I spend a lot of time, with my own songs, and with others’ in songwriting workshops, trying to make songs better. Discovering big and little things that can be changed to give a song more impact and make it truer to its own beating heart.

But… you can ‘improve’ a song (or any creative work) to the point where you’re stifling that beating heart.

A very good writer once told me, when suggesting some revisions, “Just don’t make it worse by making it ‘better’”.

This is tricky, because we humans tend to self-delusion, rationalizing, and laziness. It’s tempting to say,’That’s good enough’, when deep inside we know it could be better. It’s a constant challenge to keep my standards high, to remember it can be better (and believe me, in my case most of the time it definitely can!).

But on the other side a kind of perfectionism can kick in (although it’s also easy to call high standards and hard work being too much of a ‘perfectionist’, when it’s really laziness). You can get obsessed with having every little thing be ‘correct’… as if such a thing as ‘perfection’ is even attainable by mortals.

The bigger problem comes when the more perfect song doesn’t feel as alive as the less perfect one. The rough edges are what give some things life. Think of something as simple as a table. It can be elegantly polished, hand-carved, with perfectly rounded corners… but some people prefer a table with rough-hewn wood… something that feels closer to the tree it came from. Which is ‘perfect’? (I vote for the table that doesn’t fall down.)

Every one of us has to make a decision on each song about where the right place to land is. On one side of the runway – the trap of laziness, ‘it’s good enough’. On the other – polishing the life out of the song.

This choice is usually not that dramatic. But it is a choice. I say push push push to make it better… but always being aware that perfection is not what I’m shooting for… it’s life that I seek for my song.

The lyrics of Tom Petty’s song ‘Refugee’ come to mind. His confidence is stunning. On the scale discussed above, the words fit very roughly, especially the rhymes. The lyrics bang up against each other. They’re intentionally crude, fitting the subject matter… perfectly.

So now we come to the other kind of ‘perfect’ – when something is perfect for this song. And that’s what I think we should be going for. Music and lyrics that may or may not be technically perfect but are as right as they can be for the song they constitute.

One last warning – and I am intentionally repeating myself here –  please don’t construe any of this hair-splitting as an endorsement of sloth. It takes just as much work, maybe more, to get things ‘right’ as it does to get things ‘perfect’.

In an early Woody Allen movie, he refers to his mother “putting the chicken through the deflavorizing machine” – a tribute to her lack of skills as a cook. It’s the phrase that often passes through my writer’s mind. The last thing we want to do is put our song through the deflavorizer. Anything’s better than that.

Let me know your thoughts in the Comments section below:

And please share on facebook etc. by clicking the tabs below the video –