Gatlin Elms

The other day I was going through some boxes in my closet and found my first Moleskine writing pad and an old folder full of scrap pieces of paper, business cards, envelopes and old homework papers, letters and schedules from high school. Both of which were my primary sources of songwriting from the first year I started writing to probably my first year of college. 

I thought it would be fun to find some of the original sheets of paper that the songs from 'The Oceans and The Stars' were written on as well as 'Carry Me Home'.

I flipped through, unfolded and dug around for about 45 minutes and these are a few of the pages I came out with.. 

I absolutely love the creative process of writing songs on paper. The trial and error of it is really challenging and helpful when you know that the word, phrase or sentence that is scratched out doesn't work and that wrong idea usually ends up inspiring the new idea that replaces it.  

Over the past year or so I've actually started to do some of my writing on my computer with a great writing program called Journler, which I recommend you to check out if you are doing any type of writing.. BUT for me the creative process is handicapped when I'm just punching in lyrics to my computer.  So I try to start the bulk of my writing on paper and then transfer that over to my computer for records just in case I lose my notebook and to record the actual song idea inside the Journler application.

Gatlin.