Despite having a lot of formal education in music, spending 5 years as a music book reviewer, and being a very analytical person in general, I find it completely embarrassing that I still have no idea where songs come from.

I decided, therefore, that it was about time I took pause to explore some of the things about songwriting that I have done battle with in the past, and that I'm still struggling to fully comprehend today.

All through my life I have attempted to assess my songwriting in terms of success and failure, much as I have also made an ongoing mental evaluation of my life as a working guitarist but also as a husband, father, brother, son, friend, neighbor, and ultimately as a person.

For me, what defined success in songwriting for the longest time was money, successful songwriters made money from their songs and unsuccessful ones did not.

Successful songwriters had hit songs, had fans, just like rock stars did, and made a point of staying as far away as possible, from what I once heard someone in publishing refer to as "non earners".

Successful songwriters could also write just about anything, and have it become another brilliant link in their chain of greatness. It was what we commonly called "artistic license". Without it, it seemed that you could not do anything right, but those who possessed it, seemed to be incapable of doing anything wrong.

Ironically, it was right around the same time when I was about to achieve the kind of success as a songwriter that I have just described above, that I was forced to completely rethink my definition of success as a music creator.

About 10 years ago I got a call that one of my songs was on the short list to be cut by a major celebrity artist in the US. Sadly, I spent only seconds celebrating this achievement and promptly went to work on capitalizing on my good fortune.

I was so completely consumed by the hot pursuit of the opportunities that surrounded this cut that I almost sacrificed everything I already had going for me, including my family, our life savings, my job, my health, my sense of all things real, and ultimately even the very song craft that had opened that door for me in the first place.

I was quite attracted to the validation that I thought this would bring to me as an artist but I was also pretty excited about the money that would come with that validation and it wasn't so much that I thought that the money was the key to happiness but I decided that if I made enough money I would go and have a key made.

My song eventually got dropped in the final cuts and "fame and fortune" eluded me in the end but instead of thinking of it as "the one that got away" I was irreversibly altered by a new sense of what was possible.

At this very intersection of life and art, I had a "Jerry McGuire" moment whereby I began to look at high rotation radio music and determined that this was not the kind of music that I wanted to write anyway. I had already grown out of this music artistically by virtue of the natural aging process.

I also decided to create my own definition, of success in songwriting, based on writing good songs and not just the mining of them for financial gain. I couldn't have pinpointed the exact moment when the honesty and integrity fell out of my songs but I could tell the very second that the magic seemed to just climb right back into them.

This column is titled "Music Just Escapes Me" because I now understand that when I manipulated art so that I could control the outcome of its commercial use, it ended up sounding as contrived as its intent.

However, songs grown wild from unpredictable imagination, that spring from inspiration alone will certainly stand the greatest chance of inspiring every emotionally receptive person within earshot, including their writer.

I hope that music just escapes you as well.