Category: PART 4 – RE-WRITING

“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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You may have sung your latest song a hundred times in your writing room or while performing it live on stage. But it is often hard to spot any remaining flaws in the song’s structure when you’re busy concentrating on playing your instrument and trying to give a good vocal performance. 

If the first time you get to listen back to a recording of your song is when you’re already in a professional demo studio, you could end up wasting expensive studio time by having to make last-minute adjustments to the song. 

The best way to judge whether a song is truly finished is to hear it back just like an ordinary listener. In other words, listen to it without singing or playing along. Just your ears and a lyric sheet. 

To do this, you need to make a simple recording of your new song—in effect, a rough ‘demo’ of the demo recording that you intend to make. 

“I recommend that writers record all the time,” said The Kinks’ Ray Davies. “When you’re writing, you’re doing this balancing act between the instinctive thing that leaps right out of you and the refinement of that moment. The first time you sing a line, you might use a weird phrasing, or put a line on the upbeat rather than on the downbeat. Shifts like that will change everything, and you have to document what you did … You can always play the tape and say, ‘Oh, that’s how I did it!’” 

This ‘memo’ demo should be an essential part of the re-writing and editing process. It can be as basic as a simple guitar/vocal or piano/vocal captured on a hand-held digital recorder or a smartphone. 

During the re-writing process, you should re-record and listen back to your rough recording every time you make more changes to the lyrics or melodic structure. You’ll be amazed how it gives you a different perspective on how the song can be improved. 

Once you’re absolutely satisfied with the song and your final test recording, you’ll then have something to play to the musicians and the vocalist (if you’re not planning to sing it yourself), so that they can learn the song in advance … and save you time and money in the studio. 

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Unless you’re writing for your own band, or collaborating with other writers, song- writing can be a solitary endeavor. You’re left alone in your writing room day after day, night after day, fighting the twin demons of indecision and procrastination.

As Steve Forbert once put it: “The most annoying thing about songwriting is that you just have to put in the solitude and the time it takes to get it done. It requires a lot of alone time.”

That’s why it can be very useful to have a songwriting buddy. 

Your buddy could be a musician friend or a fellow songwriter you respect and trust—someone who will give you a chance to think out loud and be a sounding board for your new ideas. Ideally, your buddy should be someone who under- stands songwriting and whose encouragement, experience and insight will help you gain momentum and confidence in your own writing. 

Writers are often not the best judges of their own material, regardless of their level of experience or success. They often get so close to a song that it is hard for them to tell if it is truly finished or still has some weaknesses. 

At the crucial re-writing stage, your songwriting buddy can provide unbiased feed- back before you start spending hard-earned cash on a demo, or putting in the hours in your home recording studio. He or she can give you valuable criticism or informed praise from an outside perspective, and point out what still isn’t working in your song. 

If you don’t know any experienced songwriters, your buddy could always be a special person that you trust—such as your girlfriend, boyfriend, best friend, husband or wife. Someone you can take your stripped down ‘memo’ demo to—without feeling embarrassed or self-conscious—and ask for an honest opinion of the song. 

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Don’t make the mistake of shying away from the tough decisions that often have to be made at the re-writing stage—especially when strengthening a song means having to change or leave out some of the favorite lyrics, rhymes, melodic phrases, chords, or even complete verses that you started out with. 

But you have to be ruthlessly honest with yourself. If you feel the song is the absolute best you can do beyond reasonable doubt (as they say in court), then go ahead and submit the song. But if you have the slightest doubt, you must be prepared to focus on identifying the song’s weaknesses (and fix them) before spending time and money on making a demo. 

If you aren’t willing to re-visit or re-work your songs and do whatever is best for each of them, then the rejection slips may continue to pile up in your letter-box. A song that is ‘close enough’ for performing on stage won’t be good enough for publishers, A&R managers and producers who have to operate in the tough commercial world of the music business. 

Re-writing and editing can be hard work. You have to do it without losing the spontaneity and spark of inspiration that gave you the idea for the song in the first place. It may require finding a fresh way of saying what you want to say in your song, or correcting some of the common mistakes highlighted in this book. But it’s essential step if you want songwriting success. 

As mentioned previously in this book, an easy method of monitoring your progress during the re-writing stage is to make a simple guitar/vocal or piano/vocal recording on a hand-held recorder or a smartphone every time you make adjustments to the song. Hearing the song back like an ordinary listener will give you a different perspective on the changes you’ve made and may highlight any remaining flaws in the song. 

‘Polishing’ a song is one of the most crucial steps in writing a hit, so it’s better to take your time and keep re-writing and editing until you feel the magic happen … and the song finally falls into place beyond reasonable doubt. 

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