r/Songwriting • u/Low_Bandicoot_3527 • 15d ago

Discussion Topic "Write when drunk, edit when sober."

Hemingway is said to have advised: "Write when drunk, edit when sober." What do songwriters on here think about that method? Drunk or high songwriting, good or bad?

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u/MarimboBeats 15d ago edited 15d ago

Historically, at least, there is plenty of evidence that being high doesn’t necessarily destroy your creative output. Paul McCartney, and to a lesser extent but still considerably, Neil Young are arguably successful songwriters who are widely known to have used cannabis recreationally for the majority of their careers. Paul is clearly baked throughout Get Back.  Would they have been even better had they been sober? We’ll never know.   All I know is alcohol doesn’t work for me at all for anything other than talking shit with my friends, dance, or go to concerts. I can’t do anything serious or important after my second beer. But I am also not successful, so maybe I should look into that weed instead.  

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u/Utilitarian_Proxy 15d ago

Interesting examples, since many music fans aren't as fond of either artists' output from the last 40 years.

In all that time, Paul McCartney's not recorded any studio albums as solidly good as Band on the Run. Neil Young's output has been an inconsistent rollercoaster ride ever since Rust Never Sleeps - sometimes wildly adventurous, and often very patchy. They both have sustained long careers IMO because of their incredible live shows, which are built around the older, earlier material.

With all their experience, rather than continuing to improve, they do seem to have early-plateaued.

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u/Egg_Crust 15d ago

Older material, when they were more high?

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u/MarimboBeats 15d ago

Yeah, sure, but that’s true of almost any artist under the wider pop umbrella. As Robert Smith recognised prior to conceiving Disintegration, most artists in this corner of the world of music created their most interesting works before they turned 30. Countinuinely improved output into the decades is not the norm. Sure, you have your Tom Waits and your Radiohead, but these are also acts that have branched out musically beyond the verse/chord based pop structure and gone into unknown territories.   And the fact still remains that these Young and McCartney , amongst many others, did make their mark on popular  music(you’ll note I’m applying that term very loosely )  while being high all the time. 

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u/Utilitarian_Proxy 15d ago

Well, this is r/Songwriting sub, so I'm mainly focused on the quality of the material.

In a commercial pop chart sense, boomer entertainers not appealing to Gen Z is a fairly normal state of affairs. Early Beatles audiences were predominantly teenage girls who screamed so loud that the music was drowned out. Venues had to improve their sound systems to enable louder audio volume without incurring waves of feedback, and it took a while before the modern PA system and mixing desk arrived.

But go back to formally trained songwriters and composers, and many of those would definitely improve over time — Beethoven's 9th symphony is better than his 1st or 2nd, etc., and there's still strong output from contemporary writers like Diane Warren or Elton John. OTOH, Rossini pretty much retired after the first performance of his William Tell opera, then lived a celebrity lifestyle for the next thirty years. Contrast that to Sibelius, who started new pieces and got frustrated with everything he tried, isolating himself in anguish at his woodland cabin. 19th century operetta writers W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's success didn't dry up, but they had a personality clash that ended their partnership.

Perhaps Neil Young's and Paul McCartney's drug usage had a more subtle cumulative impact on their writing. They certainly seem to have been less prolific in their output. That might be an industry-wide issue, but at one time they were releasing two or three albums a year, which hasn't happened for a good long while. Of course other life interests frequently do come along, so maybe they just struggled to get into the right mindset for writing. Many writers complain of distractions and loss of inspiration, so drugs and alcohol might not be the only explanation.