#25: First Drafts (or, how I mistook a foal for a fish)
(on songwriting, audio)
Some songs take years to write. Others are like a foal: wobbly, but capable of standing on its own within a couple of hours. In the case of “Your Guitar”, I was sitting cross-legged on the bed of a hotel room in Saugerties, NY, absently watching the news and just as absently plucking at a guitar. My song reception antennae were set to off. My customary narrow-ruled legal pad was badly out of position. Nothing about this scene said song incoming—except maybe the guitar, a 1931 Larson Brothers Prairie State.
Playing guitar while watching television is one of the ways I got in my “ten thousand hours” (if not my ten thousand steps). Not only does it keep the fingers in shape, it seems to trick the left brain into leaving the right brain be. More often than not I’ll just be droning away in an open tuning, in the vicinity of the blues—pointless meandering. Every once in a while though, a groove or a chord change or a melody will appear. Sometimes a waltz. Actually, lots of waltzes. And if a few words happen to appear as well, well, that’s when things get interesting. Problem is, it hardly ever happens.
Here’s my dirty little secret: songwriting is something I do very, very seldomly. Or better said, seeing a song successfully through from inception to completion is a rare event in my life. Always has been. I say “dirty” because songwriting is supposed to be what I do. And yet most of the time—almost all of the time—I’m failing at it. Though not for lack of trying. Every day I pack a lunch, gather my gear, head down to the pond, row out to the middle and sit there—waiting, hoping, angling for a bite. At the end of the day I row back empty handed. Those are some cagey fish.
But every once in a while there’ll be some activity. By that I mean an angle so precise that what I see there seems identical to the telling of it: one thing. That night in Saugerties, that thing was not the Larson guitar in itself, but the fact that I had recently learned a little about the life of its previous owner, and that he had died a couple of years prior. The Larson had come out of his estate. Now here I was with his guitar.
A commercial sent me scurrying for the mute button. In the silence a little progression appeared, then two words—your guitar. Within the hour there was a wobbly foal standing over by the television. Here is a rough mix of what we recorded the following day…
Your Guitar (first version):
It’s never a bad idea to take a new song out for spin before committing it to official zeros and ones. A lot can be learned in performance about what works or does not work. Audience response is helpful. But the more important information comes from how I feel as I’m delivering a song. An awkward phrase, a line not carrying its weight, something about the pacing: all becomes clearer in front of a crowd. And there’s another kind of fact-finding mission going on as well: the one that asks, What do I think about saying this?
In the case of Your Guitar, it took singing the song every night of a three-week tour of the UK to arrive at the conclusion that I did not want to say some of what I was saying. It began as a slight discomfort. Before long I was having hard time getting through the song. I thought about deleting it from the setlist.
The problem had to do with the way I had insinuated or enlisted myself into the life (and death) of someone I had never met. I can’t bear to quote any of the cringeworthy lines. So for those of you who are curious, I’ll just direct your attention to the glib, presumptuous intimacy of the last verse. The chorus takes a couple of embarrassing positions as well.
Turns out songs need more time than foals. And as for that “angle so precise that what I see there seems identical to the telling of it”? There’s a name for that. It’s called a first draft. Here’s the final, edited version…
Your Guitar (final version):
There are some beautiful comments here in support of the original version, and I'm grateful for them all. I'll respond individually to the particulars of each one. But generally... If I felt the need to change the song it wasn't because I was trying to make a better song, but because I was trying to make a song that said exactly what I wanted to say, one that did not say exactly what I did not want to say, exactly. It can't be otherwise!
The final version is beautiful, but the first version cracked my heart wide open in a way that the edited one can't possibly. I've needed a good cry for a year and it burst, about halfway through.
I understand the hesitation, but I very strongly think the changes were a big mistake. The first version wasn't an intrusion into another's life; it ties the listener to the deep pain of our _universal_ mortality. The phrase about the owner closing the case for the last time, without knowing that truth, is so deeply, deeply painful. It reminds me of the paragraph at the close of The Sheltering Sky:
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
Memento mori.