Sometimes, less is more. Quality not quantity. It’s not about how big it is, it’s what you do with it….you get the picture. Bizarrely, it is a now-defunct iPhone feature I think of whenever I remember this particular lesson. Do you remember when Apple first introduced the “accelerometer” (whatever that is), which allows users to control things on their screens simply by tilting their phone? I still remember my friends and I being obsessed with this feature on the train to school. If we weren’t playing games like JellyCar and Doodlejump, we were necking virtual pints of Carling.
It was an amazing development at the time, and before you knew it, Apple was shoe-horning it into just about everything you could think of. “Shake to Shuffle” was an obvious and seemingly brilliant use of this new technology. Simply shake your phone to skip to a randomly chosen song. Beautifully simple and practical…or so it seemed. Its inherent flaws quickly became apparent to everyone.
If we felt inclined to treat ourselves to some tunes while walking even slightly more energetically than what might qualify as an amble or pootle, we would be persistently diverted from one track to another before the opening verse had even begun. We lived in constant fear of dropping our phones around friends or passing fancies and seeing them erupt into laughter as the High School Musical soundtrack began to play at full volume (or was that just me?) For my benefit and that of all Disney musical lovers out there, Apple scrapped the feature. They learned that it was best to quit while they were ahead.
This is a lesson I am learning to apply to songwriting. I have become infamous (amongst the very small number of people who have listened to them) for writing quote-on-quote “never-ending” demos. All too often, the temptation to repeat a riff here, add in a pre-chorus there, or end on an overly indulgent 2-minute instrumental section proves too great. Cutting down your 7 minute “masterpiece” into a sub 4-minute, easily digestible highlights reel is a gut-wrenching experience for any songwriter, but I’m coming round to the fact it’s a necessary one.
The same goes for production. I can’t count the number of times I’ve declared a new song to be our “big break” owing to the “beautifully” intertwined guitar licks, vocal harmonies and percussion parts I was hearing in my head, only for it to come out of my speakers as a mashed audio purée. It’s better to have a few interesting things going on rather than a mess of different ideas.
Thank God for Shake to Shuffle. It has spared you all.