the song takes as long as the story takes

I was watching a clip recently of a pianist performing on one of the Got Talent shows.

He sat down at the piano and started playing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

Not exactly unexplored musical territory.

Almost everyone knows those notes. Most of us probably can't remember the first time we heard them. The melody is so familiar that it belongs somewhere alongside nursery rhymes, bedtime stories, and other things we learned before we understood that we were learning them.

But then he started doing something with it.

The melody moved through richer harmonies. Rhythms changed. Jazz harmonies appeared. The music grew more complicated, more playful, more sophisticated. It wandered into places those few childhood notes had seemingly never been before.

And yet they were always there.

You could still hear Twinkle, Twinkle underneath it all.

That was what made the performance extraordinary.

He didn't need to replace something familiar with something new.

He made the familiar sound new.

I came across a sentence describing performances like this that stayed with me:

Great musicians don't change the melody. They transform the way we hear it.

I've been thinking about that sentence ever since.

Because I think it describes what I'm trying to do when I write songs.

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the melodies we already know

I'm probably never going to invent a new human emotion.

I don't think any of us will.

Love has been written about.

Grief has been written about.

Fear has been written about.

So have leaving and staying. Wanting and losing. Forgiving and regretting. Being lonely in a room with another person. Missing someone you know you shouldn't call. Looking backward and realizing you understand something differently now than you did when you lived it.

We've been writing about these things for as long as we've been writing.

Those are the melodies.

Maybe the job isn't always to find a new one.

Maybe sometimes the job is to take one of those familiar human experiences and listen to it closely enough that you find something inside it you haven't heard before.

That's increasingly how I understand my own songwriting.

I write about things that happened to me, certainly. But the event itself usually isn't the destination.

I'm looking for the thing underneath it.

What did staying teach me?

What did leaving require?

What does forgiveness actually ask of us?

What happens when survival looks so much like strength that we confuse the two?

What happens when something you believed about yourself for decades turns out to have another explanation?

What does it mean to become someone when becoming never actually stops?

The facts of my life belong to me.

The emotions underneath them don't.

Those belong to all of us.

And somewhere between those two things is where I try to write.

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apparently, my songs are long

I've heard this more than once.

My songs tend to be on the longer side.

It's true.

Five minutes isn't particularly unusual for me. Sometimes a song wanders beyond that.

I understand the observation. I even understand the criticism.

We live in a culture increasingly organized around speed. Get to the point. Get to the hook. Don't lose attention. Make it shorter. Make it shareable. Make it consumable. Give me the TL;DR version. Executive summary this for me.

And there are perfectly legitimate artistic reasons to make something shorter.

Sometimes a verse isn't doing anything.

Sometimes twelve lines are doing the work that eight could do better.

Sometimes we're repeating ourselves because we fell in love with the words instead of paying attention to whether the story still needs them.

Those are problems worth fixing.

So when someone says one of my songs is long, the question I ask myself isn't whether they're wrong.

The question is:

Does every minute still have something to say?

Because if the answer is no, then the song isn't too long because it crossed some arbitrary number on a clock.

It's too long because I stopped telling the story before I stopped singing.

That's different.

And I'll cut that minute.

But I won't cut a minute that the story still needs simply because we've decided songs are supposed to occupy a particular amount of time.

A story cannot always be compressed to accommodate a system increasingly optimized for the mass production and consumption of smaller and smaller pieces of attention.

Sometimes understanding requires another verse.

Sometimes the first chorus tells us what the narrator believes, and the second tells us why that belief is beginning to crack.

Sometimes the bridge isn't a musical obligation. It's the moment everything we've heard for the previous four minutes acquires another meaning.

Sometimes the final thirty seconds are the reason the first four and a half minutes exist.

Take those away and, yes, technically, I have made the song shorter.

I have also told a different story.

I'm not interested in doing that.

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the people who stay

There's something else I've noticed.

The people who connect with the music don't talk to me about its length.

Someone will tell me they listened to a song again immediately after it ended. They don't mention that it was five minutes long.

Someone will tell me they've had one of the songs playing repeatedly. They don't mention that it could have been forty-five seconds shorter.

Someone will tell me that a lyric stopped them because it described something they had experienced but never quite knew how to explain. They don't tell me I should have gotten to that line sooner.

That's taught me something.

Not that every long song is justified.

Not that criticism about length should be ignored.

And certainly not that holding someone's attention for five minutes makes something profound.

It has taught me that length and feeling are measuring different things.

If someone is waiting for a song to end, five minutes can feel interminable.

If someone is inside the story, five minutes can disappear.

So I've stopped asking:

How long is this song?

And started asking:

Does the listener still have somewhere to go?

If they do, we keep walking.

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don't lose the melody

That brings me back to Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

What fascinated me wasn't simply that the pianist could make a children's melody sound sophisticated.

It was that no matter how far he traveled from those opening notes, I could still recognize them.

That's important.

Because transformation only means something when we can still recognize what is being transformed.

I think storytelling works the same way.

I can explore all the psychological complexity I want. I can write about contradictions and memory and trauma and identity and the strange ways we reinterpret our own histories.

But somewhere underneath all of it, there needs to be something very simple.

I loved you.

I was afraid.

I wanted you to understand.

I stayed.

I left.

I didn't know.

I'm still here.

That's the melody.

If I bury it beneath so much cleverness that nobody can hear it anymore, I've lost something much more important than a hook.

I've lost the listener.

So this has become a new rule for how I think about writing:

We don't have to invent new human emotions. We make familiar ones audible in ways people haven't heard before.

Every song has a melody beneath the melody.

The simplest human truth underneath everything else.

Find it.

Protect it.

Then see where it can go.

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as long as it takes

Maybe someday I'll write a song that says everything it needs to say in two minutes and forty-one seconds.

Wonderful.

It ends at two minutes and forty-one seconds.

Maybe another needs six minutes and seventeen.

Then I have six minutes and seventeen seconds to justify.

That's the bargain.

Artistic freedom isn't permission to be self-indulgent. If anything, it creates a harder standard.

Every verse has to earn the next one.

Every chorus has to reveal, deepen, challenge, or transform something.

Every minute has to deserve the minute that follows it.

But I won't confuse brevity with discipline.

And I won't mistake efficiency for storytelling.

Because I'm not trying to manufacture the greatest possible number of songs from the smallest possible amount of attention.

I'm trying to tell the story until the story is told.

Love will still be love.

Grief will still be grief.

Fear will still be fear.

We'll keep staying when we should leave and leaving when part of us still wants to stay. We'll keep discovering things about ourselves that perhaps should have been obvious years ago. We'll keep becoming people we couldn't have imagined when we started.

The melodies aren't new.

They don't need to be.

There are still endless ways to hear them.

That's the work.

Listen closely enough to something familiar that another possibility emerges.

Follow it wherever it needs to go.

And when there's finally nothing left that needs to be said, stop.

Not at three minutes.

Not at five.

Not when an algorithm, convention, or someone's attention span tells you the song should be finished.

When the story is finished.

The story determines the runtime.

The runtime never determines the story.