Charlie Sohne and Tim Rosser explain how writing partnerships improve with repetition. Your first collaboration feels like the worst show because you're still learning each other's language and style. BMI pairs newcomers with different partners each assignment, forcing writers to figure out what they need from a collaborator.
Chapters
We've certainly found it very beneficial to solidify and just be a writing team. Your first show with someone in a lot of ways is sort of your worst show, the worst show you're ever gonna write with them, because like it's not only about writing the show, it's about like, oh, so when I use that word, that's the kind of music that I'm gonna get back. Or like, oh, when I, you know, like when we, when we have a discussion about a song before we start writing it, like what does that actually mean? And like what, and so I was actually working with a bunch of different people. And it's— I sort of— it sort of dawned on me at some point that, like, this— the— when we started to write our second show, suddenly everything was, like, really easy, and we wrote it a lot faster than the, uh, than the first one.
Um, and I think that's a common experience for songwriters to, uh— it's, it's not easy to find somebody that, um, you can communicate very well with and very effectively with because you're both actually working so closely on a— like, a song is what, 3 minutes of glory? So you're both like trying so hard to write the best 3 minutes that you can. And I actually— BMI is really cool in this way because I haven't worked with a lot of people except BMI sets you up with a new writing partner every assignment for your first year. So you get sort of a sense of what it's like to try to communicate with a lot of different people. That showed— that was a good way. It's like going on a lot of first dates. You start to learn a lot about yourself and you just go, "Oh, this is what I need somebody else to be able to do because I'm not very good at it." Or, "I need somebody else to be able to pick up on this tendency I have to write this way and to like that about me rather than always be sort of fighting it." You know.
