How can I tell my story through creating music?

Sub Questions: How can I grow as a musician by better understanding music composition?

How can I develop my own voice by listening to and covering songs of artists that I admire?

Overall I learned a lot more about myself through this experience than I had expected to. Since my essential question surrounds telling my own story, I had to look within myself and overtime the experience became more meaningful. It was a perfect essential question, broad enough to leave room for trying different things but specific enough to provide some guidance. Along with my main questions I think my sub questions helped me have a more focused project and I created a lot of goals around the sub questions that structured the weeks. I would focus parts of my week on just gaining general music knowledge, meaning learning about music theory and composition. Then I would spend the rest of my week self reflecting, writing and actually playing music. I also learned a lot from listening to other artists and focused on things I liked from those artists that I incorporated while making my own music.

I was surprised by how quickly I started to form a creative process and how I found certain things that helped my productivity along the way, like taking walks and bike rides. I think forming my creative process was the most meaningful part of my project, because it is something that will last and has set me up to want to continue creating music in the future. Through finding my voice in free writes and reflections I also began to learn how to put those feelings and experiences into lyrics, just by trying it out and playing with words/rhyming to see what felt most natural. As I started writing enough lyrics to be substantial enough for a song I realized I worked best when I built the songs up in pieces and worked on multiple songs at once so I wouldn’t continue getting writer’s block on one song.

Due to this style of writing my final product was different than I had intended, but I still think it heavily reflects my growth and learning. I ended up producing 2 mostly finished songs and then 3 other snippets of chorus’ and verses of other songs. I didn’t want to force myself to write three completely finished songs because it felt unnatural to write like that and I think they would have come out ingenuine, which is the last thing I wanted. So I think these less finalized songs illustrate the endless nature of songwriting and how you can always add to a song and the bits of the other three show more how my brain was working and thinking of songs. Through out the project I questioned how my songs would differ if I had more experience and if “fresh eyes” add something special to a song that you can never really get back after you write your first few songs. But overall I want to share how even though they might not all be whole songs it shows a lot about how I discovered my process and how I can best and most naturally express myself through music.