Creativity and why I'm going to write a bunch of bad songs

I haven't been creative in a while. Haven't written any original music in several years. I haven't been writing much on this blog this year. I started a new job a few months ago that is taking up a lot of my time and energy. This has been a bit depressing. Sure I'm still noodling during most evenings and weekends but I haven't been "working" on the guitar. I've been learning the basics of quite a few songs over the last few years, and even spent some time diving into the styles of guys like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix. Some of that was learning but I thought maybe I would derive some sort of inspiration from it. I didn't.

I was listening to a podcast from someone last year (an author, I can't remember who it was) and he was talking about how he writes books. He was talking about the fact that he shuts the doors, and even blocks his internet for a certain amount of time everyday. But he said something very interesting. He said that he tells his brain to work on things, and his brain will work on it in the background. He never says "I don't know what to do with this" when he thinks that he tells his brain to get rid of that thought and to figure it out. So last night I started thinking about that idea in terms of songwriting. I also watched an interview with David Grissom a bluesy roots rock player with an incredible resume. He said to write 100 songs and by the time you've written 100 of them you'll START to figure out what works and what doesn't.

I remember the first few songs I wrote were pretty awful but at some point I wrote a handful of songs I was really proud of. So I'm starting over, taking the two pieces of advice from above. I'm going to write 100 songs. I don't care if they are good or not. This will hopefully kick my creativity into gear. It will force me to learn about mixing demos and how to build drum tracks (which I suck at). Not sure if I'll try to add vocals at any point, for now they will just be instrumentals.

So here is the first idea, just a guitar track, nothing else. I screw up in a few spots, even the most simple part because I realized I hadn't decided what to do with that part. Maybe I'll try to rerecord it. Maybe I'll try to write a different riff. I'm not sure yet but it feels good to do something.