Joel Hoekstra Suggests Following Your Heart When it Comes to Songwriting

As a much in-demand and versatile guitarist, Joel Hoekstra has written, recorded and toured with Cher, Whitesnake, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and Night Ranger, among many others. He also appeared on Broadway for six years in the hit musical Rock of Ages. As a solo artist, using the moniker Joel Hoekstra’s 13, he’s released several hard rock albums—the latest of which, Running Games, came out in February via Frontiers Music Srl.

For aspiring artists wishing to have the same type of busy and diverse career, Hoekstra says it pays to try different songwriting approaches to find out what works best for you: “You can get different results by building songs different ways, so I advise people to check that out and see what they think in terms of getting results,” he says. “Sometimes people like to start with lyrics and write poetry and then write a song to that. Some people like to sing a melody.”

For his part, Hoekstra says, “Typically, I’ll build a song, chorus out. I’m a little bit of a traditional kind of pop or Nashville kind of guy in that regard, for the hard rock scene. I’ll usually write a chorus and then write around it. But a lot of the hard rock bands I’ve been a part of, it’s all about the riff.

“The main thing, I think, is to just put in the time,” Hoekstra continues. “You have to work hard at what you do. It can’t just be, ‘I like to do this a tiny bit’ and expect to find success. There’s a lot of prep work.”

Hoekstra follows this approach with his own work—even if it means missing out on doing other things as he travels the world. “It would be so disappointing to people to know that I’m going to all these exotic places and all I’m doing is sitting in my hotel room running sets of music,” he says with a laugh. “I’m definitely a preparer, really hard, for any of [my] gigs—and then it has to happen consistently, because the way your brain learns best is in moderation, every day. You can’t really beat something into your brain in ten hours in one day.”

Ultimately, Hoekstra’s overarching career advice is simple: “I think you just follow your heart and do your thing,” he says. “There’s no real one path that’s the same to do this.”