5. Other songs:
I rate other tunes the lowest on the scale of where to get great song ideas because it's the most delicate. Paul McCartney has been on record as saying that all the most popular Beatles songs were directly influenced by another specific song or piece of music. This is a really good place to look for new ideas if you're one of the Beatles or even if you have a producer like George Martin in your camp. I've had mixed degrees of success trying to "write something like" another tune. I'm still pretty young as far as professional songwriters go but I find that if I am too close to someone else's idea it means I just really like their song, and maybe I should just play covers of it to myself in the mirror.
4. Casual Conversation:
I've found just talking to people around me can yield strangely profound concepts. I think there can be real sweet spots sitting out there in the mundane average world that, when presented the right way, can be very universal. In the last year I've written a couple of tunes that have come almost immediately from just shooting the breeze with somebody. The tricky thing about this is that it does take a bit of training to have the discipline to pull out a note book and write down a great idea in the middle of a conversation. But hey, I've heard Diane Warren does it all the time and I'm sure no one bitches at her for it . . .
3. Headings in free newspapers:
These can yield some amazing stuff, particularly when you separate them from the context of the newspaper. If you're into writing slightly off beat tunes with long, weird titles, I think this could contend for number 1. For example I've got a free METRO paper here that someone left on the bus. One of the lines is "Dwarf burglar gets drunk of the job." Can you imagine what the Fun Lovin Criminals, Cake or even Eminem could do with a titles like that? Too bad fellas, it's mine.
2. Movies:
One of the best songs I've written this year came directly from watching Pollock. For me it was a great way to start a song because it was a very universal story (or else it wouldn't have been such a popular film) so I could take the story out of the context of the film and it would still make sense. It also really helped me place the scenes with specific visual detail that I probably never would have come up with on my own. Having that much information really gets the ball rolling for me and when I have a lot of momentum going on one part of a song I almost always get into the other parts more easily. I find films really inspirational because they are a totally escapist indulgence. Since I don't know that much about film, I'm not thinking about production value, or script quality or any of that, just letting the story wash over me. It's a great two-for-one, I get a nice brain scrub and also some artistic enrichment.
1. Literature:
By far and away the place I get most of my ideas is from reading books. It can really be any kind of book but I do find that authors with a poetic bent, and a touch of vernacular really get me going. I think books fall somewhere in between my realm of knowledge and the unknown and therefor really pull me in. Like I write all the time and I therefor really dig into well crafted prose but I can't really imagine what goes into writing a book. In a way taking song ideas from literature is fairly safe in that I usually start with a title, which could well be just a phrase from a book, which is like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles. So it's a lot like Jeff Tweedy from Wilco says in the tune "Poor Places" from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: "he takes all his words from the books that you don't read anyway . . ." Even if people did pin you down for snagging a phrase or two from a book, unless you were really being clumsy with it, could they call you unoriginal? Would you care if they did? Hmmmmm. Well I'm off to catch a chapter or two . . .