So you want to make an album? (part 19)
KeithHandy posted in Producing, So You Want..., Your Soul on September 26th, 2007
To read the entire series, go to the “So You Want…†category.
Installment 19: My song sucks!
Aural fatigue is not just your enemy when your fingers are on the faders — it’s your enemy when you’re deciding whether or not to even bother keeping the track and/or finishing what you started. A tell-tale sign that you’re being taunted by aural fatigue is that you can hear the sound of your music, you recognize that it’s your music, you’re able to identify it as such… but it’s just dead to you. You’re hearing it, but you’re no longer hearing what’s good about it.
And maybe a large part of what would be good about it isn’t even there yet, but it doesn’t matter; before you reached this state, you were able to hear the stuff coming out of the speakers and the stuff in your head equally well. Now you just hear a bunch of familiar yet disappointing sounds.
The first thing to do is obviously to acknowledge and accept that this is what’s happening. It’s frustrating, but at least it takes some of the burden off of you to know that this feeling of disappointment is normal, universal, inevitable, and temporary. It’s also somewhat unpredictable. Sometimes you’ll go for a long stretch where you should be burnt out, but instead you get on a “producer’s high” where you just can’t stop listening to the playback over and over. Other times you’ll put it away and come back to it a few days later with fresh ears, and it’s still not happening for you.
The problem is, music is never entirely rooted in physical reality. No matter how careful we are to prop up our end of it with a tight rhythm track, solid singing, and pristine mixing, the other end still has to be propped up by that elusive, cosmic je ne sais quoi. In less flaky terms, if we’re not in the mood for the song, we’re not going to like it, no matter what we do with it. We need to go back to its source — why did we write it? If we lose touch with the “why”, we might as well be doing commercial jingles, because that’s approximately how much faith we have in our own message.
Before we go back to that song, we need to go back to the feeling that inspired it. Think method acting. Who or what is it about? Even if it’s only an instrumental, there was something on your mind just before you stumbled on the riff that started it all. Granted, once your music is “out there”, anyone who listens to it and enjoys it will have a different context and a different set of associations — but if you lose sight of your own personal context and associations along the way, your song will turn into a meaningless pile of notes before you can even get it out the door. This is true whether you’re playing and singing, or just adding those last-minute EQ and compression tweaks to the final mix.
One thing that I find frustrating, or at least surreal — and don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing overall — is that as I write more songs, my perspective on life evolves, to the point where in order to work on an older song, I literally have to back myself up to a more immature way of looking at the world. So why don’t I just throw the old stuff away and start fresh? (This is what most people do.) Because personally, I like to leave a trail of crumbs showing my progression — an ongoing record of where I’ve been, spiritually, philosophically, and emotionally. Not to mention, I have a sentimental attachment to my old melodies and chord progressions. But I can’t just work on them in a detached, clinical way. So why don’t I just leave them in their existing state? Because I’m a completist, and it will nag at me if I know something could sound better with reinforced drums or vocals, even though the song itself won’t be any more sophisticated. Humor me.
Okay, we all need to be coddled now and then, and you’re no exception, so here’s the short version: your song doesn’t suck. If you’re not in the right mindframe for it anymore, make the best objective decisions you can about how to wrap up the session, avoid making rash, irreversible, subjective decisions, step away from the equipment, and focus on dialing back into the song’s ideal version in your head. This may mean returning to the situation or people you originally wrote about — either actually going back to them, or visualizing it as clearly as possible. Get your mind re-entrenched in the context first, and then think about the song. As soon as you can hear it clearly in there again, you can resume working on it out here.
