“Great songs aren’t written, they’re rewritten” ―R.C. Bannon
One of the biggest mistakes that inexperienced songwriters make is to think their latest song is finished as soon as they’ve added the final chord or found a rhyme for the last line. The first draft could, of course, prove to be the one and the song may be ready for the demo studio. But in the majority of cases, ‘finishing’ a song is just the beginning.
It means it’s time to start polishing the song to make it shine even brighter.
Professional songwriters recognize this. Experience has shown them that every new song they write will probably need several re-writes before they have the final version. They’ve learnt that creating a hit song usually requires 10% writing and 90% re-writing.
If you’ve already gone through the agony of having songs rejected by a publisher or a record company, ask yourself: Could I have made the songs better if I’d spent more time polishing them?
You should never allow yourself to be discouraged by the amount of re-writing and lyric editing that may be necessary. Look on it as simply part of the overall song- writing process.
Your aim should be to write great songs—not just settle for good ones.
Pro writers often produce a first draft of a new song, put it down for a few days, and then listen to it again. That’s usually when they can tell if the song truly has potential. Listening to it from a fresh perspective enables them to spot the weaknesses and assess how the song can be improved.
“The A material definitely lies beneath the B material,” the Goo Goo Dolls’ Johnny Rzeznik once said. “You have to sift through it to get to the good stuff. You can’t rush it. There is a time for your internal judge to come in and make the call, but you have to free yourself from that in the beginning stages of the creative process.” One of the purposes of this book is to give you a detailed checklist that you can measure your songs against, no matter how ‘finished’ you think they are. The aim is to help you improve each new song by making sure you haven’t made any fundamental mistakes at each key stage in the development of the song.
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