I'd put money on you having a folder somewhere full of songs that are nearly there. The idea's good, the arrangement's mostly done, you got excited about it for a week, and then it just sort of stalled. I had loads of them. For years I was much better at starting songs than I was at finishing them, and I don't think that's unusual at all.
The reason is pretty simple when you think about it. The start of a song is the fun bit, when it's all possibility and you can hear what it might become. The finishing is the graft — the tidying up, the fiddly mixing decisions, the bits where you genuinely can't tell anymore whether what you're hearing is good or whether you've just listened to it two hundred times. Nobody got into music because they loved that part. So most of us quit right before it, and the song goes in the folder with all the others.
What changed it for me was realising that finishing is a separate skill in its own right, and the only way to get good at it is to actually do it, over and over again. The trouble is that if you only ever finish a song once every few months, you barely get any practice at the one part you're already worst at. So I started going about it differently. Instead of trying to take one song all the way to done, I now work on four of them together, over a couple of months.
The way it goes is that I'll get the vocals recorded on four backing tracks first, so I've got four songs all sitting at roughly the same stage. Then I mix and polish them as a set rather than one at a time, moving between them, leaving a few days between sessions so my ears get a chance to reset, and constantly comparing them against each other so they end up sounding like they belong together. Working to a rough deadline keeps me honest, because otherwise a song will quite happily stay "nearly done" forever.
It sounds like more work, and in a way it is, but it's the thing that finally got me reaching the finish line on a regular basis. When you batch them up like that you end up doing the last, hardest stages four times in a row, which is exactly the practice you never normally get. The songs come out better for it, and more to the point they come out at all.
The full method — how I structure the two months, the cooling-off periods, and how I compare the songs against each other so a whole set hangs together — is in The Recording Manual. It's honestly the chapter I'm proudest of, because it's the part nobody else seems to write about, and it's the part that actually gets music out into the world instead of leaving it sat in a folder.
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See you out there.
— Aaron