The big ideas in a song are most important – the Chorus, the Hook, the Title, its melody, the beat –  they’ll vary depending on the tune. After that it’s all about the details. And no detail is too small for the intrepid songwriter to obsess over. They add up.

I have a relatively new song called ‘Please Wait’. I’ve performed it with my band a few times and it’s gone over very well. Here’s one of the things in it that I struggled with (honestly… I”m still struggling with it!).

The lyrics of the second half of the Chorus – a pretty long one – are:

Wait
I’m not gonna disappear
I’ll come running when you’re near
Don’t you feel (fear) what is our fate
It’s not too late
Please Wait

The fourth line – feel or fear? – is the dilemma.

At first I liked fear. It had the rhyme with near and disappear, and its placement in the melody worked with the rhyme. Arguably it sang a little better, and fear seemed like a stronger idea than feel.

However, as I sang it, something else became clear. In a song where you’re pleading with someone to wait for you because of your devotion to them, “Don’t you fear what is our fate’ started to feel, as I continued to sing it, uncomfortably like an instruction or a command. Not a request. And the song is one of supplication, of asking.

So I went back to ‘feel’. “Don’t you feel what is our fate”. Still very much to the point… and harder to misunderstand. In the midst of what I think is a strong Chorus, it doesn’t benefit me or the song to confuse the listener.

I wouldn’t have discovered this if I hadn’t, in preparation for performing, rehearsed the song many times. This has become an essential ‘final stage’ of my writing – singing the song over and over, trying to make the words and melody sing and feel as natural as possible, along with conveying its meaning.

Sometimes there are trade-offs. This is one that came up recently… I have a pre-chorus lyric for my song ‘Here In America’:

It’s a pan to fry your brain in
Some things defy explainin’
Everything is entertainment
Here In America

Originally the third line was “Everything is entertainin’” (not ‘entertainment’). It rhymed better (perfectly, actually) with explainin’ and brain in, and even sang better.

But… what I wanted to say was “Everything is entertainment here in America”, NOT “Everything is entertainin’ here in America” (which isn’t a bad line; just not what I was going for). So this time I sacrificed the perfect, more singable rhyme for a more distant rhyme that said exactly what I wanted it to say.

I don’t care about a perfect rhyme as an end in itself, but I don’t like to sacrifice singability, I’m always trying to get the song as right as I can. I mean feeling right, not technically perfect, whatever that is. But sometime trade-offs come up and a choice has to be made.

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