“Write what you know” seems like good advice but it really doesn’t go far enough. At first glance it would seem to mean that all your songs should be autobiographical. Well, we know that can’t be right because if it were, most songwriters would be too busy recovering from their lives to write anything down!
‘Writing what you know’ infers something more. It encourages us to keep our eyes, ears, and hearts open so we can ‘know’ more. Your powers of observation are a first class, all expense paid ticket to song material. We can ‘know’ things through an empathic connection to the world around us. We see how cruelly someone treats their family and we think “It ought to be a crime.” You can leave it at that or put it to music and call it a song.
Take every experience, every tear, every laugh, every funny episode or tragic event and examine it for inspiration. Examine it for the universal feelings that speak to us all on some level. Love, fear, hope, pain, joy, betrayal, revelation and the list goes on. Harnessing the essence of human emotion makes for powerful lyrics. Even if your life is calm and uneventful, look around you for inspiration. Indeed, coming from calmness, you may be able to interpret the maelstrom more insightfully than someone at its core. Write what you know. Just open your eyes, ears, and heart and ‘know’ more.