WORKSHOP
From the book Songwriting and the Guitar (String Letter)

EDITING YOUR SONGS

We all love those songs that come fast and whole. Like a baby born in a taxicab, they seem to know exactly what to do and what they’re about, and our job is mostly just to catch them before they fall. And when they’re spanking new in our hands, they feel so complete and right, a mood or emotion or thought miraculously made flesh. Any tinkering would only dilute their effect.

In reality, though, relatively few songs (and relatively few babies) come into being this way—most require time and labor. For many songwriters, myself included, this is a hard truth to swallow. Finding inspiration, or letting it find you, is the essential beginning of the process, but it’s equally important to develop the ability to be a song editor—to identify what needs trimming and what needs expanding, what’s essential and what’s just taking up space, and, of course, to have the courage to act on your findings. In my own case, what really developed my eyes/ear as a song editor (much to the chagrin of the side of me that greatly preferred the crank-’em-out-and-move-on method) was becoming a professional magazine and book editor. In that field, I learned to identify the weak spots (and strengths) in other people’s writing and to work with and around them, and those skills quickly translated to editing my own words. In time, a similar process took hold in my songwriting, which slowed my output but raised its quality several notches.

Editing can be a very different process in different situations, but let’s talk about some common weaknesses in writing and how you can address them to make the idea at the core of your song really shine. Note that all of the following applies equally to lyrics, melody, instrumental riffs, chord progressions—all the parts that contribute to your song’s mood and meaning.

YOUR FAVORITE THINGS

In many songs, there’s one detail that you really, really love—a line or a lick or a chord change that gives you intense pleasure. Now, this little detail could, in fact, be central to your song and give your listeners the same charge that it gives you, and if so, you certainly don’t want to touch it. But you need to assess this detail carefully, especially if it’s something that has been hanging around for a long time, awaiting a home. When you have favorite things like this, the desire to show the world your brilliant notion can definitely cloud your judgment about what really belongs in a song. I personally am prone to developing unhealthy attachments to cool little guitar licks or chord moves, which I’ll play incessantly for months and even years, and I’ll do anything to shoehorn them into a work in progress.

In the heat of creating, it’s not always easy to separate the things that fit from the things that are desperately trying to hitch a ride with your song. When you’ve got some distance from it (usually in a subsequent writing session, after a break), listen closely to how the song flows into and away from this moment. Are you awkwardly veering in a new direction or mood? Assuming a different idiom, voice, or point of view? Does arriving at or departing from this moment require a lengthy transition, most of which just performs a setup or tear-down function rather than contributing something to the song in itself? A positive answer to any of these questions is a sign that you may be trying to squeeze in something extraneous, or at least that you need to improve your transitions.

FLYING ON AUTOPILOT

During the writing process, there are times when you are very much in charge, and others where you fill in a line/lick/chord just because you’ve so often heard it done that way—it’s like temporarily leaving the cockpit and letting autopilot take over. When you do this, what you wind up with in your song is a cliché, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is bad if your listeners are so familiar with the cliché that their ears and attention shut down when they hear it. The first time someone sang, "I don’t know where I’m going, but I sure know where I’ve been," the lines may have had some resonance, but now...

If, while you’re in editing mode, you come across a detail that’s a little too familiar—so much so that it doesn’t really sound as if you wrote it—there are a few approaches you can take. One, of course, is just to replace the whole thing with an original expression, which is great if you can pull it off. But it can also be equally effective, or even more effective, to play off the cliché: to tweak it a little bit, whether by substituting a word or syncopating a riff differently or introducing whatever variation works in your context. This way, your listeners get that nice feeling of familiarity from the cliché along with the extra nice feeling of having their expectations toyed with a little bit, which is one of the best tricks in the songwriter’s bag. I’m just riffing here, but if you changed that line to "I don’t know where I’m going, but I sure know where you’ve been," you’ve created some juicy new possibilities.

Some songwriters play with clichés on a grand scale. Take an example from the witty songbook of Jill Sobule: Her song "Love Is Never Equal" takes its form from the old country-crooner duet, but as the title implies, she substitutes a cynical, funny message for the usual sap. Then, in the studio, she extended the mischief by enlisting the king of anti-Nashville country, Steve Earle, to harmonize with her and deliver lines like "Someone always gets kicked to the curb" and by asking all the musicians to play in a "sloppy, barlike" way. The result not only skewers the cliché but delivers an entertaining and memorable alternative to the typical breakup song.

MAKING MORE FROM LESS

With words (prose or lyrics), it’s extremely common for writers to pile on adjectives, adverbs, and other descriptors in a noble, gallant, and well-intentioned effort to be vivid. The problem is that these words start to cancel each other out, and the whole effect is lost. The same thing can happen with musical details (even whole verses or sections of songs), and some judicious pruning can make a big difference in your song’s impact. If you have a pile of similar words, pick the one that best expresses the most important idea and clear out the rest. If there isn’t a single word weighty enough to do the job by itself, keep pushing until you find one that can. Also remember that a good, concrete image trumps any sort of description. Jill Sobule could have explained to us that affairs always end with someone feeling hurt and discarded, but how would that have compared with seeing someone get "kicked to the curb"? Ouch.

Not all songs need to be short and sparse—long, extravagant, and involved songs can be a beautiful thing. But in all songs, regardless of the size or scope, everything must contribute to the whole, and your job as an editor is to understand what exactly that "whole" is and identify what advances the cause and what doesn’t. Some writers need to spin out ten verses in order to pare back to the four that really count, while others just keep on polishing the same four. There’s no "correct" editing process, just a result that’s either tightly constructed or not quite.

As you flesh out your ideas, you should be sure not to overlook the materials you’ve already got in hand. Try extending an existing image, returning to the opening scene, embellishing the intro guitar riff or transferring it to another chord. Building on what you’ve already written serves several purposes: it makes the song more coherent, it helps you avoid mixing metaphors and other internal clashes, and it sets up a resonance inside the song, so that listeners will settle in with an idea and then feel it being changed. This technique is similar to modifying a cliché, except you’re setting up your own familiar pattern and then playing with it.

FOLLOWING THE ARC

Every song is a story, which starts somewhere, heads off on a little journey, and winds up someplace else. In editing, you should think about your song in this light, whether or not it has action or a plot—even a mood song should be a journey, maybe further into or out of that mood.

Take a look at what we in the publishing business call the lead—your opening music and words. Generally speaking, the song form is extremely condensed, and you don’t want people to have to wait to get to the good stuff. In editing prose, I often find that writers bury a great lead several paragraphs in, and that the original opening material fits in perfectly later in the piece. Songwriters sometimes do the same thing, and while you shouldn’t feel pressured to dazzle your audience with your lead, you want to make sure to start drawing them in right away. At the moment, I’ve got this Greg Brown song stuck in my head that opens with an ominous minor-chord strum and this line delivered in his amazing rumble of a voice: "So how are things going in the small dark movie of your life?" So much information and intrigue is packed in that image (again, it’s an image and not description) that I have to know more.

After the lead, pay attention to how the song develops through the middle and the end. I’ve noticed that in my weaker songs, such microscopic changes occur from beginning to end that I am assuming way too much of listeners. There’s just no getting around it: unless you happen to be Bob Dylan, other people are not as attuned to the nuances of your songs (or at least not to the same nuances) as you are. Try to put yourself in their position and think about where they are being taken in the four-minute journey. You have to provide them with a reason to want to go from verse one to verse two and on through the chorus to the end. To continue with the example of "Small Dark Movie," Greg Brown goes on to frame the sordid life suggested in the lead, using a different angle for each verse: from "Late at night you call your girlfriend / In the morning you call your wife" in the first verse to "You could really use a raincoat and a pair of cool shoes / You could really use some idea what it is you’re trying to do" in the second to some scary road imagery in the third: "Change is a semi with smoking wheels filling the rearview mirror." A lonesome slide solo by Kelly Joe Phelps extends the mood and melody, and then Brown wraps up by returning to the first verse, which at this point has a whole new set of associations. As he fades out repeating "How are things going?" Brown also leaves us with the suspicion that the narrator might not really be talking to "you" at all, but to himself. That’s a lot to chew on in a short, simple, chorusless song, and it stays with me even though I haven’t spun that disc in weeks.

When you’re pursuing a new inspiration, you could be lucky enough to arrive at a complete composition on your first pass, but more often than not you’ll need to call on the services of your inner editor to get a song where it needs to go. No matter what techniques or approaches you’re using, the secret of being a good editor is being able to view your song from the other side of the guitar. You want to know, what are listeners experiencing here? What do they want and need as the song develops? When you can answer those questions and deliver the goods, you’re there. Congratulations. Enjoy your new song.

--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers