Education Quote by Cynthia Weil

There is a bracing kindness in Weil's refusal to mythologize talent. She doesn't dress up failure as a quirky detour or a “necessary evil”; she names it plainly: mistakes, crap. Coming from a legendary songwriter who helped shape the vocabulary of 1960s pop, that bluntness lands like a corrective to the modern brand of creative self-curation, where every draft is supposed to look like destiny.

The intent is practical and almost parental: to keep a younger writer moving. Weil understands that craft is built on volume, not purity. In the Brill Building world she came up in, songs were a job as much as an art form: you wrote fast, you wrote often, you got edited by the market, the producer, the room. That ecosystem doesn't reward preciousness. It rewards stamina.

The subtext is more radical than it looks. By separating the self from the work ("you wrote...") she gives permission to be imperfect without being broken. "But" does the real work here: it doesn't excuse the bad writing, it contextualizes it as data. You can hear the implicit promise that competence is not a personality trait; it's an accumulation of attempts, most of them forgettable.

Contextually, it's also a quiet defense of pop. Great songs don't arrive as divine transmissions; they're engineered through trial, taste, and embarrassment. Weil's line demotes genius and upgrades persistence, which is exactly how lasting hits - and lasting careers - are actually made.