Especially if you got into music and songwriting at an early age, I'm sure some of us have written some older things that you cringe and laugh at through the nostalgia, or maybe things that you love and find to be the best music you've written. This thread is for sharing older things you've written, give your opinions on them, compare it to your current state as a musician, ect.

I have a few that are pretty embarrassing. Around 11 years old, I started to get into metal. I liked a little thrash, I was listening to Slayer and Anthrax and stuff, as well as classic heavy metal, but at the time, glam was my favourite genre, due to Motley Crue being the band that, well, got me into music. I'd been playing guitar all of maybe three weeks or so, when I'd taken it upon myself to write a song. It was called something like "School's for Fools". It was a simple, two powerchord riff, and a two note solo. I no longer have the lyrics, but they were equally ridiculous. "Why do ya gotta go to school, you ain't gonna learn, you're just gonna drool" I recall. Crazy shit, looking back I also wrote some lyrics about The Raven, IIRC.

Two years ago around 13 is when I decided to try my hand at writing black metal and lyrics. None of it was that bad, so much as it was horribly generic. I basically did a poor imitation of Burzum lyrics, as they were my favourite band at this point in time. It wasn't laughably bad, more like "Standing on a blackened hill, in nocturnal contemplation". I have quite a few of these lyrics on my computer back in the States.

Another thing I was very much into was brutal death metal and slam. I loved bands like Torsofuck and Devourment to death, so I tried to play that style, and even attempted to have a one man band. I have some lyrics I wrote here...
"
Extirpated innards prepared for mastication
Omniscient need for gratuitous heaps of
gutturally secreted gastrointestinal remnants
Gorging on putrescent cadaver disgorgings
Smashing together the intestine-wrapped pulmonary organs
with a liquefying hypothalamus
It dawned onto me that there was an apparent embolism in the
somewhat devoured hypothalamus
as reticulocyte splashed all over
My body suddenly started to engorge from my feeding
a diffuse fatal allergic reaction perhaps? I pondered this.
an arteriovenous epidermal explosion took place
a profuse quantity of edema through a peritoneal burst
followed through my skin
My folds of obesity spewed yellow fat
I enjoyed this as a delectable topping to my victims heart
I became aware of my soon coming demise
and as the medical deviant I was
I wished I could perform a post mortem analysis
of my own bloated soon to be corpse
I thought it would be pleasant to share the fate of
the ravenously devoured pre-examined cadaver of mine
whose rotting organs had befallen me of this questionable anomaly
So I took my pre-sterile scalpel, shining like the sun
and sliced an ileostomy, taking my colon and masticating it
performing as my own phagocyte.
As I swallowed, I had a hemorrhage of the larynx
with the help of my scalpel, I allowed the putrid pile to spew forth
and a cerebral hemorrhage shortly followed
the exerted force caused a cranial implosion, peices of bloody brain covered the wall, then I closed my eyes as the carnage came to a timely end."

That year, I went to Romania and had a lot of time alone with the guitar. I improved much over a period of two months, and wrote some quite decent material there (Forgot 60% of it, though). Here is where my songwriting developed into where it is now and here it is two years later, a slow process where I don't remember anything unless it's fantastic. And it works just fine. Once I get back to the States, I'll post some of my old shit lyrics for fun, if the thread's active.

Sorry for the novel, but I await some stories!

When I was 11 and starting to manage my way around a guitar, I would basically write horrible rip offs of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath songs, then would add shitty Thrash riffs into the mix when I was 12-13. 14 I was writing terrible bedroom Black Metal. Didn't really start writing decent music 'till I was 15-16, when I was starting to dig into Sludge/Stoner/Drone/Doom, Psychedelia, and Hardcore/Crust- I actually still have a lot of riffs I wrote around then kicking around in my head, to be put to use in the future, but my actual SONG writing started like a year and a half ago when I started working on Green Destroyed (and I think has been developing quite nicely- got a lot more music written then I do time to record it right now, haha). As far as lyrics go, I never wrote any until last year- still working on making them good, to say the least.

I didn't get a guitar till I was 16 when I bought it for myself. never bothered to learn any cover songs, never bothered to write any songs. Just enjoyed playing and making noise with it. Bought a bass not too long after that and around 20 I bought a drumkit.

The first band I was in was me and a friend that had at one time played drums got out of it and basically got back into it. What we played sounded like a frantic Keelhaul mixed with jesus lizard. We didn't write songs cause I didn't even know how to begin with that. we just jammed and improved everyday for months and somehow got asked to play a show and we just went up and played as if we were doing a practice. we then kept getting asked to play shows, another 20 or so from that all over the coast and north florida. Then I started getting more into playing drums and while I joined a death metal band on drums he joined a screamo/ techy-indi rock band on drums which eventually i joined on bass. And that's pretty much the start of all that. The first songs I ever wrote by myself are recorded on 54R's first ep. I like them I just hate how the guy mixed them and how sloppy he played guitar for his channel (at the time we got a guitarist who was a sound engineer, I played drums, bass, and one guitar track he played the other and he was sloppy as fuck and never bothered to redo his fuck ups.

Tear at the jugular
Blood it spill forth,
Liquid of freedom
I hold no remorse

Eyes full of terror
Your pulse is no more
Consciousness extinguished
You fall to the floor

Relentlessly beating this heap of despair
I kick at the body that struggles for air

You'll die the same way
That you were born
A weakened heart
Failing to circulate life

I stab at the body that struggled for air
There's no going back

A self-taught rendition of heart surgery
You're bleeding to death, and it's because of me


Looking back on it, I think they're pretty good lyrics for a thirteen-year-old I found an old mp3 player I had in middle school and was looking through the recordings to find the very first song me and my friend ever recorded, this power metal song with a chord progression he ripped off of Jethro Tull although neither of us knew it at the time. It's fun thinking of the old days and how much we've improved. We played a show the other day for the first time in over a year with only one practice beforehand, the day of the show. I'm supposed to get the videos my friend took and I'll post them up here. It's me and the dude with the violin, just the two of us on stage, if any of you guys remember us. We played pretty well and got an alright response from the crowd considering the other bands were a psychedelic rock group, jazz elevator music, and a Bruce Springsteen rip-off.

I think the very first idea that I put into a recording (I either record riffs or write in Guitar Pro) was a simple, melancholic BM riff made of two-note chords. I still really like it right now, but haven't found a way to implement it into any songs.

Also, the first thing I wrote in Guitar Pro was some retarded "technical slam". It's so horrible that although I've long deleted the file, I'm still rather ashamed of it till this day.

And yeah, my first lyrics involved lame gore as well. 99% influenced by Necrophagist since I was hooked to them at the time.

I think this was the second set of lyrics I ever wrote, when I was twelve. The first one was some sort of Slipknot-ish "People suck!" thing and I deleted the file for it a long time ago (much to the lament of wanting to laugh at myself ). Anyways:



I think the only really retarded part is "maggot thread", in retrospect.

"He has nullified a failed rebirth" is actually a really badass closing line. But damn, them's some big words for a twelve-year-old.

i started a black metal band when i got my first electric guitar a year and a half ago. I had been playing guitar for a year up until that point, but i wasnt great. so the result all in all were two demo/ep's with three songs each, with songs about a minute to two minutes, pretty much all of which were me playing one guitar track, and maybe a track of me breathing into my mic because i didnt know how to growl or do black metal vocals. one song had a track of my friend playing too, but our other friend (who happens to be an amazing guitarist, but decided not to play that day), was talking during the recordings, so you could here him talking if you listened to the demos. And then two more tracks my other friend did, that were pretty decent, and i regret not including them. All in all, this experience that lasted a few months was a learning experience. iv learned alot about song writing, and am still learning as i write for my current project. Im still having trouble putting everything together, but its come a long way from these short 1 minute songs of a thrash progression and me breathing.

Seeing as how I didn't start piecing riffs together and writing actual music until late high school/early college, I can't say there are too many early songs that sounded terrible or that I immensely regret. I know a few of the songs from Psychic Faith's first demo need to be touched up and one will probably be dropped entirely (I'm starting to think Return To Solitude needs to be recorded by a completely different band) but that's all certainly fixable since it wasn't exactly set in stone.

My lyric writing, however, was absolute shit when I started writing them at 14. I seemed to have some sort of weird obsession with quantity and wrote hundreds of lyrics in a year that were all about sex (Even though I was a virgin all through high school) and actually remind me of 80s Pantera lyrics in some ways. Thankfully I vastly improved by my late adolescence and still have some great moments though I don't write as much lyrically as I used to.

I started with guitar pro when I was in High School. I probably wrote over a hundred songs over a couple years using the sequencer before I got bored of it. The whole experience taught me a lot about writing music. When I make music now, the planning is very high-level, almost everything besides the basic structure is improvised on the spot - because I had so much experience with detailed (well beat for beat) composition in guitar pro that I wanted to explore the more improvisational kind of song writing I had ignored up to that point.

My first band's demo sucked, but that was more of a recording/equipment problem than a songwriting problem. I think I learned what NOT to do in songwriting very early on during my sequencer stage and most of that was just me not understanding what made certain notes/riffs/arrangements fit or not fit together.

I wrote a lot of lyrics around the age of 11 but usually there wasn't any music accompanying it. Most of them were really bad attempts at epic fantasy, and looking back are very child like in general. The earliest actual music I put together was when I was about 12 and it sounded very nursery rhyme style. The first metal song I wrote was a little later and very derivative of Judas Priest, and ripped off the main riff of WASP's "The Neutron Bomber" at a certain point.

I'm still developing a lot, but I'm glad to say I'm a lot better now than I was.

I was more into gore lyrics before as well as into abstract lyrics. As of now, I can't stand gore lyrics at all, and want lyrics to be more real. I still like them to be bit abstract, but again, in-your-face.

I say this honestly. After I started listening to metal, slowly I drifted to death metal, and eventually wanted to do songwriting like Morbid Angel etc. I tried, but all I came up were boring tremolo picked riffs that were easy forgettable. Slowly, I started listening to more hardcore/punk/grind bands. The influence I took from those bands have helped me a lot while making death metal/black metal songs now, I assume. A little punk influence to other genres turned out to be a beneficial facet.

Anyway, I'm more into old school death metal, doom metal, hardcore and grindcore these days. Had a huge shift in my musical preferences than before.