People ask where songs come from. The honest answer is: I have no idea, and I've stopped trying to figure it out. What I do know is how to be ready when something arrives — and how to not kill it on the way to a finished track.
I grew up in South Africa listening to music that was emotionally direct. Folk, gospel, rock — the kind of music where you could tell exactly what the singer had been through. That directness stayed with me. When I sit down to write, I'm not trying to be clever. I'm trying to be honest.
Phase One: The Catch
Everything starts with a fragment. A melodic phrase. A chord progression I stumble across at midnight. A line of text that sounds like it belongs somewhere. I don't filter at this stage — I just catch. Voice memos, notes app, a napkin if that's what's nearby. The idea doesn't need to make sense yet. It just needs to survive.
The rule I've given myself: if I can't remember a melody the next morning without listening back to the recording, it probably wasn't strong enough to build on. Good hooks stay in your head. If it's gone, let it go.
"Good hooks stay in your head. If it's gone by morning, let it go."
Phase Two: The Excavation
Once I have a fragment I believe in, I sit with it. Not to build on it immediately — just to sit with it and find out what it actually is. Is it a verse melody? A chorus? What's the emotional temperature? What does it want to be about?
This phase looks like doing nothing, which is why it's hard to explain to people who don't write. I'm walking. Making coffee. Playing the same three chords on loop for an hour while staring at the wall. What I'm really doing is listening to what the fragment wants to become.
Coming from South Africa and living in Germany, I spend a lot of time between two worlds — emotionally, culturally, linguistically. That in-between space is where most of my songs live. The tension between where you came from and where you are. Between who you were and who you're becoming. That's not a sad thing. It's just true.
Phase Three: The First Draft
The first draft is always ugly. Always. I've made peace with that. The goal of the first draft is not to write a good song — the goal is to write a complete song. Get something down from start to finish that has a shape: verse, chorus, bridge, out. It doesn't need to be good. It needs to exist.
I write lyrics the way I'd write a letter to someone I care about. Not to impress — to be understood. The language in my songs is plain on purpose. I grew up speaking Afrikaans, English, and the hybrid code-switching that happens between them. Writing in English for an international audience means I have to be precise. Every word has to work. No filler, no padding.
Phase Four: The Arrangement
This is where being a producer and a songwriter at the same time either helps you enormously or trips you up badly. I know what I want the final record to sound like before I finish the song — which is useful and dangerous in equal measure.
My acoustic solo stuff is arranged for space. I want the listener to hear the air around the guitar, the breath between phrases. The Six5zero songs are completely different — they need to fill a live room, which means the arrangement has to be dense, layered, designed for bodies moving. Same songwriting instincts, totally different outcomes.
Phase Five: Letting It Go
The hardest part of writing is deciding when a song is finished. My answer: it's finished when I play it for the first time to a room full of people and they stop talking. Not because it's perfect. Because it's saying something true.
I've released songs I wasn't completely happy with because they were honest. And I've held back technically better songs because something was off — a lyric that was almost right, an arrangement that was one revision away from being what it needed to be. That instinct for when something is ready — you can't teach it. You just have to make enough songs until you develop it.
The short version of my process: catch it, sit with it, make it ugly, make it real, let it go.
That's it. That's all of it.