The worst song I ever tried to write was one I attempted in real time.
I was at a concert, watching a performer I loved. Something moved me deeply. I wanted to capture that feeling immediately, while it was still vivid. So I went home and tried to write it down while the emotion was fresh.
The result was terrible. It was overwrought and sentimental and completely false. It was trying so hard to recapture the feeling that it had lost the actual feeling in the trying. It was like trying to describe a sunset while the sun is setting, instead of remembering how it made you feel three days later.
The songs that work are almost always the ones that come from memory.
This is counterintuitive if you think about songwriting as a technical craft. If you think about songs as something you build, you'd think the raw materials are best accessed fresh, while they're still hot, while you haven't had time to forget the details. But songwriting isn't like that. Songwriting is about meaning, and meaning is something that happens in time. It takes distance to understand what something actually meant.
Memory isn't a recording device. It's a distillation device. When you remember something, you lose the details but you keep the shape. You lose the exact color of the light but you keep the feeling the light created. You lose the words that were said but you keep the meaning underneath the words.
And that's exactly what you need for a song. You don't need the exact details. You need the essential shape of the thing. You need the feeling that time has sifted out of the noise and noise that time has left behind.
This is why songs written weeks or months or years after the events that inspired them are often stronger than songs written immediately. The immediate experience is too raw, too unreflective. You're still too close to know what it means. But after time passes, after the feeling has been metabolized, after you've had space to understand what actually mattered, then you can write something that has clarity and depth.
I've written songs about things that happened ten years ago and the song was stronger for the distance. I've written songs about things that happened last week and they felt shallow and grasping. The distance isn't a problem. The distance is the point.
This is true for all kinds of emotional memory. Loss especially. People often want to write about loss immediately, while they're in the acute phase of grief. But those songs tend to be the most self-indulgent, the most focused on the writer's pain rather than on the actual person who's gone. The songs that people actually connect with are the ones written months or years later, when the grief has transformed into something more complex, when you've had time to understand what the person actually meant to you beyond the immediate shock.
Memory is selective. It throws away the trivial and keeps the essential. It forgets the things you said and remembers how they made you feel. It forgets the specific day and remembers the season. It forgets the words and keeps the meaning.
That's exactly what a good song needs to be: essential and meaning-focused and stripped of the trivial. A good song doesn't need the details. A good song is the shape of the feeling, the architecture of meaning, the thing that remains after time has done its work.
So I don't write from the moment anymore. I write from memory. I let things settle. I let time do the distilling. And then, weeks or months later, when the feeling has been metabolized and the essential shape has emerged, I write the song.
The result is usually stronger. It's clearer. It's less about capturing a feeling and more about expressing something that has survived the passage of time, something that still matters weeks later, something that has revealed itself to be true rather than just intense.
This is one of the hardest lessons of songwriting: that the best way to write about the moment is to wait until the moment is over. That the best way to capture the feeling is to let time do the capturing for you, and then trust what remains.
THE MUSIC
If the history is what brings you here, the music is what keeps you here.
Until next time.
Sid