other people's songs

back to listening for a living.

tomorrow morning someone is going to play me a voice memo they’re a little embarrassed by, and we’re going to turn it into a song. i've missed this.

this is the part of my work i talk about the least, which is strange, because it’s most of what i do. sessions. writing with other artists, for other people’s records. my name in the credits where nobody reads, my fingerprints on choruses you’d never trace back to me. i love it in a way i've never fully written down, so this is me trying.

people picture co-writing as two songwriters at a piano having a shared epiphany. mostly it’s coffee and small talk on a couch. somebody’s tour story, somebody’s landlord, twenty minutes of nothing. and then at some point one of us stops performing and admits the thing they came in carrying. that’s when the day starts.

the voice memo has a ritual. the apology comes first, every time. ignore how bad this is. i recorded it in the car. the ending is terrible. then forty seconds of something hummed too close to the phone mic, dogs barking somewhere behind it, and it’s alive. i've learned to trust the apology. the more embarrassed someone is by a memo, the more of them is in it. nobody apologizes for the polished thing.

my actual job, if i'm being exact about it, is listening for the sentence somebody keeps almost saying. people circle it all day. they’ll say it straight out during the small talk, some line about their ex or their dad or the town they left, said casually, like it costs nothing. then the writing starts and they reach for bigger words. safer ones. rhymier ones. and the whole session becomes me trying to walk them back to the sentence they already said an hour ago over coffee. my favorite question in any session is: what did you actually say, though.

first versions are fragile. a feeling that just got said out loud for the first time will not survive being workshopped in its first hour, so you protect it. you let it sit there as a bad line for a while. a bad line with blood in it beats a clean line with nothing in it, and most of the job is knowing which one you’re looking at.

it’s been a loud month for me. my own song got heard farther from home than anything i've ever made, my own words got read by strangers, my own name got said in places i wasn't standing. i thought coming down from that might feel like a demotion. it doesn’t. what i keep noticing is that i'm not craving more volume. i'm craving tuesday. a couch, a coffee, somebody else’s half-song and the little apology before it. after a month of my own voice, caring about someone else’s verse doesn’t feel like a step down. it feels like the other half of the craft, the half that made the first half possible. i steal something from every session. i just usually don’t find out what i took until i'm writing alone again.

so, tomorrow. there will be coffee and there will be small talk, and somewhere in the small talk there will be a sentence said like it costs nothing. it usually costs everything, that’s why it got smuggled in as small talk. my whole plan for the week is to catch it.

some weeks the best i can be is the loud one. this week i get to be the guy who noticed. i missed him.