What writer doesn't love Eliot's formulation in "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" about "visions and revisions"? And who doesn't wish he had time for hundred before tea?
I'm sure I wasn't alone in my sophomore days as a writer in coming down on the "Visions" side of the equation. I thought writing -- especially writing songs -- was 99% inspiration and only 1% perspiration (as the cliché has it). I'd get ideas and furiously write them down as they came to me, reaching for the rhymes a bit, but mostly taking the ideas down in a steady stream. The real challenge from there was to make the music work with the text. Thus, the songs that worked the best for me were ones in which music and lyric came at the same time and inspiration at least did me the favor a following a consistent rhythm and rhyme scheme.
Over time, though, I've come to appreciate how much craft and technique lies behind the art. I still don't fully subscribe to "rules" about making a good song, but understanding how to write a "three-minute movie" song -- that is, how to write a typical hook-based song -- is invaluable to knowing how to write something different when you want to. It's like making sure you really understand the five-paragraph essay before you try to break away from it. To be perfectly honest, when I got to college, I abandoned the standard essay structure so completely, I went from always getting "A"s in English to getting "B"s and "C"s for a couple of years. Similarly, there are ways in which the little songs I wrote when I was 15 and 16 were better than some things I wrote after getting "serious" about songwriting.
About over a decade ago I found myself hanging around with some really good poets. I had the opportunity to observe them writing and revising and to participate in conversations about what made a passage or a line or a word better and what made things worse. I learned how to take (some) criticism without getting pissed off, what hard work revision is, and how to try to make things more concrete, more vivid. On the other hand, I also developed a tendency toward overly-philosophical themes and highfalutin language that I wouldn't shake for years to come.
Here's a revision I made around that time. My song "So Many People" used to start like this:
You're goddamn right! I shot 'em all.
I got me a handgun and went straight to the mall.
In order to make it more specific, more vivid, I changed it to
You're goddamn right! I shot 'em all.
Bought a gun at a pawn shop, took a cab to the mall.
Doesn't change the sense of the line one whit: the plot advances in exactly the same way, with the character acquiring a gun and heading to the mall (where he's fixin' to do some damage). But the revised version gives us some important detail and tells us a little something about the character. (Where I'm from, if you go to a pawn shop for a gun and take a cab to the mall, you're low status. A rich guy would already have a gun or buy it at a sporting goods store, and then he'd drive to the mall.)
With regard to the relationship between vision and revision, those two factors can meet across a gap of time. I often have an idea for a song, maybe a partial chorus or a couple of lines, but I don't have much time to spend on it. Some years back, I would have either written the whole song or just let it drop. Now I write what I can as quickly as I can, and then put it away. I look back over my fragments periodically to keep them percolating in the back of my mind, but other than that I don't worry too much about it. I've learned to trust this "vision" stage to develop on its own and to not feel anxious about not finishing songs.
The song "Victimless Crime" started with a pretty simple idea: I was driving by a wreck on the highway and thinking about how hard it is for people not to look, and I had the idea to juxtapose that image with a "hit and run" relationship, maybe with the victim sitting in the corner of a bar. So I came up with a few lines -- "He sees the car crash in the corner, but he's pretending not to notice." And right away I at least had a little bit of a story and a couple of characters. I probably heard the term "Victimless Crime" on the news in some context while I was driving by the wreck, because the phrase was already in my mind, and I wanted it to use it to ironically -- a character insisting, in the very presence of his victim, that his was a victimless crime.
After jotting down half a verse and half a chorus, though, I let it sit for weeks without even thinking about it. Then I woke up in the middle of the night with the idea in my mind, and I started the hundred visions and revisions that would eventually become the song. The final (and hardest) major revision was to get rid of the idea that led to the song in the first place. I had changed "He sees the car crash in the corner" to "He sees the wreckage in the corner," but I finally faced up to reason, and the first stanza became:
He sees her sitting in the corner
But he's pretending not to notice
He likes to think she's none the worse for wear.
He turns back for another drink
And disregards the damage
Wondering why the hell she's even there.
I came to realize the crash imagery worked against the song, making it harder for the listener to understand the setting. It's one thing to add information gradually -- we don't really know it's a bar until "He turns back for another drink." But when a song opens with a confusing or nonsensical image, the "poetic" conceit often isn't worth the disorientation. Or put differently, expecting your listener to get from a car crash to a bar stool that quickly might stretch things a bit. In the end, the vision that gave rise to the song became a burden to the more important characters and story line, and it took some heavy-handed revision to clear away the unnecessary parts.
I'll leave it there rather than going through draft after draft and line after line. But next time, I think I'll write about a completely different kind of songwriting: starting with the music, picking a line purely for it's rhythm to work through the melody, and then letting the words sort of coalesce around that initial phrase.
