WHY NOT REWRITE?

finish the tune. Sometimes, hearing an old rehearsal after 10 years made me suddenly come up with a lyric for that piece that had eluded me up to that point. Sometimes just seeing if I could still play that obnoxious riff I invented for the bass, then combining that with a drum patch that seemed to go with it would be enough for me to jam out the rest of the song. The important lesson here is to not think of previously written material as being unworthy of attention, since it wasn’t good enough for you to finish at the time, but instead to think of it as ideas whose time just hadn’t come, yet. Perhaps now is the time for that old material to make a debut. Perhaps now you can rewrite that lyric that just didn’t sound right, add that bridge that you just couldn’t come up with, or come up with the burning guitar solo that you needed to end the tune the way you were looking for, but just couldn’t at the time. It is possible that you just needed a little more experience, a little more knowledge, or just needed to walk away from the problem for a bit so you could look at the pieces with “fresh eyes.” Or perhaps you just needed to find it so you could show it to a co-writer so that person could see what you weren’t able to in that scrap of music or lyric. So take those little bits out of those boxes and notebooks and give them an airing—at the least you could clean up a mess, you could possibly have some fun and get in some good musical exercise just trying, but, more importantly, you may finally finish at least one number that wouldn’t have been written if you hadn’t given it another chance.

We should all be so lucky!

Have fun and keep writing!

© 2001 Cindy Lee Haddock

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