How I Learned to Finish Songs (And Stop Hiding Behind It Is Not Ready Yet)

For a long time, I had a folder on my computer called In Progress that contained approximately forty-three song sketches in various states of incompletion. Some had verses but no choruses. Some had fully written lyrics but no melody that felt right. Some were just a chord progression and a note that said this feels important — with no further explanation of what, exactly, felt important about it, or to whom.

I told myself this was a normal part of the creative process. That ideas needed time to develop. That forcing a finish was worse than allowing organic completion. I told myself all of this with great conviction, and I believed almost none of it. The truth, which I was not ready to look at directly for a while, was that I was afraid. Not of failing — or not only of failing. I was afraid of finishing, because finishing meant the song would exist in the world, and the world might look at it and find it lacking.

Unfinished songs are safe. They contain all the potential of what they might be. A finished song has given up that potential in exchange for being something specific. And being something specific means it can be assessed, criticized, found wanting. The In Progress folder was not a creative space. It was a hiding place.

The Moment I Understood the Problem

The shift happened because of a conversation with another musician — someone whose work I respected and whose process was completely unlike mine. I described my forty-three unfinished songs as a sign of how prolific and generative I was. She listened, nodded, and then said something that has stayed with me ever since: ideas are not songs. Songs are what you make out of ideas. You have a lot of ideas. That is good. But you do not have any songs yet.

She was right, and I knew it immediately, which is why it stung so much. I had been confusing the raw material with the finished work. I had been counting the lumber and calling it a house. The generative part — the part where the melody arrives, where the opening image suggests itself, where something interesting begins to take shape — is genuinely pleasurable. The finishing part, where you have to make decisions that close off other possibilities, is uncomfortable and difficult. I had optimized my creative life to maximize pleasure and minimize discomfort. The result was forty-three fragments and no album.

The First Rule: Deadlines Are Not the Enemy

The first thing I changed was that I started giving myself deadlines. Not arbitrary ones — deadlines attached to something real. I booked a recording session six weeks out. I told people I was working on an album. I made the commitment public in small ways, which meant that failing to complete the work would now have social consequences rather than just personal ones.

This felt uncomfortable, and the discomfort was the point. Without real consequence, my internal critic could always manufacture a reason to postpone completion. With a real deadline, the critic had to compete with a real external constraint. Sometimes the critic won — a session would arrive and I would have fewer songs than I had hoped. But even in those cases, I had more finished work than I would have had without the deadline, because the deadline forced me to make decisions I would otherwise have indefinitely deferred.

I came to understand deadlines not as enemies of creativity but as its necessary structure. Creativity without constraint is not freedom — it is formlessness. The constraint of a deadline is like the banks of a river: without them, the water just spreads out and becomes a swamp. The banks are what give it direction and force.

The Second Rule: Good Enough to Exist

The second change was philosophical. I stopped asking whether a song was good enough to be the best thing I could possibly make, and started asking whether it was good enough to exist. These are very different questions, and the first one has no good answer. There is no song that could not be better with infinite revision. Perfectionism is not a standard — it is a game designed to be unwinnable, and the only way to win is to stop playing it.

Good enough to exist meant: does this song say something true? Does it say it with enough craft that the truth is audible? Is the emotional core intact? If the answer to these questions was yes, the song was done. The fact that the bridge could be stronger, that the second verse was slightly less interesting than the first, that the production might benefit from another pass — these things were real, but they were not dealbreakers. They were the normal imperfections of a completed human artifact.

The songs that have meant the most to me as a listener are almost never technically perfect. There are missed notes in classic recordings that have become inseparable from the emotion of those recordings. There are production choices that contemporary ears find dated but that carry the feeling of a specific moment in time in ways a more polished version would not. Imperfection, deployed honestly, is not a flaw — it is evidence of a human being in the room.

The Third Rule: Separate the Sessions

The third change was structural. I learned to separate the session where I generate material from the session where I evaluate and complete it. Generation and evaluation use different parts of the mind, and trying to do both at once produces a kind of paralysis where the critical faculty interrupts the generative one before it can get anywhere interesting.

When I am generating — laying down a melody, finding words, sketching out a structure — nothing gets evaluated in that session. Everything stays. The bad lines, the wrong notes, the progressions that do not quite work. All of it stays in the file. The session is not for making good things. It is for making things. The next session — which might be days later — is where I listen back, assess, and decide what to keep and what to cut. By then I have enough distance to hear the material more clearly, and the critical faculty can do its job without strangling the generative one.

This change alone reduced the size of my In Progress folder significantly. It turned out that a lot of what I thought was unfinished was actually finished — I just had not given myself permission to declare it done. When I came back to sketches with a completion-focused ear rather than a generation-focused one, I found that many of them were already complete enough to be songs. They just needed someone to stop tinkering with them and let them be what they were.

The Album That Came Out of This

Kahel at Bughaw exists because I applied these rules, imperfectly but consistently. There were sessions where I violated every principle I am describing here — where I spent three hours reworking two lines of a verse and accomplished nothing except exhausting myself. There were moments when I wanted to delay the release because I thought the production on one track was not right. I released it anyway.

The response has told me things I needed to hear. People have written to me about specific songs — not the songs I thought were the strongest, but songs I almost cut because I did not think they were ready. One listener described a moment in a track that I had nearly deleted entirely as the moment that made them feel understood. That moment exists in the world because I stopped trying to make it perfect and let it be finished.

The In Progress folder still exists. It has twenty-six sketches in it now, down from forty-three. Some of them will become songs. Some of them are ideas that wanted to be ideas and nothing more. I have learned to tell the difference, slowly, by asking the same question I ask of everything now: is this good enough to exist? If yes, it gets finished. If no, it gets kept as raw material for something that will be.

The work of making music is, in the end, the work of making decisions under uncertainty. You will never know if the song is as good as it could be. You can only know if it is as honest as you can make it, right now, with what you have. That is enough. It has to be enough, because the alternative is forty-three folders full of potential and not a single song for anyone to hear.