eggbug enjoyeri was gonna post this as a share of @fawnrot's post about music, but it got long and i feel weird about soapboxing underneath somebody else's ask, so i'm just gonna link their post and share my thoughts here!
i'm a technically-minded person who came to music through a theory lens. it was really interesting to learn about! and has done... basically nothing to improve my sense of what a "good song" is or sounds like. these days i think of theory as a "debugging tool" more than a prescriptive framework. it's good at answering specific questions ("why does this chord sound bad here"), but bad at driving creativity ("what chord progression should i use for this part").
if you (like me) struggle with finding direction in creative projects, and want to develop a sense for how "good" music is put together, i've gotten a piece of advice from several great producers on here that has helped me a lot: try making a few covers of (or at least pieces inspired by) songs you already like. it is so much easier to take something that already exists and put a spin on it than to invent something from whole cloth as a beginner. it's like drawing from reference.
another important thing (that celia also points out) is that the point of music is emotional beats, not absolute perfect mechanical purity. my day job (programming) demands rigid compliance to a standard by definition, so it's really quite counterintuitive for me to build something primarily based on how it feels rather than how it works, but if you approach writing a song the same way that you would writing a program, it's just going to sound rote and mechanical and boring. trust me, i have a whole folder of them 
