I can't do it, I can't conceive You're everything you're trying to make me believe 'Cause this show is too well designed Too well to be held with onl… - Aimee Mann

Something gets lost when you translate. It's hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.

I think people in general, no matter what they do, first need a cheerleader. Then they can sit down and go, ‘Okay, what is wrong with it?’ or ‘What should we do now?’ But the first thing out of anybody’s mouth can’t be, ‘You’re not doing it right.

I became friendly with [a] bass player. . . .
He told me about this place called the Berklee College of Music, and said that you didn’t have to audition. . . . They had a summer session you could attend; that was “Come one, come all.” So I went there and it opened a lot of doors for me. First of all, the ear training — to work on your ear and learn to hear things you’d heretofore not been able to ascertain, individual instruments, chords and where they went, and remember melodies better . . . I’d just thought, either you could do it or you couldn’t. That plus learning about chord progressions and music theory, and which chords sound good going into other chords . . . that was really a revelation. . . .

So I started applying that to writing songs.
Which were all terrible. But you do it enough, and you get better at it.