You think you're right/NO! /You are wrong!/WRONG!

Principal recording has been done for awhile. The tracks are nearly mixed, for pete's sake, but I still get sucked in to vocal reshoots. Change a word here, change an inflection there, see if I can hit that note this time, so on. Some vocalists don't even like to re-record anything less than a verse, but I don't mind redoing a syllable if my ears tell me it's better that way.

I'm all about lyrics, and sometimes changing a word can change the song's whole message. I mean, if Hendrix meant us to excuse him while he kissed this guy, we'd probably have Purple Haze poppers by now. Oh wait, apparently we do. In any case, the two verses that I've been most hesitant about happen right in the middle of my (ever-changing) prospective track order: the last verse of track four and the intro to track five. This isn't a concept album and the songs are independent entities, but it's still a critical moment in the album and I'm vacillating between saying a couple of different things. I have to decide what kind of stories I want to tell, what conclusions I want to draw.

I don't want people to listen to the songs and think that I haven't fleshed my main character out enough. Because that's me, and I get enough of that in real life anyway. I look at my songs as a place to work out and  concretize my emotional reactions, and in fine-tuning I'm molding words and music into something that resembles my internal feeling and memory as closely as I can. I direct my writing by using memory-images: situations and moments in my past that are tied to the specific emotion that I am trying to channel in the song. I'm not Capote and I don't have 94% recall, so the imagery and dialogue I lift from my real-life situations (sometimes I write scraps down in a notebook) is usually filled in somewhat with imagination and invention, with the only rule being that it doesn't stay unless it 'feels' right to me. I think it's possible to tell an emotionally true story which differs on some key factual points from real life, as long as the diversions are in line with what I felt at the time, representative of the forces I perceived were at work. That's artistic license.

But that's just me describing the method. Wait 'til you get the madness!