wooden chair. I had my guitar and notebook. It was a cold night. I built a fire in the wood stove. Sat in the chair, wrapped in my blanket. Got warmed up and went to sleep. When I woke up my notebook was open. The song was written in my scrawl, but I have no memory of writing it. It’s my favorite of my own songs.”
You can listen to and purchase this song on Bandcamp: https://louisgarou.bandcamp.com/track/just-my-other-side
Krista Chapman Green – Cages
Krista told me that Cages “fell out of my heart and onto the paper.”
“It wrote itself, on the side of the road, on paper covered in tears. So many things I felt and all the things I had been through in my life all came to a rolling boil after the death of my biological father. At last, everything my heart felt and everything my body and mind had witnessed and lived through was seeing light. It will always be one of the hardest songs for me to sing, and it will always bring me one step closer to healing.”
Eboni Nash – Corner Pocket (feat. Cloud the Pagan Rapper)
Corner Pocket was a musical piece and “a dormant song for so long and was the last song to fall into place with my debut album. I just felt it come through while listening to the instrumental & in 45 minutes to an hour, it was finally complete. (I)t’s the first song I put lyrics in that I allowed people to hear.”
You can listen to and purchase this song on Bandcamp: https://sereln.bandcamp.com/track/corner-pocket-feat-cloud-the-pagan-rapper
Inspiration magic is all around us
I do believe that songwriting is a craft and that we must continue to hone our skills by improving our musical knowledge and ability, as well as learning techniques from other writers. I also believe that when Divine inspiration strikes, however and whenever that happens, we must be ready to listen deeply within and without, and employ every tool in our kit, to bring the best version of that song into the world.
So tell me, what song wrote itself through you, and what was that experience like? Share your wisdom and a link to that song in the comments.
For more information about Mama Gina, including her collected articles here on Pagan Song, her bio, and links to Gina’s sites on the web, check out Gina’s page on Pagan Song.
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One of my first songs came to me in one piece as I sat at the laundromat after a life-changing river trip!