The Imitation Game
As a song consultant, the most difficult client to work with is the one who is hyper-fixated on being truly unique. Music is not created in a vacuum. We, as songwriters, are mosaics of our experiences and influences. We should seek to honor the music that we love and worry less about sounding like ourselves.
I am not advocating a painting by numbers approach to writing or performing music. I am simply suggesting that maybe we should collectively lose less sleep over finding ourselves. I am here and so are you; we do not need to be found.
At 19 I put some serious effort into discovering who I was as a songwriter. I theorized that if I made a Venn Diagram of all of the artists that I love then I would find myself sitting somewhere in the middle. But how do you harmonize a genre-diverse list of writers?
I found myself searching for a middle ground between the eccentricity of Nick Cave, the grit and hope of Bruce Springsteen, the musical heroics of Swedish death metal band Opeth, and the strophic verse of Iron and Wine. The common ground between these acts is deceptively simple. 1.) They play music using essentially the same three tools: melody, harmony, and rhythm. 2.) They are all great at what they do. That second point is the key to this equation because the first point is obvious. The most effective way to honor your heroes is to become great at what you do.
I remember those formative years as a time of reverse engineering. I would figure out how my favorite songs worked so that I could replicate their basic principles in my own compositions. I was occasionally able to hide my influences well, other times I was flirting with plagiarism. It never bothered me. I knew that I would have to write like other people to learn to write like myself.
Despite what you may think, imitation is how art works. Many a great painter has gotten their start by copying the works of others. In this same way, the great songwriters have all started out playing their favorite songs.
A brief disclaimer: While I personally believe that music is something to be borrowed, shared, and expanded upon, many do not agree. I encourage you to write songs that sound like other songs as a form of practice, but I discourage you from commercially releasing music that is highly similar to other works.