The mystics, the mechanics, and the masters of meticulousness

I want to talk about revision and its role in creating art.

Lately I’ve been listening to three albums on heavy rotation: Jeff Buckley’s Live at Sine-e, Tom Petty’s Wildflowers & All the Rest, and Gillian Welch’s Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg. What they all have in common is that they provide glimpses into the artists at work, and how each artist goes through their unique process of creation, re-vision, and re-creation.

Live at Sine-e, recorded in 1992 in a New York coffeehouse, featured only Buckley’s voice and a Telecaster guitar. Many of the songs were early drafts of what would become his first and only complete studio album, Grace. Wildflowers & All the Rest includes a full album of home recordings of the songs Petty was writing for his 1994 masterpiece Wildflowers. And Boots No. 1 is a mix of home recordings, alternative takes, and outtakes from Gillian Welch’s 1996 album Revival.

I want to focus on three songs, one from each album, and reflect on what each one has to say about the process of creation and revision.

Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”

The version recorded for Grace is one of the most dynamic songs on the album, building from a gentle voice over acoustic guitar toward a powerful peak, a grunge-fueled bridge with Buckley’s brilliant falsetto quivering over it. But on Live at Sine-e the song is subdued, includes a few extra verses, and goes on three minutes longer than the Grace version.

Jeff Buckley is the mystic here. Many of his original songs began as dreams. He doesn’t perform a song so much as his vocal cords feel their way through it. He once said, “I need to inhabit every bit of lyric, or else I can’t bring the song to you – or else it’s just words.”

Take, for example, this verse that ends up being discarded for the studio. “Every inch of me is filled with pain . . . and the rain . . . I want it to come down fast like kisses on my skin.” Now, who am I to criticize a Jeff Buckley lyric? He could sing the back of a cereal box and I’d still be entranced. On the other hand, composing a song is a series of choices connected to economy of sounds and words, so when you eventually write a line like “All my riches for her smiles when I slept so soft against her,” you might eventually realize you no longer need to say “every inch of me is filled with pain.” You’ve said enough. You’ve said it better.

It seems that the transformation of the Sine-e version to the Grace version involved a slow, mystical movement of sound that only Buckley could navigate by more fully possessing the song within his voice. For Buckley, there is no song if the lyric is not inhabited by the singer. I imagine that his process of revising “Lover” in between the performance at Sine-e and the recording of Grace involved finding the words that felt most inhabitable, and then through the act of practice, singing a song over and over again, discovering how to sing each word in a way that felt embodied.

Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels”

Of the three songs, this one is surely the most well-known. In October 2020, Petty’s estate released an expanded series celebrating 25 years of Wildflowers. It’s incredible. If you like Tom Petty and want to waste away an afternoon with me talking about this album, I’m game.

The expanded album includes more than a dozen home recordings, and the interesting thing about listening to Petty’s home recordings is how closely they structurally resemble the final versions on Wildflowers. They are stripped down, but the bones are there and you could hear Petty through his voice and guitars suggesting strongly where the songs would go once his full band showed up in the studio. What’s interesting about the home recording of “You Don’t Know How It Feels” is the second verse. Instead of what we all know, “People come, people go, some grow young, some grow cold,” he sings, “I’m so tired of being tired, sure as night will follow day / most things that I worry bout never happen anyway.” This verse started out in one song, and then ends up as a final verse in another Wildflowers song, “Crawling Back to You.”

Petty is the mechanic because of how strongly he built each component of a song that if he determined it no longer fit in one song, he could find a home for it elsewhere. Of course, that’s not entirely fair to Petty. He was also the mystic, believing that his songs arrived from a place that he didn’t dare describe. But once the pieces were in his hands, he was a damn master builder. If a lyric or a melody was sturdy, it could travel among songs until it clicks.

Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl”

The thing I want to focus on with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings is the time they devote to experimenting with harmony and dissonance as they are in the act of songwriting. They are known for practicing through a new song dozens of times trying out different vocal arrangements until they arrive at a moment that feels like they’ve found the right fit. (I picture them trying on new boots in a similar fashion.)

Dave Rawlings is a master of dissonance. I once read a description of Dave Rawlings’ guitar style as a train that keeps nearly jumping the tracks but never quite does. I think his approach to singing harmony to Gillian Welch is similar. Regularly in their songs he places his voice over hers on a dissonant note that resolves quickly, only to leap back to dissonance again a few notes later.

On their home recording of “Orphan Girl” that appears on Boots 1, Gillian sings alone on all four of the verses, then is joined by Dave for each of the four refrains. But what’s interesting about the studio version is one small change when Rawlings enters early in the fourth verse. “Blessed savior, make me willing / Walk beside me until I’m with them.” Rawlings’ voice enters with a series of sustained dissonant notes for “Walk beside me,” and then moves into much warmer harmonic notes for “until I’m with them” as if the tension and resolution of the harmonic line mirrors and imitates the content of the lyrics, the warmth of a release arriving alongside “I’m with them.” Rather than leaving that fourth lyric lonely with Gillian’s voice, they charged it further with a small moment that resolves the tension of absence with the brief warmth of presence.

Coda

If there’s something worth broadly reflecting on here, I think it’s the devotion that can go into songwriting, singing, painting, or any art that requires something of us based on the vision we see, even if all we have are scraps to start with. An inkling, a hunch, an inspired couplet, a sketch. Where can they lead? And how do inspiration and perspiration, the dreaming and the doing, inform one another? To me, it’s all in the act of revision—doing the hard work of exploring your own creations with new eyes, re-vising, casting a new vision, and enacting it.

And also, because the subject here today is music:

“To sing is to pray twice.” - Saint Augustine