The Light of Day

The stages of a song’s development over the course of your life
KeithHandy posted in Lists, Songwriting, Your Soul on August 27th, 2007

(Note: I’m too tired and hungry to write at my usual level. There are some inelegantly overused words, etc. — I’ll come back and spiffy this up later.)

The stages of a song’s development, none necessarily any better or worse than the others (with the possible exception of stage 5, an awkward but possibly unavoidable “growing pains” stage):

Stage one: You just wrote the song. You know it on a very immediate level, but haven’t formed a relationship with it. It’s almost a little frightening because it’s so unfamiliar, and yet you know in the pit of your stomach this is something good. It’s raw, though. Your melody is simultaneously repetitive (from line to line) and inconsistent (from performance to performance), because you need to have your lyric sheet in front of you just to get through it — but your inspiration, the thing that made you want to write it, is still fresh on your mind. You haven’t developed all the inflections yet; if you record this now and listen to it later, it will sound funny to you.

Stage two: a few days have passed, you may have made a couple of changes in the lyrics, and you can now pretty much sing it from memory. Since you don’t have to focus on remembering the lyrics, some new inflections start to form. You don’t even have to think about doing this; it happens whether you intend it to or not. Some syllables stretch, some get compressed, and the tone of your voice changes.

Stage three: you start to perform the song in front of other people. You’re gauging their reactions, and your self awareness naturally leads you to develop the “character” you sing it in; it may be grittier and more aggressive now.

Stage four: you do the studio version. You keep most of the inflections and character from stages two and three, but now your focus is on being anal-retentive. Your voice is probably not as raspy, because you’re drinking tea and sitting on leather couches. This is going to be (in your view anyway) the “quintessential” version of the song, and having solid intonation is crucial, lest you spend the rest of your life wishing you’d done one more take. It will sound good, but it will be more restrained and less spontaneous than your previous live versions.

Stage five: you continue to perform it, but now you’re mimicking the studio version. Little improvised flourishes from the session are now considered to be essential parts of the song, and you’re starting to tire of doing it all by rote — plus, let’s be honest, you can’t really sing as well in real life as you did on the album — so now you take some liberties that may or may not be entirely smart aesthetically. This is the stage where one would yell out something like “does anybody remember laughter??” in the middle of a song like Stairway to Heaven. Consciously, you’re trying to keep the song “vital”; unconsciously, you’re trying to put it out of its misery.

Stage six: you get so sick of your song that you start to think of it as a cliché. You’re older now, and you feel downright silly performing it. You might swear it off altogether, or only perform it for charity or novelty.

Stage seven: you rummage through your old treasures and find that cassette of your original demo of the song. Your apprehension is trumped by your curiosity, and you pop it in. On one level, it sounds just as silly as you expected it to, and is noticeably missing some key nuances that the song had accumulated as it matured. Yet, at the same time, you’re getting little shivers, smiling, and patting yourself on the back for writing such a neat little song — and remembering the uncomplicated, immediate feeling that sparked it, some of which had been lost in the translation when you “got too good” at singing it. 90% of the lines you sang on that old tape might sound quaint and embarrassing, but you’re too busy being blown away by the other 10%, half-wishing you could have preserved the elusive quality of those lines in later versions.

Stage eight: you use super-advanced modern technology to create a “fantasy mash” of earlier and later versions of the song, the new quintessential version, a version that could never have happened at any particular time in your life, and yet, there it is.

To be continued?

(Pretty soon I’ll have some “stage eights” to put up for your enjoyment.)