Rewind and Rewrite
These last few weeks I faced an unusual challenge. As you may know, I’ve been working on my first full-length album called ‘Spirals’. There have been a few setbacks on my plans for its release and unfortunately I had to delay everything for quite a while. All plans in the music industry have suffered because of the pandemic, and momentum is key for every artist. So I decided that before releasing my first single later this year, I’m going to make a release of an old song of mine that I think has a lot of potential but I didn’t distribute it to streaming platforms. It’s a song I wrote in 2014 and has been lingering on my Soundcloud. Six years later, I’m thankful it has remained low-key, because I’ve realized that the lyrics are a huge mess! And this meant that I had to rewrite them, almost from scratch.
The process of rewriting was a tough journey. First of all, I don’t have the same mindset I had six years ago when I first wrote the song. I understand what I was trying to say back then, but now I don’t feel like saying it anymore. This is a huge problem, because the core of every work of art is having something to say. So, what do I want to say now, and can I say it without removing the main hook from the song? After struggling with this I realized that I just needed to divide and conquer: what do I like? What makes me cringe? So I knew now that the plan was to erase the sucky parts, and take advantage of the parts I liked to build my new idea.
Once I had my strategy, the process was like playing sudoku. I had a number of syllables, a structure, but I needed to fill in the missing words. It is also a challenge to let go of the old lyrics. Even though you know they don’t work and they make you cringe, you can’t deny that you are used to hearing them that way, so eventually when you edit something it’s hard to tell if it feels natural. I would advise to make edits early in the writing process to avoid this. Revise them with a colleague if you need to, but it’s always easier to change things early in the game (not six years later, like me).
After a couple of days, the lyrics were done! I felt a new wave of motivation because I knew the song was going to work after all! Now there was just one tiny (not) detail: what about the music?
Indeed. Fortunately, the music is the part I mostly liked about the song in the first place and where I saw its potential. I love how my strings arrangement came out, and the chord progression is simple but catchy. But still, there’s a huge gap between the level of production I had in 2014 and the one I’m going to be showcasing with ‘Spirals’. I employed the same strategy of identifying which elements I didn’t like and which I wanted to keep. And unsurprisingly, the thing I didn’t like is the thing that I always beat myself over: the beats (pun intended). But now I have something I didn’t have in 2014, which is a producer experienced with the type of music I make; someone that’s on the same page as me creatively speaking. So I went back to Psicofonia Studio, where last year we worked on ‘Spirals’. Producer Charles A. Leal saved my butt again with all the drum related stuff. You know how stuff happens for a reason? Maybe it was a good thing I waited this long to release this song, because I think now it’s in way better shape than before. I’m not cringing anymore! And with all this new energy and momentum, I even added a couple of new elements to the arrangement as well. Of all the things I do, working on my music makes me the happiest.
Later today I’ll go back to Psicofonia Studio to record vocals! Wish me luck and stay tuned because in just a month I’ll be releasing this new/old song.
Here we go!
Monica Lyrae
Composer, and a better songwriter than she was six years ago