The Songwriter’s Song – Song Description
“I’m looking for momentum. I’m looking for the flow.” What I think this song gets right, more than anything else in it, is that the long waiting isn’t wasted time sitting before the real writing eventually starts. The waiting is already part of the work, even though it doesn’t feel like work while you’re inside it — mostly it feels like failure, like nothing at all is happening. But whatever eventually arrives at four in the morning, when the words finally come together, was being quietly assembled the whole sleepless night before it showed up, out of sight, in a part of the process that doesn’t look productive from the outside and doesn’t feel productive from the inside either. I wrote this one as close to the actual, unglamorous experience of chasing an idea through a bad night as I could manage, resisting the urge to skip ahead to the satisfying part where it finally arrives, because I think the chasing itself, tedious as it is, deserves to be represented honestly rather than edited out for the sake of a tidier story.
Verse 1
Four in the morning
One quiet room
A cold cup of tea
Beneath the moon
Searching for words
That somehow belong
Waiting to find
One more song
Chorus
I’m looking for momentum
I’m looking for the flow
I’m looking for the words
That make a song just glow
I can hear the music
I can hear the sound
I can feel the beauty
Swirling all around
Verse 2
Half-finished verses
Scattered around
Chasing a feeling
More than a sound
One little spark
Starts to belong
Quietly growing
Into a song
Verse 3
Nobody watching
Nobody knows
How one small idea
Quietly grows
Line after line
Patient and long
One heart still hoping
This is the song
Chorus
I’m looking for momentum
I’m looking for the flow
I’m looking for the words
That make a song just glow
I can hear the music
I can hear the sound
I can feel the beauty
Swirling all around
Verse 4
Empty pages
Hour by hour
Yesterday’s magic
Has lost its power
Searching for something
Still doing wrong
Wondering softly
Where is this song?
Verse 5
Words keep escaping
Out of his hands
Nothing he’s writing
Quite understands
Chasing a shadow
All the night long
Hoping tomorrow
Will bring the song
Verse 6
Every new sentence
Falls to the floor
He’s been this way
So many times before
One quiet prayer
Before the dawn
Please let me find
One honest song
Final Chorus
I’m looking for momentum
I’m looking for the flow
I’m looking for the words
That make a song just glow
I can hear the music
I can hear the sound
I can feel the beauty
Swirling all around
Final Verse
Morning finds the window
The first birds softly sing
He reads the words before him
And smiles at everything
The song he’d searched for all night
Was waiting all along…
He’d finally finished writing…
The Songwriter’s Song.
Lyrics Michael Forty
Voice Michael Forty