I have been here before. I wrote a song called ‘Snakeskin’ which mapped some of the same sorts of moment I experienced with my father’s passing. But I have been writing much closer to the coalface this time. Also incorporating songs from before that suddenly make sense. And strapping them all together to create a life raft I can float on right now now, through these difficult waters as the grief catches me round the throat at unexpected moments. It comes in waves. Yes, that’s another song.

What I want to focus on here is the idea of the dirt under the fingernails in songwriting. This is a concept I return to a lot when I’m writing on my own, and just as much when I’m cowriting, as I was with Dan Whitehouse this week ahead of our Autumn UK coheadline tour ‘Songs Before Sunrise’.

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My father died almost ten years ago, and last week my mother joined him (see Songwriter on Fire 36). I am experiencing a double layer, new grief squatting on the old.

I go walking in green places when I feel the need to find balance. I head for the trees by the river here in Cambridge. There’s a magical ring of white willows out on Stourbridge Common towards Fen Ditton. They form a natural haven. I think of them sometimes as a cathedral. And I sometimes feel the need to walk among, sit among those trees.

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Today I have just been mentoring a fantastic singer-songwriter here in Cambridge who’s about to give this crazy life a try. I’m moving to London in August she said — where do I start?

Here’s a summary of my response. Please feel free to share with anyone in the same situation.

1 Self-care — being a singer-songwriter is like being an athlete. Late nights at open mics, early mornings at the money job, you’ll be burning the candle at both ends and you need to look after yourself to avoid burn out. Try to get adequate sleep (for me that’s 8 hours - know what your need is); eat clean food — lots of protein, lots of greens, and find eating times that work for you so you eat enough; if you need dinner at 5pm that’s ok. Be careful with alcohol: I’ve seen so many talented people I love enter into a problematic relationship with it in this environment. Care for your mental health and if you feel something isn’t right about your outlook and the way you’re perceiving things, talk in time; creatives are sensitive humans and we need to be careful with our heads. Just keep your awareness on. Be kind to yourself. Forgive yourself. Tread gently. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

2 Open mics — Start going to and playing your songs at open mic nights. There are so many good reasons for doing this. Learning and getting better at your craft.  Listening to and learning from others playing their songs. Sensing which of your songs connect with people and which ones need more work. Honing that connection. Meeting your tribe, finding other musicians to build your support community, creating more opportunities and connections. Learning gig craft and accruing essential gig kit (such as a guitar stand, capos and picks, a spare set of strings, a spare battery, a jack and a spare). Hearing about other great places to play. Getting asked back to play as a special guest. Growing your fan base. Growing your mailing list. Growing your socials. Generating socials content. The list goes on and on…

3 Be kind — people you stab on the way up will be waiting for you with a knife on the way down. Don’t be a jerk. It’s a small world and word gets around.

4 Socials — Set up your socials: Instagram, Youtube and TikTok are probably now the most important; Threads and Facebook have some reach. Try to get all the handles to be the same. Start posting art-appropriate content that helps you grow your community. Make and post acoustic videos of your songs. You don’t have to be talking about your songs all the time. You can just be sharing your journey.

5 Mailing list — Establish an email mailing list. Don’t laugh: this old-school direct communication method is very effective: algorithmic limitations don’t guarantee you’ll reach followers with posts every time and when you’re going on tour that’s devastating. I use Mailchimp to manage my list but there are lots of providers where you can grow a database of people who care about your work enough to sign up to your newsletter. I post no more than once a month. I put a clipboard out at every gig and always gather a few emails.

6 Patreon — when you are ready, consider starting a Patreon page. It will really help you with accountability and provide some helpful financial support.

7 Dream supports — make a list of all the people you would love to support. Find them on socials and start following them, engage in conversation with them in public posts, be amiable and reach out. Make friends. If they like what you’re doing they might ask you to support them which gives you a chance to play in front of their fans.

8 Dream producers — listen to albums sonically “in the room” with you and your project and make a list of all the producers you would love to work with, who you can hear would be sympathetic to your offering. Start following them on socials and find out who their managers are.

9 Recording — learn the basics of self recording so you can be as independent as possible and make simple demos to showcase your songs. When you are ready, you can blend studio recordings with home recordings to make an affordable first record.

10 Self release your music — you don’t have to wait for a record deal if you don’t want to. When you have any recordings you want to make publicly available on streaming platforms such as Spotify, Deezer and Tidal, you can sign up to services such as Tunecore or CD Baby which will take your song and release it on multiple platforms. You can also release on Bandcamp. You can release a single or a series of singles as part of a bigger release: just make a release plan and allow enough time (3 months minimum) to tell people you’re dropping a track. Be patient, take your time, spread the word.

11 Do the opposite — this is a weird one; sometimes things feel really hard and every door you knock on stays shut. The best advice I ever had is, when it feels tough like this, go off and do something else for a bit. It’s counterintuitive, but oftentimes you come back later and the answer has presented itself.

Please share with anyone you know who may find this helpful. Making this post free.

Thank you so much for supporting and reading.

Polly Paulusma is a recording artist and songwriter, releasing records since 2004 with legendary record label One Little Independent Records (home to Björk).

Listen to Polly Paulusma’s six critically acclaimed studio albums and ancillary releases at Bandcamp.

Dr Polly Paulusma is Bye Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and Associate Professor of Song & Literature at The Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP) in London. She teaches songwriting for the Centre for Music Performance (CMP) in Cambridge, Professional and Continuing Learning (PACE) in Cambridge and for the Arvon Foundation. She publishes academic writing on literature, song, songwriting and practice as research.

From 13 April she will lead early morning silent writing sessions each day on Instagram 6.45-7.15am. Follow @pollypaulusma at Instagram for more.

For up-to-date news of gigs and releases, join her artist mailing list.

For more about her journey as an artist and a human, join her at Patreon.

The Mercurys last October. The Grammys in February. The Ivor Novellos yesterday. Same feeling. Same pit of the stomach gut punch. Disappointment.

You put your art in the ring for competitive consideration, and your peers just don’t think you have what it takes. It always hurts. It never gets any easier.

Putting myself in the ring feels right, though. You have to try. Circus ring? Boxing ring? Bull ring? It’s all the same. It still hurts to emerge anonymous, uncelebrated. You still leave feeling like a clown and you have bruises all over you and a bloody nose.

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So for this Substack I thought I’d share with you my deep-dive analysis into Joni Mitchell’s ‘All I Want’, the opening track of Blue which just mesmerises me from its opening jangle.

Come with me into the song and see if you can find what I find there, maybe find a whole load more.

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In England, it’s eight minutes past two in the afternoon and already the beginning of dusk. Soon the sun will be setting, a couple of minutes later than yesterday, as we now start the slow climb on the other side of the year in a gentle ascent towards that other, lighter solstice.

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And here I sit by my little fireplace in my cosy slipper socks and leggings, typing to you about downtime. Because that’s what I have here on my hands. Downtime. The gigs are all done for 2025, the term is over and the essays to be marked have not yet been delivered, and all I have to do is sit here and ponder on things, on how things are, on how things were, on how things might be. My own private visitation of Christmas ghosts.

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I haven’t had much time for this kind of reflection recently; it feels unnerving to be able to just breathe. It is hard as a creative not to feel guilty for doing nothing. But if I’m really honest with you, dear reader, I feel pretty empty right now. The push of a big creative project is something like having a baby and it’s over now, for the most part. I’ll have some last shows to play in March with Jon and an unnamable-for-pr-reasons third member who played piano on the record, if you know who that is. The album that has had me round the throat for three years has released her grip on me, and there she sits, complete.

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I’ve been writing new somethings. New songs I guess. But they feel to me like soggy biscuits in comparison. They feel like apologies. On one particular day one can write a song and be held captive by it, a crisp firm real song with true energy and bristling internal logic, and the feelings might be pure and healthy or they might be perverse, the kind of feelings to be ashamed of, locked in a bottom drawer and the key thrown away, but in the song they are ‘right’ in the sense that they are the truth, they are the feelings that occupy your every waking moment, and you can’t lie about them, and you don’t have to. And then on another day you can write a song and it bores you almost instantly, it’s a limp soggy lie of a song with no compass point, no real intention, no common thread, and the feelings might be pure or they might be sinful but it doesn’t really matter because they are not true. Is it because you feel nothing? No, that’s not true either. It’s more that you’re not really allowing yourself to show anything any more because you’ve beaten yourself around the head with your own interminable showing, the endless showing, the endless truth. You’ve exhausted yourself. And also, I am the worst judge of my own material. How the hell do I know what I’m doing?

So. Here is my downtime. And honestly I just have to sit here and take it.

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When I feel songs are not coming on the way they should, when I feel like a bleached, faded sign for some long-ago circus in a chippy window, I know my old wisdom. Reading is good for my inner songwriter, when she feels like this. Reading lots of beautiful things. It’s like taking her back to that circus. So I’m going to heed it this holiday season. I’ve been reading John Burnside’s incredible The Music of Time but afterwards I might move on to some fiction, or some Romantic poetry, that always feeds this lightning word-brain. Some people go look at art or dance. That can help me as well but my little internal combustion engines are more sparked by words than images.

What do you do to feed the well? Do share in the comments….

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Here’s the truth: sometimes I am not on fire. Right now, I’m more in deep sleep mode. The crop rotation has landed on the fallow field. I need it. I know in my brain that deep sleep and fallow are necessary parts of the process, but even though I’ve been through this cycle many times, the deep sleep and the fallow field never stop being terrifying. I never stop wondering: is this it? maybe I’ll never write again, maybe it’s leaving me, maybe the birds won’t stop at my windowsill any more, maybe I’ve done my best work, maybe it’ll never come again, maybe it’s time to hang up my guitar, shut the lid on the piano and close the window. The fear never leaves. But then again, I don’t think it should: I think it’s a part of the act of making. It’s the spark of danger in the ignition.

Another way to help with this emptiness and fear of insincerity is writing with prompts. There’s something about fast writing to prompts that stops me thinking about what I’m writing until after I’ve written it.

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This coming January I will join The Writing Hours with poets Kim Moore and Clare Shaw for at least one week, probably the first week. Join me?

Here I am, at the bottom of the creative wheel, the winter solstice of my making life, but I feel a couple of minutes different to yesterday, and I will feel a couple of minutes different tomorrow, when I will start the slow climb up the other side of myself, in a gentle ascent towards the light.

Wishing you a very restful, healthy, peaceful holiday season, and all the good things in the new year.

Please do feel free to share this page with anyone creative you know who is looking for company on the creative journey. I look forward to sharing more of my journey with you in 2026.

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Please do send me any questions you may have about songs, songwriting, recording, process, or any other topics you are interested. I am always happy to try to answer them.

Thank you so much for supporting and reading.

Polly Paulusma is a recording artist releasing records with legendary label and home to Björk One Little Independent Records.

Her album WILDFIRES was released in February 2025 to critical acclaim. MOJO ★★★★ “a marvel of subtly nuanced longform art in a world perma-geared towards instant gratification.” CLASH “A quite remarkable thing” “Arguably her masterpiece”.

She teaches at Cambridge University where she is a Bye Fellow in Literature at Murray Edwards College, and at The Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in London, where she is Associate Professor of Song & Literature.

She releases albums and publishes academic writing on literature, song, songwriting and practice as research.

For up-to-date news of her gigs and releases, please join her artist mailing list.

For more about her journey as an artist and a human, join her community at Patreon.

Follow me on Instagram where every UK morning 6.45am-7.15am Mon-Fri I turn on my camera and write my morning pages in silence. I have never said a word. I might blow my nose but that’s about it. People join me and do their own writing. We write together. It’s interesting.

In this essay I’m going to share with you not just what morning pages are, and how different creativity mentors have advocated for them, but I’m also going to do something brave and share my today’s morning pages that I wrote today with you, so you can see a real working example of what they might look like. This is dangerous; morning pages are not normally for sharing. But because we are a small community of like-minded people I know I am safe doing this with you.

So what are morning pages?

I’ve mentioned this writing tool before (see for example Songwriter on Fire 6) because I use them every day in my own creative practice so I can’t help but talk about them a lot. I’ve found them impossibly useful in my own songwriting. Ideas just percolate in them. Sometimes ideas even arrive complete.

I have found morning pages described with different names by different creativity mentors, and while they may have different labels they are really the same thing: like the same old friend wearing a different hat.

Let’s look at the different descriptions: you’ll quickly see how different, clever people have realised their power independently. This is quite persuasive; if these people in different times and places have arrived at the same conclusion, there’s got to be something in it, right?

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Here are my friends Beacon and Kin who make lip balm from the flowers in their French garden. Needless to say, all my nieces are getting lip balm this year.

In that spirit, I draw to your attention to the fact that it is Bandcamp Friday today.

You can buy music and merch directly from the makers and they get all the proceeds. This lasts 1200-1200 Pacific time. Or if you’re in the uK it’s 8am Friday to 8am Saturday. Bandcamp Friday is a remarkable and generous thing of Bandcamp to do.

I’ve got CDs and vinyl and even a book of lyrics and prose poems up at my Bandcamp page. I’ve also got A4 riso prints and I’ve also just added some new A5 mounted print images, black/white art stills I took from the full-length film of WILDFIRES that I directed and edited.

You can see the films these images came from (WILDFIRES Parts 1 and 2) here.

Please check out my stuff. But more importantly, think about all the makers you know. If you can buy directly from them somehow, this would be lifechanging.

And specifically today, think about the musicians you know and love, and if you want to gift their music this holiday season, today’s the day.

The perspectives or points of view from which we sing our songs create a big moment of decision as we start to pen lyrics, and they can be something to tweak if we have a tricky moment with a song.

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It took me two United flights and an Uber journey to get there, setting off from London Heathrow late morning and grinding across the Atlantic, coming in over Canadian coastal communities, Cap-aux-Meules and Bassin, to land at Chicago, then after a very short break on to Cedar Rapids in a second plane that was only airborne for 35 minutes.

Finally I made an Uber ride with Sade for 30 minutes into downtown Iowa City — Sade pronounced like the famous 1980s pop star, who told me all about her three daughters with pride. And I had ten minutes to check in, find my rental guitar that had been left at reception, and hotfoot it over the road to a songwriting workshop that was just about to start with the festival’s artist in residence, Courtney Marie Andrews.

How did I find myself in Iowa City, running across a road with a guitar in my hand?

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I’m thinking a waterfall shaped like Angel Falls in Venezuela. Here’s a picture of Angel Falls I took in 1995 on a trip there. It stays in my consciousness.

The cascade of images. A central topic, object, image, will be introduced as the song opens and will tumble its way through, changing, being caught, turned around, sent on its way again, to arrive at the pool of understanding at the bottom of the falls, the end of the song.

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I love the cascade of images because it contains in its structure all the best things about writing a really good song: an idea that turns and changes and moves you.

Sometimes you get lucky and a song falls out fully formed, with its cascade of images intact, because our brains can do beautiful things when we let them do what they want to do unhindered. My song ‘Hallelujah’ (not that ‘Hallelujah’, a different one), took eight years to write, but actually took 10 minutes twice, eight years apart. The piano part fell out of me on one day, and then eight years later I had to catch the lyrics on the inside of a loo roll whilst in the bath (this happens quite a lot). The words, like the music, birthed fully formed with a cascade of images about jewels and guardians and holy houses completely present. I guess my brain had been given eight years to knit it together quietly in the darkness.

In my mortal songwriter experience, this full cascade event is quite rare. More often than not, on my first song draft I might not have a cascade yet. This cascade-building business is then to be found in the redrafting.

There’ll be some image, some arresting person or being or object or colour or state, that has popped up somewhere in the song as it emerged in its nascent state. It may not be at the start. It might be in verse 3. But keep a look out for it.

This image will poke out like a sparkly jewel and wink at you. The cascade, in my experience, is usually a reverse engineering process. You take the sparkly image and you run backwards to the head of the waterfall, the top of the song, and you find interesting ways to tell the song’s story of itself through the manipulation of the image as it tumbles through the length of the song. Meaning unfolds itself. When you give it a chance to flow, it takes on its own life and starts making new meanings, often way beyond your control. And this is the meaning-making we seek — the flash of new splashes, unexpected pairings, images put together that you hadn’t seen before that make the brain think a new thought.

Here’s a brilliant example of a text-book cascade in action: a full-blooded alt-country song that makes me marvel at its structural heft called ‘Loose Change’ performed by The Highwomen, written by Maren Morris, Daniel Robin Layus and Maggie Chapman.

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/highwomen/loosechange.html

Thinking on the topic of money, work your way through the song and watch the cascade of images shimmer and twist to tell the story of a jilted persona recovering a sense of confidence and self-worth after a cruel romantic break-up.

From shines, bucks, the titular loose change, flipping heads or tails, and differing concepts of value, we tumble through the song through a cascade of coins to arrive at the optimistic manifesting mantra ‘I’m gonna be somebody’s lucky penny some day’. The money image keeps twisting and curling to mean something different, but it creates unity in the song from top to bottom, allows us to see the waterfall, where we started, where we land.

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The Beatles’ song ‘Blackbird’ is a more poetic, aesthetic, emotionally resonant example of this phenomenon. I don’t want to tell you too much at Paul McCartney’s brilliant entry in his book ‘The Lyrics’ about this song and what meanings he believes it carries. I know the magic it has held for me over the years and the love-lock embrace of images that tumble through the song of birds, wings, flying, existential pain and the darkest moment of the night.

https://www.thebeatles.com/blackbird

Some songwriters never redraft. They might say: the song came out that way, who am I to touch it? I say: yes and no; never say never; some songs do come out fully formed, but other great songs (the other ‘Hallelujah’, for example, which took some time to emerge) come out needing some crafting, and it’s our job to know the difference.

Exercise: next time you write a song, save your first draft. Nothing can touch it. Now hit ‘save as’ and see if you can find a sparkly image in that first draft that could be teased into a waterfall. Work on a second draft manipulating that image to thread it through your song from the start in some form to help tell the story. If it doesn’t work, nothing lost, you still have draft 1.

Please do send me any questions you may have about songs, songwriting, recording, process, or any other topics you are interested. I am always happy to try to answer them.

Thank you so much for supporting and reading.

Polly Paulusma is a recording artist with One Little Independent Records and Associate Professor of Song & Literature at The Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in London.

For up-to-date news of her gigs and releases, join the mailing list.

For more about her journey as an artist and a human, join her community at Patreon.

We musicians (like so many people) can be perfectionists to a fault. We can keep going and going and going because we are led to believe relentlessness is a virtue that will be rewarded. Sometimes, it can be. But sometimes you can flog all the love and heart out of a song. By take 68, you’re not singing it to mean it any more. And although you may be attaining technical perfection, the love light in its eyes has gone out. You and your song are going through the motions. And you might find that when you go back, take 1 or take 2 is indeed the keeper.

Nothing beats the spark of enjoyment that you get in a first or second take of a live pass of a song, and the older I get the more I come to believe that the perfection of a recording lies in its imperfections. I guess the rise of AI is proving this. We are like wood: when you can see the unique grain of us, that’s where the beauty and the resonance and the recognition between us is to be found. Human to human.

But comping can be handy when take 2 was basically The One but you did some weird thing of swallowing your spit just towards the end of the second verse, or that first note of the first chorus just didn’t land. Namely, when you just want to patch moments in a nearly-great take that you won’t be able to live with.

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Your audio interface is on, and connected via USB to your computer, which is installed with your DAW.

Looks to me like you’re ready to record some music.

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So you have all the equipment you need to record. The next piece in the daisy chain is the microphone. Perhaps microphones. We’ll come to that in a minute.

Microphones come in all shapes and sizes and types. Condenser mics are commonly used in studio environments and need phantom power to work. They are quite sensitive and pick up motes of dust when they are working properly. Dynamic mics are more commonly used in live environments. The rugged SM58 is the classic mic you find in most venues with the silver lollypop head.

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OK, so since my last post I know you’ve been thinking about separation. You did your homework and you’ve thought about your workflow.

So you now know what you think it is you’re trying to do. This is excellent progress. Now let’s start taking steps towards making it a reality.

I am going to describe the ‘daisy chain’ of tools to create your home studio. This chain is comprised of the computer, the DAW and the audio interface.

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I am writing the next batch of posts for you. I want to help you you on your journey to recording yourself.

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