I fought with this song for months.
Not every day. I’d put it away, come back to it, change something, try again and put it away one more time.
But I knew exactly what I wanted it to be.
That was probably the problem.
I wanted a very slow blues tune. Heavy. Emotional. The kind of song that could move from grief into anger and then fall right back into grief again.
My keyboard player heard it and called it a dark tune.
He was right.
And I kept trying to make that darkness work.
For months.
Eventually, I had enough.
At that point I wasn’t even trying to save the song anymore. I decided I was going to have some fun with it.
Nothing is ever my fault, of course.
So obviously the song was to blame.
I decided to abuse it.
I threw out the slow-blues idea, cranked up the tempo, turned it into hard rock and arranged it as though it were being played wide open in front of a concert crowd.
If the song wasn’t going to cooperate, I was going to destroy it.
Except something unexpected happened.
It came alive.
What had struggled for months as a slow, dark blues song suddenly became a driving rock tune with an energy I had never heard in it before.
And it worked.
It surprised the hell out of me.
There’s a lesson in that which I’ve had to learn more than once.
You can have a strong idea for a song. You can know exactly how you think it should sound. You can spend weeks or months trying to make it fit that picture.
And you can be completely wrong.
That doesn’t mean the song is bad.
Sometimes the song is just waiting for you to stop telling it what it is.
That’s why I’ve become much less interested in musical categories and much more interested in asking one question:
What does this song want to become?
It might be blues. It might be rock. It might be reggae, jazz, folk, R&B, synth-heavy, or something sitting somewhere between all of them.
I don’t really care anymore.
If you want to create successful music, you have to come at it with an open mind.
Sometimes you have to stop trying to fix the song.
Sometimes you have to threaten to kill it.
Apparently, that works too.
The song that came out of all that frustration became All For Nothing by Black Voltage, now on the Kill Zone EP at JayT’s Music.
Hear All For Nothing and the other songs on the Kill Zone EP:
https://jaytsmusic.com/product/kill-zone-black-voltage/
— JayT