An Imperfect Song Released Trumps a Perfect One Not Released.
In another post, I wrote about how I keep restarting, how each tool change is a restart or a reset. But there is another way I restart, and it has to do with the songs themselves. I keep re-recording or “working on” the same song.
I did this with the songs on the demo I finally released this Spring. For more than twenty years, I held on to six songs I recorded in a real studio with a real drummer and real amps. The resulting versions were the best I had recorded to date (2003), but my first instinct when I got back into recording last year was to re-record them. I had many reasons, and they all felt perfectly valid at the time: my guitar playing is “better” today than it was then, the gear I have today is better than the gear used to record it, and many, many others. I wasted months trying to make them “better” when in fact, they were already good enough.
The problem with this form of restarting is the same as it was with gear: it prevents me from finishing songs because I keep trying to perfect them. It’s a pattern that I’ve been engaging in since I started writing and recording songs. From my four-track cassette days to early DAWs, digital multi-track recorders, and the studio where I recorded my demo, all of those sessions contained versions of the same set of songs. One song, Blood From a Stone, must have been recorded and re-recorded at least 25 times (maybe a slight exaggeration) since I wrote it.
And I was doing it again, twenty-something years later, with the song I’ve been “stuck” on for close to two months. So I decided I’m not going to feed this behavior for one more day. I have an old demo of the song. Other than the drums, the song is pretty good. Not great, not perfect, but pretty good. So I decided to “fix” the one thing that bothered me. I used a stem splitter to “remove” the drums, and used EZdrummer to create a “better” drum track. The rest of the song remains-warts and all.
Here’s another reason I’m releasing the original version: I probably recorded it around the same time I wrote it. The energy and enthusiasm for the song were then, not now. The emotions were fresh then, especially for the particular song I’m talking about. I wrote it about my son and the emotions I was experiencing around the time of his birth. Those emotions were captured during the recording of the original demo.
And lastly, why am I recreating the wheel? Why am I not honoring the work I did previously? What is really gained by re-recording? Am I really making the song better, or am I just rationalizing my actions as productive work when in fact all it is is yet another form of friction avoidance (you know, avoiding the discomfort of putting something out in the world that is not perfect and dealing with the likelihood that others will judge it and even worse, not like it)?
Avoidance is a sneaky bastard, but I’m slowly getting wise to its tricks. The song “Everytime” is being released this week. The next song is titled The Road I Travel, and its situation is the same as Everytime’s. I have an old demo, it’s pretty good except for the drums, so it will get the same treatment. I’m going to honor the work I did in the past so I can free up time and energy today to make new music.
Title: Each Song Represents a Moment in Time, and They Don’t Have to be Consecutive.
Yesterday, I got home from work and fired up my computer to start working on my current song project, The Road I Travel. For some reason, I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and wrote, “How can I release this as-is?”
As with my last project, a song titled Everytime, I felt stuck. I was trying to recreate the feel of a guitar part, but I was getting frustrated. Objectively, my guitar playing is better today than it was when I recorded the demo, but I was unable to match the demo’s guitar parts. Soloing the guitar parts revealed a cool (if I do say so myself) rhythm part sloppily played and slightly off time, but somehow gelling into a cohesive part.
The same thoughts ran through my head as when I finally decided to stop trying to recreate Everytime and use what I had. Why am I re-recording this? Am I really making this better? I didn’t have a good answer for the first question, and the answer to the second was clearly no.
The next question I asked was, “What’s distracting me, what’s bugging me about the original?” Like with Everytime, the answer was the drums. The drums were a very simple two-bar pattern with a repeating fill to mark transitions. So I tried what I did with Everytime, I removed the original drums and used EZdrummer3 to create a new drum track. It sounded horrible! I couldn’t get it to align with the other tracks, and the feel was off.
After closer inspection, I noticed that the original drum track was slightly off. In theory, this should have made the other tracks sound off as well, but somehow it produced a feel that worked—a happy accident. The part that I first thought was a distraction was actually the song’s glue. Sometimes, first impressions are not accurate. Long story short, The Road I Travel is getting released completely as is. I’ll balance the track levels, throw a limiter on the master fader, and call it a day.
The end goal of all of this is to release music. Get it off my hard drive and out into the world. And it should not matter when I created it, yesterday, today, tomorrow, or twenty years ago. Each song represents a moment in time, an evolution of the process. The only way for the process to evolve is to keep working through it, release songs, and repeat. Next up: Memories.
The Road I Travel just debuted on Spotify this morning!