The craft of throwing out: choosing between many versions

There's a part of my work you won't see anywhere. It isn't in the music videos, it isn't on Spotify and nobody can hear it. It's everything I threw away.

I produce the music of PLANETA GAYFOLK with artificial intelligence tools. That means that for every lyric, the machine offers me versions. Lots of them. Some similar to each other, others completely different. And my job, at that point, mostly consists of saying no.

For a while I thought that was the boring part. Now I think it's the craft.

Contact sheets

Photographers used to work with contact sheets. They'd print a whole roll of film in miniature, on a single sheet, then sit down with a loupe and a red marker to circle the good one. Out of thirty-six frames, sometimes one made it. Sometimes none. There are famous contact sheets hanging in museums precisely because they show what nobody saw: the frames either side, the nearly-good ones, the one with the eyes closed.

When I listen to versions of a song I feel like that, loupe in hand. And I've learnt that the good one is almost never the most spectacular. Often the most spectacular is the first to go, because it swallows the lyric. A melody that shows off too much means nobody hears what the line is saying. And in my songs the line is what matters.

What I'm looking for

I don't have a checklist. I'd love one, because it would save me time, but every song asks for something different.

What I do have is a handful of questions I nearly always ask. The first is whether you can make out the lyric. It sounds obvious and it isn't: there are gorgeous versions where the words get squashed, or where the stress lands on the wrong syllable and a joke stops being a joke. A badly stressed joke is a dead joke.

The second is whether the tone matches the title. If a song is called «Mi novio de Albacete» (My boyfriend from Albacete), it can't sound like a requiem. It needs something everyday about it, something of a Sunday. If it's called «La primera drag» (The first drag queen), I picture something with more sparkle and more ceremony. A version can be brilliant and have the wrong tone, and then it's no use to me, however much I like it.

The third is the hardest to explain. It's whether I want to hear it again. Not right then, but tomorrow. Some versions dazzle you the first time and wear you out by the third. Others seem like nothing much and get stuck in your head. That's why I try not to decide in the heat of the moment.

The fear of binning the good one

I have a fear that hasn't gone away. It's the fear of throwing out the good one.

When you choose between many versions, there's always a nagging suspicion that the perfect song was three places further down and you didn't listen carefully enough. Or that it was in the next batch you never asked for. It's a lot like dating apps, as it happens: there could always be someone better if you keep swiping. And we all know how people who never stop swiping end up.

My solution, which isn't perfect, is to accept that there's a point where you have to stop. When a version gives the lyric what it needs and I want to come back to it, I keep it. Even if there might be a better one out there. I'd rather have a good song released than a perfect song that never leaves the folder.

Throwing out is writing too

Some people find this hard to understand. They think choosing is passive, like going to the supermarket. You pick the yoghurt you like and that's that.

I experience it differently. Every time I discard a version, I'm saying something about how that song has to be. I'm sharpening an idea that started out vague. Sometimes the first batch shows me what I don't want, and thanks to that I know how to ask better for the next one. It's like editing a text: you don't invent new words, but you decide which ones stay, and the final text is yours because of those decisions.

In about two years I've released 273 singles. Behind each one is a pile of versions nobody will ever hear. I don't feel sorry for them. They did their job, which was to show me the way.

Something similar happens with the music videos, although there the throwing out is more physical. I direct mine, more than 280 of them, and in each one there are shots I liked that didn't make it in. A lovely gesture that didn't fit the rhythm. Gorgeous light at the wrong moment. I don't know which I learnt first, binning images or binning versions of a song, but I think each taught me the other. In the edit you quickly understand that whatever's surplus gets in the way, however pretty it is. A song works the same way: everything that stays has to earn its place, and whatever doesn't earn it goes, no matter how fond of it you are.

I have to admit something. Sometimes, listening to a song that's already out, I remember a discarded version and think maybe it was better. I don't bring it back. Once something's out, it is what it is. But that little doubt stays with me, and I suppose it always will.

I think that doubt is a good sign. If one day I stop having it, it'll be because I've stopped listening carefully. And then it won't matter which tool I use, because my judgement will have gone down the plughole.

If you want to hear what I did choose, it's all at mikesaintlouis.com.