You’ve written a song. Or a big chunk of an album. But now you’re stuck. All the advice you’ve heard is: Write and get to the finish line. But now what? You thought once you got all the words down on the page, it would get easier. But when you look at your lyrics, you’re unsure what to do next.

So you do what Paul McCartney says: "I write a lot of songs, and I'll often put them in a drawer for a while and return to them later. Sometimes I'll change them a lot, and sometimes I'll leave them as they are. But it's always good to get a fresh perspective on your work."

But when you come back to your lyrics with fresh eyes and play them in your head again, you’re not much better off. You’re unsure if you have a one-star or a five-star lyric draft. Does it work? If it doesn’t work, how do you make it work? If it does kind of work, how do you make it one of the best it can be? In other words, how do you level up your lyrics?

You put it back in the drawer because it seems a lot easier to work on a new song. But the same thing happens again. And again. And again. Soon, you’re one of those stereotypical songwriters who writes hundreds of songs but never releases them. Someone who starts but never finishes.

Time to start collaborating?

You decide you need some help. You reach out to other songwriters and musicians to get some feedback on what you've done. And then you wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Finally, you get some feedback, but it’s impossible to follow. There’s advice on a few individual lines and maybe some vague feedback on bigger chunks of the concepts, all mixed up with talk about your lyric's form and structure or your writing style — but regarding your lyrics' content, nothing concrete. Nothing that explains specific problems and gives you the steps you need to follow to fix them. You’re still stuck.