The song was good on the sofa.
One voice, one instrument,
four minutes,
and it made somebody in the room
stop talking.
Then you started producing it.
A pad underneath,
because the verse felt thin.
A harmony on the second chorus,
because harmonies are nice.
A second guitar,
doubling the first,
because it sounded bigger
the moment you pressed record.
Every one of those decisions
improved what you heard
at the second you made it.
That is the trap,
and it is a fair one,
because each addition
genuinely did sound better
in isolation.
Play it now
against the phone recording
you made on the sofa,
and the phone recording wins.
Two things went wrong
and neither is about taste.
The first is space.
Two instruments in the same register
do not add up.
They fight, and the winner
is whichever one is louder,
and the loser is the detail
you wrote the part for.
The pad did not support the voice.
It sat exactly where
the voice was carrying the meaning
and it blurred the words.
The second is that
a chorus can only lift
if something was held back before it.
You had a lift on the sofa.
You got it for free,
by playing the verse
with one hand
and the chorus with both.
Then you filled the verse,
and now there is nowhere to go,
so you fill the chorus harder,
and the song runs the whole way
at a single level
that a listener stops hearing
after ninety seconds.
The repair costs nothing
and takes an evening.
Mute one part.
Listen to the whole song without it.
If you do not miss it,
it was never doing a job,
it was doing an impression of one.
Then take out the thing
you are proudest of
and check whether the song
is actually worse.
Sometimes it is.
More often you find out
that the part you loved
was standing in front
of the thing people came for.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
