Try books on "design" topics more generally. Visuals, storytelling and UX are unrelated to music at the surface but they allow you an in to grounding your abstr

Try books on "design" topics more generally. Visuals, storytelling and UX are unrelated to music at the surface but they allow you an in to grounding your abstract thoughts and finding a thing that the rest of the work is derived from. It's the thing artists always talk about in interviews where they're like, "it was about this one time in my life where..." That may seem disconnected from the sounding good part but it's what gives you a core to build on. You can take the thought and express it in a very simple, low-fi, minimalist way, or go all out and build a huge arrangement and smother it in production. That's something that is better to decide upon by design than by trial and error.