Writer's block

I sat down tonight to try and come up with the beginnings of a new song but I may as well have had a washboard and a length of hose in my hands. It's been so long since I've written anything (almost a year, feels like a whole lot longer), whether it be on acoustic guitar or 8-track that I appear to have forgotten how to even begin to approach the whole songwriting process. It used to flow pretty easily but recently it's been getting harder, every chord progression I strummed and every line I played tonight was such utter bullshit I started to despair, so I went over some old tunes I had written to try and remember how I did it. Maybe I'm overcomplicating things, trying to be too clever as most of the songs I have written before start out so simply, and then become layered until they're almost unrecognisable from the originals. The order I write in has become confusing too - do I write a simple chord progression on the guitar then take it into the 8 track and add instruments, or do I work on a section at a time in the machine, adding instruments as I go? It's a bit of a Catch-22: I can't seem to find the right basic chords until I add more instruments, and I can't add more instruments until I get those elusive chords.

I used to have a stock of three or four instrumentals to work on but I have absolutely zero at the moment and I'm starting to worry whether it's ever going to come back again. Add to this the fact that the band as a whole is going through some kind of collective drout regarding new material and I feel that the onus is on me to try and come up with something quickly so we don't all start getting bored and pissed off that the muse has well and truely fucked off. We're stuck in the cycle of rehearsing until we have an hour left, then not really having enough time or the drive to do anything new, then repeating the same pattern the next week. For the amount of time we've been going, our rate of production is downright embarrassing. I realise it's about quality and not quantity and that it's difficult to be inspired when we need to be, but listening to other bands on here I am starting to wonder whether what little quality we have is enough anymore.

I hate having to cram music in around everything else, I need whole days to write and not just two hours on a Monday night when I'm burnt out from the weekend and the first day back at work! Anyway, I'm tired. Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow.