Bum Notes, or Trying To Record The Perfect Version Of That Song You've Written

At the beginning of Beckett’s Endgame, Clov announces: Finished. It’s… nearly finished. It must be nearly finished.

It isn’t clear to what exactly the character is referring, but I like to think that at least one of Beckett’s points is about the agony of trying to complete a creative project. For me, Clov is stepping back from a painting he’s toiled over for years. What starts as certainty – Finished – collapses swiftly into doubt and indecision: It must be nearly finished. If you’ve ever made a piece of art, you’ll have shared a little of his pain, I suspect.

I make up pop songs. (To speak of ‘writing’ pop songs can sound a little too self-important, so ‘make up’ will have to do.) The making up of the lyrics, sung melody, chord structure and arrangement – that is, the parts for the instruments to play – is often quite easy, and almost always rather satisfying. If I were to stop at that point in the process, it would save me an awful lot of frustration and disappointment. But of course, for various pragmatic reasons, I feel the need for there to be a recorded version of the song.

That’s when the trouble begins. The musical possibilities are endless, which means… decisions, horrifying decisions – both artistic and technical. The other problem is that the potential for mistakes (literally miss-takes, in this case) is huge. The result: trying to capture the song as it exists in your original intention is pretty a much a self-inflicted method of torture, guaranteed to cause pain.

I want to consider two possible explanations for the problem of the version of the song that you’ve recorded never quite being the version.

Firstly, let’s say there’s such a thing as Plato’s realm of Perfect Forms. Your three-minute pop song exists in this realm, outside of space and time, acting as a blueprint for the version you’re recording so ineptly in the flesh and blood world. But it seems quite a stretch to claim that ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ or indeed ‘Stairway To Heaven’ really exist in such a domain.

So how about we say instead that each interval used in your song (major third, minor seventh, etc) exists in a Platonic realm. That might explain why a note that’s a bit sharp or flat sounds wrong to you; it simply isn’t close enough to the Platonic Form of that interval. And couldn’t there also be a Platonic Form for the time signature 4:4, and perhaps even for the idea of rhyming words, and so on. That is, couldn’t the building blocks of your song exist as universals outside space and time?

Ok, so it’s still quite a stretch. I suspect most modern folk will find it much easier to go along with some version of a Humean or Kantian view. That is, the notion of, say, a perfect major third is a feature of human nature, and/or is rooted in our particular perceptual and cognitive apparatus. In short, on this view, being able to hear a bum note is a sensibility, and a particularly human one at that.

Either way, you’re left with the problem of trying to nail the perfect version of your song. Of course you can fix the timing and tuning digitally if you want to, but then your production can start to sound lacking in some other way. And you’ve probably only got this one chance to produce the song. (Even if you try to re-record the song for your greatest hits album in five years’ time, it’s still the original version that people will remember.) So you agonise over small decisions that seem hugely significant, at least when you’re in the midst of finishing – or nearly finishing – your production: is that note a touch flat, is that English horn part a bit too loud in the mix? Onwards and downwards. It must be nearly finished. Right? Madness follows, at least temporarily.

It’s enough to make you do a Bill Drummond and abandon the pursuit of recorded music altogether. At least with gigging there’s no expectation that the audience is going to hear some definitive version of the song.