Why Do Great Songwriters Throw Out Most Songs?

Nick Kokonas says everything is grind: a great songwriter writes songs every day and throws out 98 percent of them, and while a song finished overnight might happen once in a while, most people are Picasso and grind out a lot of bad work to reach something great. The people who do that grind are the ones worth finding.

In a loft in Chicago, a member of Wilco was writing a song that was honestly not good. He comes in every day and has to write two or three songs every week, or he will not have 12 good ones at the end of the year.

Chris Rock's advice to a young comedian with two shows, one at seven and one at nine, is to write jokes every morning. The money is made in the day and only collected at night. What happens on stage is the byproduct of writing bad jokes every day, and without the daily writing there is nothing else to the racket. Even among professionals, most people are not doing it.