Songs Need Rust

Songwriting is a tricky thing. What it means to “write” a song can often be much more nuanced and complicated affair than it might appear at first glance.  They go through a transformation over time, even when you think they are technically done, and in the sense they’re less like completed works and closer to trees.

When they’re young they’re like saplings. Little sketches that can become really any kind of thing. The structure might change. You might add a little inflection here or there, a quick little change that can put the punctuation on a specific part.

The biggest piece of ambiguity are the lyrics. Right until the final recording where you’ll document the completion of the first part of the songs existence, the song itself will still be an ethereal and insubstantial thing.

I know that I was finalizing lyrics for the songs on this album right up until the final moments and even then we might do a bunch of different takes with different lyrics and then see what worked later and then when we finally made the selection and mixed and mastered the tune, only then do those words, like and paintings in concrete, finally stiffen into something more permanent and everlasting.

And still they may need more years and more weathering to finally achieve a permanence where the changes and the words echo and reverberate lkike the creaky halls of an old house.

The first sketches of my favorite song that I’ve written, “Broken Bow”, were done in October 2006. The words weren’t lasting but the emotion and the heart of the song emerged. The changes and the groaning chorus had an old timey Western feel. But it was hard to tell at the time. It was just me and an acoustic guitar in my apartment late at night.

The next little moment for the song came about a month later when me and some friends demoed the tune upstate. The song sprang a bit more fully to life then. We got the descending piano line out of that weekend in the chorus and some good lyrics and it felt a bit more substantial.  [Here's the demo]

And then I took some things to Paul and we worked through them, ended up cutting a stanza from the first verse, took it into the guys that played on the record and that was in December 2007 and March 2008.

Then we added stuff to the tune over the year, played it live twice, mixed and mastered the record.

And its only now, almost two and a half years later that everything in the song truly feels sturdy and strong. Where I can thump a beam with the butt of my hand and not worry that the whole dang thing will collapse into a big dust cloud.

Playing it live a few weeks ago at Drom brought that notion home to me. The song as a thing was safer and more independent and could now go a bunch of different ways while still being itself. It had an identity.

I think about that as I toy with these 30 or so odd little saplings I’m now tending to for the next record. I’m thinking about which ones will grow up and be something strong and which ones won’t really have what it takes to do much in the world. And they’ll live on as little fragments that I’ll strumy softly to myself late at night and we’ll think together about they might have been.

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