Reading your own song back like a stranger
Okay. New module. Cut It Down.
We've spent a lot of weeks building things up — finding your line, writing it plain, finding a tune that sticks. Tonight we take something away. Most songs are twice as long as they need to be. Mine included. Especially mine, actually.
The problem is you can't see it while you're writing it. You wrote every line for a reason. Felt right at the time. It's only later, coming back to it cold, that you notice half of them are saying the same thing twice.
So tonight's whole job is learning how to get cold on your own song.
Why you can't hear it the first time
When you write a verse, you're inside it. You remember what you meant even if you didn't quite say it. So when you read it back the next day, your brain fills in the gaps for you. You hear the song you meant to write, not the one that's actually on the page.
That's the trap. You need a way to trick yourself into hearing it fresh.
How to actually do that
A few ways I use. Pick whichever works for you, or use all of them on the same song.
Put it away and don't look at it. A week is good. Three days, minimum. If you can't stand not looking at it for three days, that's information too — usually means you're still in love with a line that isn't earning its keep.
Read it out loud, not in your head. Silent reading is too kind. Your mouth will trip on a clunky line your eyes glide right past.
Read it in a different room than you wrote it in. Sounds small. It's not. Different chair, different light, you're a slightly different person reading it. Kitchen table instead of the truck. Front porch instead of the desk.
Hand it to somebody and watch their face, not their mouth. People are polite. Their face tells you more than their words will. If they read a verse and their eyebrows do something, that's the verse to look at.
What you're looking for
Read through and ask, for every single verse: does this say something the last one didn't already say?
If the answer's no, that verse goes. Doesn't matter how good the line in it is. If it's not doing new work, it's dead weight, and dead weight is the whole problem with long songs.
I'll say the thing I always say here: nobody has ever complained that a song was too short. Nobody's ever walked away from a song thinking, I wish that had another verse about the same thing. Cut it down. Say the thing, then stop.
A story about a Saturday and one verse
Few years back I did a canning clinic, showing folks how to do peaches, and a fella named Parker mentioned afterward that he'd always wanted to try writing songs. I said come over sometime, we'll work on one.
He came over one Saturday. We sat at my kitchen table most of the afternoon on a single verse. Just one. He had it down to about eight lines by lunchtime, and I told him to read it back like he'd never heard it before, out loud, standing up, not sitting at the table where he wrote it.
He stood up, walked over by the window, read it out loud. Stopped after line four and said, "line five doesn't need to be there. It's just saying line four again in different words."
That's it. That's the whole skill. He found it himself in about ninety seconds once he got some distance from the page. We cut it, verse got tighter, and he still — far as I know — hasn't finished the rest of the song. I bring this up to him about once a month. He takes it fine.
But the point stands. He didn't need me to tell him what to cut. He needed to stand somewhere else and read it out loud like a stranger wrote it.
A caution, sort of
Don't do this the same night you finished the song. You'll either think it's perfect or think it's garbage, and neither one's true. Sleep on it first. Distance is the whole tool here — if you skip the distance, you're just reading your own handwriting back to yourself, and that never tells you anything.
Before next time
Take a song you finished a few weeks back — not tonight's, an older one — and read it out loud somewhere you didn't write it. Cross out every line that isn't doing new work. Bring what's left.