Writing fast and writing slow

I have two ways of writing a lyric and neither is better than the other. It took me a long time to accept that. For quite a while I thought good songs had to come out all at once, like a sneeze, and that if a lyric needed a lot of reworking it was because something had been wrong from the start. Then I thought exactly the opposite. Now I think both are true, depending on the song.

The ones that write themselves

Some lyrics I write almost whole in one sitting. I start with a line, the line pulls the next one along, and before I know it I've got verses, a chorus and even an ending I hadn't planned. There aren't many. But when it happens, it feels a lot like freewheeling down a hill on a bike without touching the pedals.

Those lyrics have a virtue I find very hard to get any other way: they sound like a person talking. They keep the rhythm of a conversation, with its shortcuts and half-finished sentences. There's no time to get fancy. No time to hunt for the pretty word. Out comes the word that's there, and very often that's the right one.

I imagine a title like «La vecina cotilla» (the nosy neighbour) asks to be written that way, fast, with the urgency of someone passing on gossip before they forget it. A neighbour who knows everything doesn't talk slowly. She talks in bursts. And a lyric trying to sound like her has to keep up.

The danger of writing fast is that I believe all of it. In the heat of the moment, every line seems wonderful. So I have a rule: what I write fast, I revise slowly. I let it sleep, even just for a night, and reread it with a stranger's eyes. The skeleton almost always survives, and two or three lines fall that were only there because I was on a roll.

The ones you have to go looking for

Then there are the others. The ones that start with a clear idea and jam on the second line. The ones with a wonderful chorus and verses that refuse to get off the ground. Those I write slowly, in pieces, coming back to them on different days.

It isn't a pleasant process. I open the lyric, look at it, change a word, change it again, close it. The next day, the same. Some days I make no progress at all and some days I take out more than I put in. From the outside it would look like I'm not working. From the inside I'm not entirely sure either.

But lyrics written slowly have another virtue. They're better built. Every line knows why it's there. The rhymes fit without forcing, because I've had time to try twenty before settling on one. And they tend to have more layers: a first reading that's funny and a second that stings a little more.

What I've learnt with these is not to force them. If a lyric jams, I don't shove it out. I leave it and write something else. Sometimes the solution comes in sideways, while I'm working on a completely different song and suddenly see that the line I was missing in that one is right here, in the other.

The speed trap

There's a confusion I want to clear up. Because I produce the music with artificial intelligence tools, many people assume everything in my work is quick. That if the machine takes no time, neither do I.

The production side can move fast, true, though less than people think, because I discard a lot of versions before keeping one. But the lyric goes at my pace. And my pace isn't set by any tool. Some lyrics take an afternoon and others take weeks, and the music can't properly start until the lyric is there.

This has caused me some tension, I confess. With 273 singles released in two years, anyone would say I'm always in a hurry. And sometimes I am. There are spells when I'm itching to put things out and I write faster than I should. I notice it later, rereading, when I find lyrics that would have been better with another week's patience.

But there are also lyrics that, had I written them slowly, would have lost their charm. Haste is sometimes part of the joke. A joke told slowly, with every explanation, stops being funny.

How I know which it is

I don't, honestly. I have no method for deciding in advance. What I do is start and see what happens. If the lyric runs, I let it run. If it stops, I don't push it.

Over time I have noticed one thing. The lighter songs, the ones with more direct humour, tend to come out fast. The ones about self-esteem or something closer to home need more time. Not because they're technically harder to write, but because I need time to decide how much I want to tell.

I've also realised that speed doesn't show in the result as much as I thought. There are lyrics I wrote in no time that people think were laboured over, and lyrics that took me weeks that sound improvised. Maybe that's what I should always aim for: that nobody can tell how long it took.

If you write, my only advice is not to trust your speed. Neither the fast one, which fools you with its euphoria, nor the slow one, which fools you with its seriousness. What matters is the lyric left at the end. How long it took only matters to you.

The lyrics, fast and slow, are all at mikesaintlouis.com.