When I’m doing a cover, I tend to crank it out super quick. I’ve finished some within an hour. I usually will have an idea in mind for how to arrange something and just record it. I’m done. If I were working professionally, it would just be a demo. When working on original songs, mostly written decades ago, I rely on memory to recall lyrics, chords, and melodies, which can be challenging. I have demo tapes at home, but I have hundreds, so I depend on what I can remember. Consequently, I tend to work on multiple songs when I am redoing an original, largaely because of trying to recall and either accuartely recreate what I wrote long ago or write a new part that fits well.

When I do a cover, like when I did my first cover since getting a new DAW PC and attempting to play and record music again — more than ten years since my prior DAW PC bit the dust — I really worked as fast as I could with the only thing stopping me was tendinitis pain, which results in my needing to take breaks while recording various tracks. But if it’s a simple, undemanding song where my tendinitis pain isn’t too great, I can power through recording everything within hours. That is the way I like to work.

Sometimes though, especially when I’m working on originals, I may stop because I creatively know that I don’t have any strong ideas for an arrangement of something, so I’ll switch to recording a cover, hoping that I can later return to what I was working on with a more fresh approach.

I’ve certainly worked on several song ideas concurrently. In fact, one song can often generate an idea that doesn’t feel quite right in the current song, but can be used in a second song – and then there’s also the thing you’ve mentioned about not being sure of where to go next with the song currently being worked on, so you move to another one, then return later. I tend to do that quite a lot.

In fact, quite often, even if I know where I want to take the current song, I’ll step away from it for a day or two, just to gain perspective – that can often lead to a rejigging of the song, or possibly a new vocal melody, or something better than what I originally came up with.

There’s no “right” or “wrong” way, it’s whatever works for you – and of course, some songs are the equivalent of pushing an elephant up a hill – they’re a lot of hard work, and when you reach the end, you still don’t completely like what you’ve produced. I recently wrote a song and got it to a place where it could be described as “finished”, but it didn’t sit well with me, so I then took it to pieces, rewrote the chorus, added a new middle-8, shortened the outro, re-recorded some of the verses, and now I’m much happier with it.

Time – more than anything else – allows you to step back and view a song differently. There’s no rush, and these things aren’t linear, so don’t feel that you have to complete song #1 before progressing to song #2.